Stranded: The Desert Island Album

The premise is simple.  You are stranded on a desert island.  The question is more complicated.  Which album will accompany you as you wait to be rescued?  There are so many sounds in the world and there have been countless beautiful musical examples from every generation and from every corner of the earth.  But the question asks for one record.  Admittedly, I have extremely diverse musical tastes and it saddens me to think about a life without access to all of these sounds.  However, as soon as the question was proposed, one album came to mind and would not depart.  This particular album transported me through several difficult phases of life.  It was there for my first love, and for my first heartbreak.  It was there through all of the awkwardness of puberty and the alarming self-assurance that comes from feeling on top of the world during the last days of high school.  It is an album that I have listened to countless times and never tire of hearing- even after owning it for nearly ten years.  To pass the time on this desert island I will have Weezer (Blue Album) on repeat.

The answer surprised myself.  Why wouldn’t I choose The Beatles (The White Album) or David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars?  The question was not: what is the greatest album of all time?  Rather, the question is much more personal than that.  The question cuts to the core of why we listen to music at all.

Released in May of 1994, The Blue Album entered the music scene at a time of fusing genres and expanded soundscapes.  The metal of Guns and Roses was dying a slow death as guitar bands traded in blazing solos for simplified power chord songs.  The mid-nineties ushered in a feeling of “anything is possible” with bands like Green Day re-defining punk and hip-hop thriving as a genre.  From this, Weezer rose with a debut album that would come to empower many young, insecure and impressionable musicians to pick up guitars.  The Blue Album’s electro-synth keyboards, harmonica, and three part vocal harmonies distinguish itself from grunge; the bare bones sound of Nirvana and the hypnotic, edgy Soundgarden leading this grunge movement.  Mixing hard rock elements with pop sensibilities was just beginning to happen in the early 1990’s and Weezer crafted its songs to allow the two seemingly different worlds to unite.  As a result, Weezer reached out to the under-represented populace who played Dungeons and Dragons and listened to KISS; a slight contrast from the also misunderstood Nirvana fan base, which consisted largely of flannel-wearing post-punk youths rising against popular music.  The members of Weezer (lead by frontman Rivers Cuomo) were not afraid to identify themselves as nerds and they ushered in the “post-grunge” era where the sounds of popular radio began to meld with the grunge/hard rock paradigm.  Cuomo, with his trademark dark-rimmed “Buddy Holly” glasses, became the voice of disgruntled, self-proclaimed nerds everywhere. 

At the age of 15, listening to my father’s classic rock collection, I was so desperately seeking a band that could voice the same struggles and emotions that I was feeling.  I found myself drawn to the primal wails of David Bowie and the furious speed of Iron Maiden, but I still felt a void unfilled.  After hearing “Say It Ain’t So,” I immediately realized that what I had been waiting for was Weezer.  This record quite literally changed my life. Hours would pass as I would listen to those ten songs over and over again until I could sing every lyric, match every harmony, and nail every guitar lick.  I became obsessed with playing the guitar.

In lieu of presenting a full personal history, I can just say that this album still elicits the same feelings today.  Every time I hear that unmistakable introduction to “Say It Ain’t So” or the guitar/keyboard interplay on “Buddy Holly,” I feel that same sense of belonging and hope that I felt as an impressionable 15 year old.  And with that comes a certain amount of nostalgia.  In many ways, I long for the nineties again.  From a sonic standpoint, The Blue Album is a quintessential example of nineties post-grunge power-pop.  The hiss and hum of analog tapes is present and the raw, distorted guitars create a wall of sound that is yet unknown in the digital age.  The guitar feedback captured on this album is reminiscent of the noise rock genre and provides some of the album’s most breathtaking moments (I challenge anyone to listen to “Only in Dreams” and not get chills as the feedback of the guitars transforms into a soaring counterpoint that crescendos to the reprise of the main melody).  To me, Weezer brought the visceral nature of hard rock and pop music song structures together in one perfect package.  Today’s music misses the mark on this point.

To put it simply, I have such an admiration for every second, every lyric on this record, because it stuck with me during a very important time in my life.  It was only years later (after really studying the music) that I realized the brilliance and universal appeal of The Blue Album.  So, on this desert island, I will be riding waves of nostalgia and feeling truly content.  It sounds too good to be true and some may say that this can occur only in dreams.  Say it ain’t so.