Recording
After the Blue Album tour ended in August 1995, Weezer took a seven-day break. A few days before Cuomo left to study at Harvard University, the band gathered for two weeks of recording at Electric Lady Studios, the same studio where they had recorded The Blue Album, and tracked the songs "Why Bother?", "Getchoo", "No Other One", and "Tired of Sex".
While Cuomo was at Harvard, other Weezer members worked on side projects. Matt Sharp promoted his band The Rentals' debut album, while Patrick Wilson and Brian Bell worked on material for their bands The Special Goodness and the Space Twins respectively. Weezer regrouped in January 1996 during Cuomo's winter break for a two-week recording session at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, with the intent of completing the songs they had worked the previous August. After recording new songs "El Scorcho" and "Pink Triangle", the band members went their separate ways again while Cuomo returned to Harvard.
During a week-long break in the spring of 1996, the band regrouped at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California and recorded three new songs, "The Good Life", "Across the Sea", and "Falling for You", before Cuomo returned to Cambridge for his university finals. The band put the finishing touches on the album in the summer of 1996 in Los Angeles. Two additional tracks, "I Swear It's True" and "Getting Up and Leaving", were abandoned prior to the mixing process.
Weezer decided against hiring a producer, feeling that "the best way for us to sound like ourselves is to record on our own." The band hoped to explore "deeper, darker, more experimental stuff" which would better resemble the band's live sound. To give the album a live, "raw" feel, Cuomo, Bell and bassist Matt Sharp recorded their vocals in tandem around three microphones rather than overdubbing them separately.
Read more about this topic: Pinkerton (album)
Famous quotes containing the word recording:
“Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.”
—Jane Heap (c. 1880–1964)
“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)