So I completely forgot to do this yesterday. I was on my laptop almost all day too so I’m not sure how that happened. But we carry on, it’s nothing to get hung about.

Some time, I’ll say in about 2005, I was watching Kerrang! and the video for ‘Keep Fishin” came on. I would have been nine going on ten and I knew who the Muppets were. Weezer, not so much. But I thought the song was good and the video was good for comedy value too. YouTube was on the verge of being created, so the music video site I knew was the LAUNCH media site that was run by Yahoo! (If anyone remembers that who’s reading, you have my respect). I was able to watch a majority of my favourite videos on there. If they weren’t region-locked. But I remember showing ‘Keep Fishin’ to my good friend back in primary school and we would laugh and joke about what was going on. And through those repeated viewings I steadily began to appreciate that this was a great song. Good hook. Swinging rhythm and memorable melodies/vocal harmonies. That’s really all you need. And I think that was the first song by Weezer that I had ever heard.

Fifteen years on, I still care about Weezer a little. The Blue Album and Pinkerton are undisputed classics. The band’s last release that I was really into was The White Album, some great songs on that. Their new album’s due to be out in about May(?), if I remember correctly. I’ll listen, but I’m not counting down the days towards it or anythin’. Maladroit, the album that ‘Keep Fishin’ appears on, is all right. It saw the group return to a heavier/metal-influenced edge to their music after the relatively tame Green Album. That works well for some songs on there more than others. There are only a select few tracks on it that I’m into, ‘American Gigolo’ is one. ‘Dope Nose’ is another.

Listening to Maladroit for the first time, I was unsettled that the version of ‘Keep Fishin’ on there wasn’t quite the same as the one in the music video. It sounded a lot more rough, less sleek. Kinda messy in some aspects. Turned out that the band re-recorded the guitars, bass and drums for the single release. I’m sure that there are many people who prefer the album version to that of the single. I am not one of those people. So I’ll just clarify that it’s the single version of the track that I’ve grown accustomed to for the past fifteen years.

Here is that album version if you want to compare.