Gonna cast my mind back all the way to 2008. Let’s see. For the first few months of it, I was 12. Then I turned 13. In my second year of secondary school. No longer a junior and old enough to pick on the new first years who came in. I never did that though. I take no delight in those kinds of things. A lot of time was spent playing FIFA 08 on the PS2, even though the PS3 was very much a thing and an item that was quite affordable. My music taste was still very much under the influence of what I saw on TV and to a lesser extent in the charts. But by that year I was already a firm fan of Weezer, owning physical copies of the Blue Album and Pinkerton and enjoying their music videos whenever they showed up on MTV or other channels of the like. So I was really excited when the Red Album was coming around. Was the first album in three years since Make Believe which, unbeknownst to me at the time, had received the worst reception of any Weezer record to date. It carried on the colour theme after Blue and Green. Things could only go up from here. And just a few weeks after my 13th birthday, ‘Pork and Beans’ was released as the big return, the first single off the new album.

I can’t remember where or when I heard the track for the very first time. I’ve known the track and become so familiar with it at this point, it just sort of feels like it’s been around since before I was born. I have this small memory of a guy in my class bringing in his phone one day and me getting really excited that he had ‘Pork and Beans’ on there. I don’t think he even knew what it was or who it was by, and probably downloaded it because it was a popular song. Really, my hype for the track rising to an all-time high when the music video finally became available on this rising video website called YouTube, and was soon playing on MTV2 as a result. The music video contains all of these Internet personalities and OG meme people and was a huge attention-grabber at the time, but is incredibly dated looking at it 15 years on. I however had no idea who any of the people in there were apart from maybe Tay Zonday, the Numa Numa guy and the Leave Britney alone man. But they all didn’t matter. What did was that Weezer was back, and at the very least it rocked a lot harder than the last time the first single was released from one of their albums.

An executive at Geffen Records told Rivers Cuomo and the rest of the band that they needed to record more commercial material one day. Feeling somewhat annoyed and insulted by the suggestion, he was inspired to write a new song which in turn became ‘Pork and Beans’. Cuomo addresses having to deal with getting older, working out at the gym, putting Rogaine in his hair and the pressures of writing that perfect pop song to dominate the music charts. But considering all this, he tells the listener that, really, once he thinks about all of these things, he’s just going to do what he wants to do, he hasn’t got anything to prove and he’ll just continue on his merry way without considering what outsiders think about him. Was very close to just typing out the lyrics in the chorus to you, but it couldn’t be explained any simpler than how it’s sung during those moments. And speaking of the chorus, it’s such a great singalong section. I mean, any chorus has to be one of those. But this one in particular’s led by a greatly memorable melody accompanied by crunchy guitars and confident rhythm section. I don’t know what it was about producer Jacknife Lee in 2007/08, but a lot of bands wanted his hands on their records, and one thing I’ve noticed listening to his productions of that era is that he could make guitars sound machines and I think that also comes into great effect on this track. The Red Album is probably seen as fairly average Weezer album in terms of their group’s whole discography, but ‘Pork and Beans’ is a damn good track. To this day, probably still one of my favourite Weezer singles.