Explaining why Weezer named their albums after colours
What’s your favourite Weezer album? The California alt-rockers have outlasted virtually all of their 1990s post-grunge peers through constant reinvention, sometimes at the behest of their die-hard audience. With 15 studio albums and no sign of slowing down anytime soon, Rivers Cuomo might run out of colours on the spectrum before he runs out of Weezer albums.
If you wanted to claim that your favourite Weezer album was Weezer, you would have to be more specific. That’s because the band currently has six studio albums named after colours. There’s the band’s classic debut, known as The Blue Album, along with their power-pop comeback LP The Green Album, the eclectic Red Album, the throwback sounds of The White Album, the all-covers Teal Album, and, most recently, the electronica-focused Black Album.
It’s become a signature for the band, so much so that fans half expect each album to feature a new colour. When sitting down with Adam McKibbin in 2008, Cuomo shed some light on why the band keeps returning to the colour scheme for their albums. At that time, the band only had three colour-coded albums, but each one held a specific significance to Cuomo.
“That shade of blue was always my favorite color growing up; I painted my room that color when I was a kid,” Cuomo revealed. “There was a Beach Boys cover that had that color in the background [possibly 15 Big Ones], and I thought it was so beautiful. On The Green Album, we printed out a bunch of different colors and put them in CD cases and brought them to the store and set them in the racks and then stood about ten or 15 paces away and just looked to see which color popped out the loudest – and it was green.”
“For The Red Album, there was only one primary color left. Perhaps serendipitously, it was the perfect color for this album – it’s such a bold and brave and loud album,” Cuomo added. “Red is the car color you associate with the greater likelihood of getting a speeding ticket; that’s exactly what this album feels like – breaking musical laws and getting in trouble [Laughs].”
In the time since, the group added three more colours to their palette, although Cuomo has yet to reveal the significance behind the colours white, black, and teal. Perhaps now they’re just going for what’s the most eye-catching. Maybe Cuomo wants to channel The Beatles or Metallica with their respective choices. Whatever the case may be, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that we’ll get another colour-coded album from Weezer sometime in the not-so-distant future.
