Pacific Daydream

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2. "Happy Hour"Released: October 18, 2017

Pacific Daydream is the eleventh studio album by American rock band Weezer, released on October 27, 2017. The album is their second release by Crush Management, is distributed by Atlantic Records, and is the most significant departure from their trademark sound to date. The lead single, "Feels Like Summer", was released on March 16, 2017. The second single, "Happy Hour", was released on October 18.

## Background

In 2016, frontman Rivers Cuomo began filling a folder of songs intended for a darker project (provisionally titled The Black Album) but ultimately completed a second folder with songs that were of a different nature first, leading to the creation of Pacific Daydream. In April, Cuomo teased the album, describing it as "Beach Boys gone bad", tackling "more mature topics" and "less summer day and more winter night". As Cuomo began writing and recording, they found the songs to be more "like reveries from a beach at the end of the world [... as if] the Beach Boys and The Clash fell in love by the ocean and had one hell of an amazing baby". The band ultimately pushed back plans for The Black Album and began focusing on the new collection of songs. Guitarist Brian Bell later said "Whatever it's going to be called, it's going to be fucking awesome." Inspired by an ancient Chinese proverb by Chuang Chou, Cuomo hoped to explore more "radical" sounds, a departure from the "classic" style of The White Album. Cuomo's original title for the album was Somebody's Daydream, but he later explained that the band's drummer, Pat Wilson, thought "Pacific" was a more attractive alternative than "Somebody's", and ultimately the group settled on Pacific Daydream.

To create the album, Cuomo utilized various musical and lyrical fragments he had collected over time. He kept an archive of song ideas and hired programmers to organize a spreadsheet of lyric snippets by beats per minute, syllable, and key to call from whenever stuck. "Instead of trying to force myself to feel inspired, I can just go into the spreadsheet and search [...] I just try them out to see which ones work magically."

## Composition

Cuomo has described the album as having an overall theme of "alienation and loneliness and not feeling like I have a place to fit in", describing it as having a "darker, sadder undertone to it relative to" their previous album. The album's opening track, "Mexican Fender", written by Cuomo and Toby Gad, was based on Cuomo's interactions with Katy Goodman, of the indie rock band La Sera. Cuomo credited Jake Sinclair, the producer for The White Album, in assisting with the creation of the track. "Beach Boys", an ode to the Beach Boys, was written specifically to sound "the least like [them]", and describes Cuomo's experiences of "being in downtown LA at night and being totally disoriented and alienated". The song's bridge features quotes from Murry Wilson, the father of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. The album's lead single, "Feels Like Summer", is an "EDM-infused" track about "the death of [Cuomo's] June bride", who's now "home with the angels." The track was written through a "cut-and-paste" style that Cuomo had adopted while writing for The White Album. "Weekend Woman", the album's third promotional single, features an opening nod to The Zombies' "Time of the Season", as well as a verse melody previously used in a Green Album outtake, "Burning Sun".

## Track Listing

### Original Album

* 1. Mexican Fender
* 2. Beach Boys
* 3. Feels Like Summer
* 4. Happy Hour
* 5. Weekend Woman
* 6. QB Blitz
* 7. Sweet Mary
* 8. Get Right
* 9. La Mancha Screwjob
* 10. Any Friend of Diane's