Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo (second from left) says, contrary to popular belief, not everything the band does is ironic or satirical.

If you're wondering if Rivers Cuomo wants you to take him seriously ... he wants you to.

"The thing that pisses me off is when critics say that it's all a big joke," confesses Weezer's leader over a speakerphone from an L.A. recording studio.

"When they say I'm intentionally making fun of certain kinds of music, or I'm making fun of my fans, or I hate my fans, or I hate music. I hear these kinds of things all the time, and it's so frustrating for me because I put so much work into the records. No one would put that much effort into a joke! It's obviously something I care so much about. I love the music, I love the records, I love our fans, and I don't know how to communicate that to the world in a way they can understand."

Clearly not. If anything, Cuomo and the rest of Weezer — guitarist Brian Bell, drummer Patrick Wilson and bassist Scott Shriner — have developed a reputation over the years as a band of smirking power-pop satirists.

Their videos — from the Happy Days homage of Buddy Holly to the viral-video tribute of Pork and Beans — often find them cheekily sending up pop-culture trends and touchstones.

Recent live shows have reportedly found them covering Lady GaGa's Poker Face, Coldplay's Viva la Vida and The Killers' Human. Their recently released album Raditude — which was christened by Office star Rainn Wilson — finds Cuomo and co. venturing into the hip-hop realm with the aid of unlikely allies like Lil Wayne and Jermaine Dupri. Heck, even their winged-W logo is a clear knockoff of Van Halen.

Then there are the Snuggies. To promote Raditude, Cuomo concocted a truly bizarre marketing campaign: The band is selling Weezer snuggies for $30 — and giving away the CD with purchase. They recently performed on Late Night With David Letterman clad in the sleeved blankets, and have even filmed a TV informercial. And he wonders why people don't take him seriously.

But dig below the surface and you'll find a sincere songwriter, he insists.

"I don't think I use satire and irony nearly as much as other people think I do. In a number of cases, I've done lyrics 100% sincerely and those lyrics have been interpreted as being satirical. The entire song Beverly Hills, for example, is completely sincere, exploring my craving for celebrity. But many listeners think I'm satirizing celebrity."

The soft-spoken, thoughtful 39-year-old wasn't satirizing anybody or anything when he spoke to us during a break from assembling a deluxe reissue of the band's underappreciated 1996 sophomore album Pinkerton.

The most obvious difference between this album and your others is you're collaborating with other songwriters now. How did that come about? Until now, you've been a self-contained unit.

Last year we put out the Red Album, and to support it we did what we called The Hootenanny Tour, where we invited fans to bring their instruments to Weezer shows and play with us onstage. So each day we were faced with the challenge of making music with these people. And each day I got to hear hundreds of new instruments, and I was interacting with people I had never met before. And it was very

invigorating. So it was natural for me to start calling up other musicians when I started writing songs for Raditude at the beginning of this year.

Some of them aren't people anyone would expect you to know, let alone work with — people like Jermaine Dupri and Lil Wayne, for example. How did that happen?

I've always been a huge fan of Jermaine Dupri's songwriting and Lil Wayne's rapping. Yeah, they're from a totally different world, musically speaking. But that made it all the more fun and challenging

for me. To figure out how to integrate their ideas with my ideas and with Weezer's sensibility and chord progressions and melodies.

And how did you fuse those things together?

Well, it just takes a lot of work. You just have to keep trying different things and problem-solving until everything clicks. The song Can't Stop Partying is a perfect example. The idea Jermaine was bringing to the table was a pure club-party song. And while I thought something about that energy was great, it wasn't the whole story for me. And I struggled for a long time with the lyrics, trying to revise them to make it feel more authentic to me. But everything I tried just made it worse."

"So eventually I struck on the idea of radically changing the music underneath the lyrics — changing it to a minor key and making it into a sad, beautiful musical landscape under those lyrics. And it really changed the music of the lyrics. Now I'm singing about partying but the music is sad.

You're selling Snuggies and giving away your CD with every purchase. What kind of statement are you making about the music industry?

(Laughs) Yeah, it's a bit of a joke. People say that CDs really aren't worth that much anymore. So we're basically giving it away for free with a Snuggie. But I don't know that we're making a serious statement there.

How are they selling?

I haven't got any figures yet. But from what I hear, they're selling quite well. Snuggies in general have just been phenomenal sellers — 14 million or something like that.

Please tell me that Brian's not rubbing your feet in your fake informercial.

Those are not my feet.

You're going to be 40 soon. You're married and have a two-year-old daughter. How do you integrate that life with the arrested adolescence of being in Weezer?

I think the core human emotions are pretty universal. So as long as I boil my feelings down to their core essence, people of any age can relate to them. Whether they're people 20 years younger than me or people 20 years older than me. That's what I've strived for as an artist with Weezer's first album —trying to make timeless, universal songs that will appeal to people of any age.

Speaking of timeless, universal songs, Raditude's first single If You're Wondering if I Want You To (I Want You To) seems to borrow a bit of its groove from You Can't Hurry Love. Yet the lyrics are about a guy urging a lover to hurry up and make a move. Is that an intentional juxtaposition on your part, a happy accident, or am I just overthinking the whole thing?

Gosh, I loved that song so much as a kid. I can't say I was intentionally modelling it — though I do remember, as I was writing the song, saying 'Hey! This kind of has the same feel of You Can't Hurry Love.' But no, it wasn't closely modelled on that song.

You recently wrote a song with Katy Perry. Tell me about that.

Well, there's not much to tell. We just got together and wrote a song. I don't know what the fate will be of the song we wrote. It could end up on her record or my record or anybody's record.

Do you have a wish list of other artists you'd like to collaborate with?

Yes, I actually literally have a list. Let me pull it up on my computer. Some of the names you might know are Fred Durst, Lady GaGa, The Killers, Karen O, Brian Wilson ...

Are they on the list simply because you appreciate their music? Or

are there other factors involved?

It's important to me that I'm really excited to work with somebody and a big fan of their music. But I also like to talk to my friends and see who they think it would be cool for me to work with. Sometimes, somebody else has a different perspective that might produce a result that I never would have thought of on my own.

darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca