Rivers Cuomo biography
Rivers Cuomo (; born June 13, 1970) is an American musician and singer-songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter of the alternative rock band Weezer. Raised in an Ashram in Connecticut, Cuomo moved to Los Angeles at age 19, where he participated in a number of rock bands before founding Weezer in 1992. With Weezer, he has released nine studio albums.
In addition to fronting Weezer, Cuomo has also worked as a solo artist. In December 2007, he released his debut album, Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, which featured home demos that Cuomo recorded from 1992 to 2007. He released his second solo artist album, Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, in November 2008. Alone III: The Pinkerton Years was released in December 2011.
Childhood and youth
Rivers Cuomo was born in a Manhattan hospital to parents of Italian and German/English descent, and raised on an ashram - run by the late yoga master Sri Swami Satchidananda in Pomfret, Connecticut. His mother, Beverly, was inspired to name her son "Rivers" because he was born between the East and Hudson rivers in Manhattan. Her appreciation of the sound of running water further reinforced her desire for this name. His father, Frank Cuomo, was a musician who played drums on the album
Odyssey of Iska by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
During his early childhood Cuomo attended a private school on an ashram farm where his parents raised him and his brother Leaves. Cuomo's parents moved to nearby Storrs, Connecticut when the ashram (known as Yogaville) was relocated to a plot of land along the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Cuomo attended E.O. Smith High School in Storrs, Connecticut under the name Peter Kitts, but reverted to his original name once he began attending Santa Monica College. Cuomo went on to attend the Berklee College of Music and Harvard University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, after attending classes on and off from 1995 to 2006. In high school, Cuomo played the role of Johnny Casino in the stage production of Grease.
After a series of musical projects in Los Angeles, Cuomo formed Weezer on February 14, 1992, with members from Sixty Wrong Sausages, including drummer Patrick Wilson. The original Weezer line-up included Cuomo on vocals and guitar, Wilson on drums, Matt Sharp on bass, and Jason Cropper who at first played exclusively on acoustic guitar. Weezer signed with DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen Records, on June 25, 1993. They began recording Weezer (also known as The Blue Album) in August 1993 at Electric Lady Studios in New York with producer Ric Ocasek. "Weezer" was Rivers' childhood nickname, given to him by his father when he was a toddler, although it wasn't because he had asthma.
Throughout 2002 Cuomo frequently posted on Weezer message boards as 'Ace' to discuss music with fans. He once had a website called the 'Catalog of Riffs' ('COR') in which he shared old demos of songs as well as scans of many personal items (letters, schedules, records). Since 2003 he has kept a MySpace page in which he has posted many blog entries including his original admission essay and two subsequent readmission essays to Harvard. Additionally he uses his MySpace blog as a clearinghouse for clarifications, corrections, and addenda to interviews and press reports about him. (This has included responding to misinformation on his Wikipedia entry.)
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