Rivers Cuomo Is Piecing It All Together

Do you imagine threading it together into a meaningful narrative—a book?

That’s somebody else’s job. I like recalling all the details, and not trying to make sense of it all. The part that I enjoy is just getting the events in order—almost like an O.C.D. thing or something. It’s a detective story. “Wait a minute, if I went to pick up my shoes in Manchester, Connecticut, on November 2, 1986, that means I must have gone to Berklee after that.” That sort of thing. I don’t know why—it’s just really fun to put the puzzle together.

It’s forensic, almost.

Which is different from catharsis.

Well, catharsis often comes from the imposition of meaning.

Yeah, I don’t do that. Or sometimes I do that, and then I go back and cross it out. It just feels icky, when I go back and read it. It’s, like, “Oh, that’s me now, having some kind of reaction to something that happened forty years ago.” I don’t care about that.

Serialization itself is interesting—the inadvertent or almost incidental meaning that can come from putting one thing next to another thing. I’ve written a little bit about collectors of very rare 78-r.p.m. records. It’s a pretty oddball subculture, and they’re really obsessive about their work. In the fifties, there was a collector named Harry Smith, who compiled “The Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways—

Oh, yeah!

He collected mostly prewar American vernacular records. He was very big on completion and serialization. That was a sense-making process for him, acquiring each item in a series, and putting them in the proper order.

That’s one hundred per cent what I’m talking about.

And, for you, there’s peace at the end of that?

It’s soothing. It’s like getting your room super organized or something. I don’t have O.C.D., so I don’t know where this comes from. It’s a lot of journal entries, a lot of letters, and a lot of me re-creating memories—fleshing out the journals, giving them a little more context. Letters from my mom to dad, and vice versa. And then even going back before my life, to my parents’ lives.

Are you learning things about yourself through it?

Yeah. Boy, yeah. I learned a lot about my dad, and that kind of shined some light on my relationship with my son, too.

You were four or five when your dad moved out, and you were raised chiefly by your mom. Is that right?

Well, I only ever heard my mom’s side of the story. And now I’m going back and seeing all these letters he wrote to us. I have no memory of them. I don’t know if I saw them. I would characterize it more as—we left. We moved from New York to Connecticut and joined the ashram. And, I don’t know, it might have been something like, “You don’t have to pay child support, but you can’t be a big part of the kids’ lives.” I really idolized my dad, and missed him. I was really young. It left a big hole in my heart, for sure.

How long did you go without seeing your dad?

I saw him when I was five, when I was seven, when I was eleven, and when I was sixteen. And then not again until my mid-twenties.

What was it like when you encountered each other again in your twenties?

Well, that was awkward.

You were a rock star by then.

Well, yeah. And it was when we’d put out the first album, and we had that song “Say It Ain’t So.” [On the bridge, Cuomo sings, “Dear Daddy, I write you / In spite of years of silence / You’ve cleaned up, found Jesus / Things are good, or so I hear / This bottle of Steven’s / Awakens ancient feelings / Like father, stepfather / The son is drowning in the flood.”] Somehow, I ended up with a lot of anger toward him, and bitterness, and so I just let it rip in that song. I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was scary having to deal with the fallout from that creative choice. I didn’t have a phone at the time, I just had a fax machine. And one day, out of the blue, I got a fax from my father. And he said, “We have to talk.” It was scary. He was a scary guy.