Released November 25, 2008 Length 58:49 Release date 25 November 2008 Label Geffen Records | Recorded 1992-2008 Artist Rivers Cuomo Producer Rivers Cuomo Genre Alternative rock | |
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Alone II The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
(2008) Not Alone – Rivers Cuomo and Friends Live at Fingerprints
(2009) Similar Rivers Cuomo albums, Alternative rock albums | ||
Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo is a compilation album by Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. It is a sequel to Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo. On July 24, 2008 on riverscuomo.com, an entire list entitled "The 4 and 5 star demos of river como" [sic] was posted, with certain songs designated as songs that either appeared on Alone, Buddyhead's Gimme Skelter compilation, or Alone II. Soon after the list was posted, the site was redirected back to Cuomo's MySpace.
Contents
On October 15, 2008, the album was made available for pre-order on Amazon.com and its release date was revealed as November 25, 2008, with http://www.interpunk.com reporting it will contain "a 3 song mini suite from the highly sought after Songs from the Black Hole and a cover of the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby" and posting the cover artwork. The artwork was confirmed by Pitchfork Media on October 27, 2008.
Alone II debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart with opening week sales of 6,000. It was followed by Alone III: The Pinkerton Years (2011).
Background
Rivers Cuomo has recorded a great deal of unreleased material, nearly 800 songs. This material was recorded with Weezer, earlier bands, and self-recorded demos. Of these songs, despite the large amount of unreleased material that has been made available by Cuomo on the internet, large chunks of his work remain unheard by fans. These include certain demos for The Blue Album, various songs from the scrapped Songs from the Black Hole project, over a hundred songs he composed and demoed throughout 1999 (songs which he has described as ranging from "drone-y romantic," "abrasive dissonance" and "riffy pop-rock") and over a hundred songs that didn't make the cut for Make Believe.
The idea for the demo collection was made 10 years ago, when Cuomo had brought up the idea to his record company. However, they discouraged him from the idea because they didn't want to "dilute the Weezer name" by putting out less polished material. It wasn't until 10 years later that Cuomo pushed harder for the collection and it gained enough support for a release.
There were some legal issues between Cuomo and Geffen about releasing the album:
[Legal issues] [were] a big part of it because the record company owns all of my demos under Weezer's contract, and my argument was that they aren't Weezer recordings; they're not part of the Weezer record deal, this is my own stuff, I should own this. So we had to negotiate for a long time to reach an agreement as to the legal ownership of the records but we agreed enough that we were able to move forward and put it out.
Track origins
Songs
1Victory on the Hill0:50
2I Want to Take You Home Tonight3:56
3The Purification of Water3:56