Rivers Cuomo

At 53 years old, Rivers Cuomo has this physical status:

Rivers Cuomo (KWOH-moh; born June 13, 1970) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and producer.

He is the lead vocalist, guitarist, keyboardist, and songwriter of Weezer's rock band Weezer.

Cuomo, a boy who grew up in an ashram in Connecticut, moved to Los Angeles at 18, where he performed in numerous rock bands before forming Weezer in 1992.

Burnt out on Weezer's self-titled debut album, Cuomo, but Weezer's second album, Pinkerton (1996), was a disappointment; he re-enrolled and graduated in 2008.

Despite the fact that Pinkerton is now listed among the best albums of the 1990s and has been awarded platinum, it was initially a commercial and critical failure, pushing Cuomo's songwriting into pop music. Cuomo has also released three compilation albums of home demos: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo (2007), Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo (2006) and Alone III: The Pinkerton Years (2011).

He has collaborated with a number of musicians; in 2013, he and Scott Murphy released a self-titled Japanese-language collection under the name Scott & Rivers.

Early life

Rivers Cuomo was born in New York City on June 13, 1970, to a father of Italian descent and a mother of German-English descent. Accounts regarding the name of the author are conflicting. According to one account, Cuomo's mother, Beverly Shoenberger, named him Rivers either because he was born in Manhattan's East and Hudson rivers or because she could see a river outside her hospital window. Cuomo was named after three key soccer players, Rivellino, Luigi Riva, and Gianni Rivera, all of whom were competing in the 1970 World Cup, according to his father, Frank Cuomo, a drummer on the 1971 album Odyssey of Iska by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

Rivers was born in Rochester, New York, until his father, who died in 1975, took the family to the Rochester Zen Center. The family was relocated to Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut, by his mother. Cuomo and his mother married Stephen Kitts at Pomfret Community School. Yogaville moved to Virginia in 1980. The Kitts family stayed in Connecticut and moved to the Storrs/Mansfield area. Cuomo attended Mansfield Middle School and E.O. during this time. Smith High School. Rivers, a member of the high school choir, appeared in a Grease school production as Johnny Casino. After graduating, Cuomo reverted to his original name.

Avant Garde, a glam metal band from Cuomo, was one of Cuomo's earliest music projects. Avant Garde moved to Los Angeles in 1989 after appearing in numerous shows in Connecticut, but they did not rename it to Zoom until 1990. Cuomo attended Santa Monica College at that time. When Cuomo was writing content for King Size's debut album in 1990 and 1991, he was a roadie for the band King Size and spent time at Tower Records, where he listened to "basically every word that was released at the time." "I was exposed to a ton of music that I may not have heard before."

Personal life

Cuomo took vows of sexual abstinence from 2004 to his marriage in 2006. Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, whom he first saw in March 1997 at one of his solo concerts at the Middle East Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He proposed to her in Tokyo a few weeks before Christmas 2005. The wedding was held on a beach in Malibu and was attended by all past and present Weezer guests, as well as Kevin Ridel and Rick Rubin. Both the couple have two children, Mia, who was born in 2007, and Leo, who was born in 2011.

Cuomo was born with equal length legs, but his left leg was almost two inches shorter than his right leg as he increased to his full height. Cuomo underwent the Ilizarov therapy to correct the condition following the success of The Blue Album. This involved the bone breaking of his leg, as well as several months of wearing a steel brace that required self-administered "stretching" of the leg four times per day; Cuomo likened the event to "crucifying [his] leg."

Cuomo has been vegetarian since childhood. However, in 2002, he told an interviewer that he'd like to start eating meat more often and that he'd done so before, in Tokyo, eating "some kind of barbecued beef."

Cuomo practices Vipassan meditation and was a pupil of S. N. Goenka. He also practices children's meditation as a result of S. N. Goenka's teaching of children's meditation as of mid-2009. Cuomo was assisting in the establishment of a 2007 documentary titled The Dhamma Brothers about Vipassan meditation, which was filmed in an Alabama state jail.

Cuomo was an early adopter of soccer. In 2006, he wrote "My Day Is Coming," in tribute to the US men's soccer team's "represent" -- the U.S. team's "unofficial anthem" that was released as a Weezer single on June 11, the day before Team USA's World Cup opener against England. Cuomo played in the Mia and Nomar Celebrity Soccer Challenge in early 2008 and scored a goal in the tournament. The video for "Lover in the Snow" from Alone's album discusses this sport and his growing love of soccer. Cuomo played in the Athletes for Africa 5v5 Charity Soccer Tournament in Toronto, Canada, alongside actor Michael Cera in August 2009.

On November 1, 2019, Cuomo spoke at a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang in Iowa, but Cuomo did not specifically endorse Yang.

Cuomo's interests include programming, he took the CS50 exam, and maintained his GitHub page.

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