Top 5 Weezer B-Sides

No one's going to care about this post but me, but then, that would sum up this entire blog, wouldn't it? Blah blah blah, whatever.

Just now I FINALLY acquired the long hold-out in my extensive(ly biased towards old school) Weezer collection, "Waiting on You," a B-side from the Pinkerton era (AKA ye olde 1996). It really was worth the wait. I like it a lot, and I'm a tough critic (ha, understatement). Rivers' voice sounds great in this one, especially during the chorus ("Mine is the loneliest of numbers/Now is the loneliest of times/You're 19 days late, but still I sit and wait) his harmonizing in the background is especially cool. The song is really sad and paints Riv as a lonely, miserable, consistently down-on-his-luck dude, but that's my favorite flavor of Rivers, so it's alright. Overall, I'm ecstatic that 1. I finally got this song and 2. it's so good!

Since Weez B-Sides are almost just as good as [good] album cuts, Imma rank 'em. Because how could we function in society without meaningless numbers arbitrarily defining which thing is better than which? We couldn't. (Oh, and like you care, but I would totally rank "Waiting on You" on my list but I wanted to give myself a chance to write about another song...sorry, WOY.)

5. "Jamie (Live Acoustic)" from the "Say It Ain't So" single

I really love Weezer acoustics. I read somewhere once that the best thing about Weezer, and today really the only good thing about them, is Rivers' voice. Thus the acoustic versions, which strip the band of their sometimes way-too-loud guitars and force them to show off their vocal talent, are always fun to listen to and sound quite nice. This is an acoustic of what was a b-side itself, actually, on the "Buddy Holly" single. The original "Jamie" is loud, generic, and even annoying; this song is, like my favorite Weezer songs, a little pathetic but still very "cute." What I like most about this song is that it seems like it's the standard W. love ballad (which I will discuss in #3) but is in actuality an ode to the band's lawyer! It makes sense when you consider that one of the lines is "You've got the Beach Boys/and your firm's got the Stones," which is completely dumb otherwise. If the band I was the lawyer for wrote me a song as nice as this one, I'd be flattered. Maybe I'd even work pro bono! Haha, no.

4. "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly" from the "El Scorcho" single

"El Scorcho" is my second-favorite song by the band, right after the B-Side that makes number 1 on my list. I guess I'm a little bit biased, then, because I automatically like most things associated with. "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly" is not particularly noteworthy until you consider that it accomplishes as much as any of the 2nd tier (lawl) songs on Pinkerton in under 2 minutes. "La la la/you sang to me" is also just a really great singalong line. The whole song is a singalong! For me, anyway. This song is such an earworm; its melody stands out more to me than any of the actual lyrics so I mostly just shout "YOU! GAVE YOUR LOVE! TO ME SOFT-LY!" and leave it at that. Enough about that: this song also has a great bassline, so props to my beloved Matt Sharp (why did you have to leave?).

 3. "Susanne" from the "Undone (The Sweater Song)" single

"Susanne" is a typical Weezer ballad - crunchy guitars underscore silly rhymes declaring that the Girl-of-the-Week did sweet things for our pathetic loser hero Rivers Cuomo ("When I met you I was all alone/Cold and hungry cryin' on the phone/You baked me brownies and said, 'Don't you cry'/And gave me the coat off your back"). This song also makes use of references to the band's influences, in this case Guns 'N Roses. "Susanne" (You're all that I wanted of a girl!) is sweet and catchy and while I'm not sure if the pairing of it and "Undone" was so well thought out, it really exudes classic =W=." (Oh, and the back-up vocals are great, especially in my absolute favorite part, the bridge: "I haven't much I can give you in return/Only my heart and a promise not to turn/But I sing to you every day and every night/Suzanne, I'm your man.")

2. "Devotion" from the "El Scorcho" single

Told you I was biased! But in all seriousness, there's a nice sincerity and empathetic quality about the flying W's 90s output, and "Devotion" really emphasizes that. "Devotion/waiting for me/you'll always be my girlfriend!" Yeah, okay, it's a little sappy and the lyrics can be stupid at times but it's sweet and I believe my pal Rivers when he tells me (or, y'know, whoever he's actually singing to) that he'll always be my friend (which seems to be less than reciprocal but I'll take it!)  This song was another recent addition to my collection and was the one I was searching the hardest for. This song is revered in the fanbase, I believe, for just how simple and good it is. I believe this was a cut from Songs from the Black Hole originally, which would make sense as to why everyone is so in love with it. For an album that was deemed unfit to see the light of day, it's excellent (both tracklists)!

1. "I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams" from the "The Good Life" single/EP

This is my absolute favorite Weezer song of all-time. This is quite ironic, considering how this song features lead vocals from that dog.'s Rachel Haden instead of Rivers Cuomo, whose voice I've been lauding throughout this countdown. But don't worry! I'm really not that inconsistent. One of my favorite things about this near-perfect song is when Rivers kicks in during the bridge towards the middle/end of the song, singing with Rachel. Other great things about this song: that it's written, not just sang, from a female's perspective! One of the great things about Songs from the Black Hole is that all of the songs are from the perspectives of different characters. It was a rock space opera, after all. Since most of the songs didn't get the full studio treatment like this one, on a lot of them Rivers is singing the part of Maria/Laurel, the two main female characters. However, in this song, Rachel gets to perform and we get a taste of what SFTBH would have really been like. This song has shades of Matt Sharp's later project, the Rentals, with its keyboards, and since I like the Rentals I have no qualms. "Dreams" also has some really nice lyrics ("I'm so tall/can't get over me/I'm so low/can't get under me" is my favorite by far and I think about it all the time), and it's just a charmer of a tune that stays with you. The second I first heard it I knew that it would become a favorite. And it has! The whole synth-emphasizing, different singers thing would have been an interesting direction for the band to go in (although they did take turns singing on later albums, like Red, but that album sucks) but it would have meant that we would have not had Pinkerton, and so I think I can settle for just having magnificent B-sides like this one.

Honorable mentions!: "Automatic (LA Riots Remix)," which is not technically a B-side and more like a rarity as it was just a remix of a Red album song (I think the purpose of creating the remix was so that it could be the theme to Grand Turismo 5: Prologue but who knows) but I like it a lot anyway; "My Evaline" from the "Undone" single (short but nice).

If you stuck around, thank you and congratulations, but...

Yeah, I went there. I probably won't post tomorrow or Thursday or even Friday, so Happy Thanksgiving, survivors (and all Americans).