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Rivers Cuomo Prepackages His Internet Presence

Credit...Dylan Coulter for The New York Times

It has been 25 years since the “Blue Album” was released, and Weezer is having a resurgence. Your album “Pacific Daydream” is nominated for a Grammy this year; you just released the “Teal Album,” and the “Black Album” is coming out in March. Most important, your cover of Toto’s “Africa” hit more than 25 million streams on Spotify. Well, that started with a 14-year-old girl in Ohio who spammed us every day requesting us to cover Toto’s “Africa.” We let it play out for a few months and decided to release Toto’s “Rosanna.” Then, a week later, we put out “Africa.”

Do you get tired of playing, say, your old hit “Buddy Holly” all the time? We’ve played well over a thousand shows, and it’s all about feeling the audience’s excitement, and it’s just so addictive. Standing up there and playing a lick or singing a hook is just like putting a question out into the universe: “Am I worth something? Am I good? Am I cool?” And you just want to hear this roar of affirmation: “Yes, Rivers, you rock.” It’s such an intense craving for me that I’ll do whatever it takes to get it, even if it means playing “Buddy Holly” for the 2,000th time.

You’ve been a rock star for decades now. Do you think you’ll always want to keep answering that question? Yeah, until I kick the addiction. It’s like any drug. You can’t just say, “Well, you’ve been shooting heroin for 25 years by now, you think you’d just feel good all the time,” right?

Do you think that’s a healthful way to live? I have some detachment from it now, and I can use that addictive dynamic to get the best work out of me without being too miserable all the time. Number one by limiting my exposure to the online world. That’s just more stuff to get addicted to, and it can give you a thrill, but it can make you feel pretty terrible about yourself. I’ve set my computer so I can’t get on to social media except for a few hours on Fridays.

But you were just on Twitter. I was? What does it say?

It says, “My voice is dead tonight, you have any vocal health tips for me?” Oh, I just load it all into a program which tweets three times a day. So I don’t know when that was composed, but not recently. Though my voice is kind of wrecked today.

Even with the limits, you do have a very clear relationship to social media. You’re very present on Snapchat. Yeah, that’s the one I do every day. As for the rest of my social media, it’s 100 percent sincere and reflecting how I’m feeling at the time, but probably only 20 percent of it is literally from me. The rest is cut and paste.

Sometimes your tweets feel as if they might be curated by artificial intelligence. My new passion is computer programming. I’ve been writing a program to generate our set lists for our tour with the Pixies. I get almost sexually aroused looking at spreadsheets.

You signed up for Tinder for purely platonic reasons. How did that go? I was working with this producer, Jake Sinclair. He’s a young guy. He was on Tinder, and he was telling me all about it, and I just started writing songs from his perspective. I met somebody in Indianapolis — we walked around the whole city. But I started talking to this one woman on the phone, and I said: “Look, I’ve gotta be upfront with you. I’m actually just a songwriter looking for inspiration,” and I think she was really disappointed. It made me feel like this is not the best experiment to continue.

“Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch featuring Matt Damon and Leslie Jones as insanely devoted Weezer fans. What did you think of it? I didn’t watch it. I like to exist in my own happy little world and not be too close to what people are saying about the band.

You wrote a tweet about it. You said you were crying while watching it, in all caps. I’m sure that would be my reaction if I did see it.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 62 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Rivers Cuomo Prepackages His Internet Presence. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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