If I were tasked with sorting all the world’s popular songs, I would put Weezer’s “Undone – The Sweater Song” in the file with Blur’s “Song 2”. Personally, they make sense together. So it’s a good thing that isn’t part of my job, because “The Sweater Song” actually has more to do with Metallica and the Velvet Underground than anything else.
During an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s podcast in 2022, frontman Rivers Cuomo explained the origins of Weezer’s debut single. The topic arose when O’Brien asked Cuomo about his unique approach to songwriting and what he was listening to as a child.
“I’m actually thinking of ‘The Sweater Song’ now,” Cuomo replied, “but I remember the moment I came up with that riff. I was about 20 [or] 21 years old, and I had been exposed to cool music finally after moving to L.A. from Connecticut.”
He continued, “Got a job at Tower Records and started listening to Sonic Youth and Pixies and Velvet Underground. And I was like, ‘Ok, I’m going to try to write a Velvet Underground song.’ I sat down and came up with ‘The Sweater Song’ riff.”
Rivers Cuomo On Telling Lars Ulrich He Accidentally Copied a Metallica Riff
From there, Cuomo continued to share the story of Weezer’s debut origins. It may have started with the Velvet Underground, but the more music Cuomo discovered, the more interesting his influences became. This is where Metallica comes in.
“I was like, ‘Yes, this is so cool,’” he said of that initial riff. “And a couple years went by, we got signed, put out a record, it blew up, very happy. [In] 1995, we end up playing this big festival in New York City, and Lars Ulrich was there from Metallica and I saw him backstage.”
He continued, “The truth was, I was a huge metalhead in high school, and that’s really how I learned how to play my instrument. It suddenly occurred to me that ‘The Sweater Song’, that riff, is actually very similar to Metallica’s ‘Sanitarium’.”
The table erupted into laughter, and Rivers Cuomo added, “If you play them next to each other, they’re pretty much identical.” There’s one crucial difference, however. “‘The Sweater Song’ [is] in a major key,” he said.
Metallica, Cover ‘The Sweater Song’, You Cowards
The story doesn’t end there, though. “So, I had to tell [Ulrich] that right then and there,” Cuomo continued. “That’s what I told him when I met him.” When asked how Lars Ulrich handled that information, Cuomo said, “He’s totally cool, we just ran into him again, and he’s just very, very cool. And because we covered ‘Enter Sandman’, it’s been in our set recently. We ended up playing with him this summer [of 2022], and we were so close to playing ‘Enter Sandman’ right before they went on.
“But we asked him, like, ‘Hey, is it cool if we play it?’” he continued. “And he said, ‘Yeah, that would mean we don’t have to play it.’” According to Cuomo, Weezer didn’t actually play “Enter Sandman” for Metallica that time. “We chickened out,” he explained.
But that just conjured up the image of Metallica playing “The Sweater Song” in return. Surely something like that would unravel the fabric of space-time. Much like something else I know of that occasionally comes undone. Convenient.
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