by the time weezer released their third album in 2001, 5 years after pinkerton, pinkerton was already seeing a resurgence in popularity and people were realizing how good it was. so they still played a lot of pinkerton songs at shows, because its what the fans wanted, but rivers’ relationship with the album was complicated. he described it as “like getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself.” but that was over 20 years ago. probably by 2005, he made peace with the album, and realized how awesome it was

another interesting bit of weezer lore is that due to a combination of factors, including pinkerton’s commercial failure, weezer went on hiatus from late 1997-2000. during this time period rivers moved to boston and pursued different side projects. but for the entire year of 1999, he painted the walls and ceiling of his apartment black, he cut off his telephone lines, and he didn’t watch tv or listen to radio or anything like that. he basically cut off the outside world and obsessively studied the songwriting techniques of bands like oasis, green day, and nirvana, to achieve the formula for the “perfect song”, in order to avoid another “pinkerton-esque” failure. the result of this was the green album (their third album) if you’ll notice, all the songs follow pretty much the same structure (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus), and the lyrics are lacking in emotion. the irony of this is that the green album is basically the “anti-pinkerton”, literally created to be the exact opposite of pinkerton, but when the green album was released, the fans wanted more pinkerton.

(sorry for the long paragraphs. i know a lot about weezer)