Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

If Rivers Cuomo of Weezer were to walk past you in the street, you probably wouldn't notice

him. If you did, you might think that this stranger kind of looked like Lewis Tully, the

nebish accountant played by Rick Moranis

in a couple of Ghostbusters movies. Chances are he'd be wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt,

a hoodie, maybe a baseball cap, indistinguishable from a hundred other short, slight guys

with glasses that you encountered that day. And that's just the way he likes it. But Rivers Cuomo is also a rock star,

an unlikely sort of rock star that is extremely committed to being a rock star and doing things

that he hopes will keep him at that level. He's highly educated, deeply introspective, very private, and always looking to learn something

new, be it studying the mysteries of writing the perfect song, to computer programming, to

intense forms of meditation, to careful study of the music industry.

He does all these things.

And one day he wants to make a Weezer movie, not a tour film, but some kind of actual

movie. Weezer has been together for more than 30 years. There have been no breakups and no

reunions. There really haven't been any official hiatuses. But Rivers has also taken a pickleball

with a vengeance. He's a very good chess player and he's fascinated with Japanese culture.

What else can I tell you?

Pita once voted him the sexiest celebrity vegetarian, although he does confess to hating carrots.

He doesn't have a middle name because his parents wanted him to choose one when he got old enough, but he just never got around to it.

Fox filmed a pilot for a TV show based on the years Rivers went to Harvard, and once he had a pet squirrel named Mr. Peanut Butter.

This is just a start.

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