Rivers Cuomo Readies Live Disc, Collaborates With Rainn Wilson of "The Office"

Weezer's Rivers Cuomo will release a live CD and DVD documenting his in-store performance at the Fingerprintz record store in Long Beach, California, according to the official Weezer site. Recorded in December 2008 while Cuomo was promoting his Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, the set features a mix of Weezer songs played to a small crowd, with 150 members of the audience joining Cuomo for an encore jam. Both formats will be released April 28th, with the DVD featuring an interview between Cuomo and Rushmore actor/Coconut Records man Jason Schwartzman.

Cuomo and Schwartzman will also team up on April 11th when they plot an Alternative Radio Countdown Takeover on Sirius Radio and play new material they've been working on. And here's where things get strange — stranger than the Red Album cover, the Alone II cover and even that train conductor costume Cuomo wore to Fingerprintz: Actor Rainn Wilson, or The Office's Dwight Schrute, joins Cuomo on the Weezer leader's new material. Wilson was in The Rocker, so it kind of makes sense. Plus, maybe Wilson can inspire Cuomo to break out those Green Album-era glasses again.

In news more Weezerian, the band have announced their first tour date of 2009, a gig at Tokyo's Fujirock Festival on July 26th. The official site also hints, "Beyond that date there will be more international and North American shows announced when they are confirmed," perhaps in support of their seventh album the band is rumored to be releasing this year.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

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