The morning after the Super Bowl, Brian Bell wasn’t exactly basking in the glow of sports history. From his place in L.A., the Weezer guitarist had slept well, watched a blowout, and shrugged his way into the day. “I just wanted a good game,” he said. “They overhype that stuff. What’s one for the ages is the fact that the season happened at all.”
Football aside, he was more interested in a different kind of miracle: a 30-minute orchestral Weezer album in the middle of a pandemic, built for attention spans that tap out halfway through Side A.
OK Human is short, strange, and wired for vinyl. Bell loves it that way. “I don’t know about your attention span,” he told me, “mine isn’t really one side of a record.” He compared it to meditation: “Let me take you on this journey for like 15 minutes, that’s all we’re asking. Just enjoy it, let whatever images and feelings come to you, and then if you want to, get up and flip the side.” Streaming, he’ll tolerate, but only as a tool. “I don’t really like listening to streamed music that much. I do as educational purposes… like, okay, I want to hear this song. But there’s something about putting a record on yourself and dropping the needle.”
The orchestral concept started in the least “human” setting possible: a private jet. Bell laughs about it, fully aware of the flex. “This is going to sound pretty douchey,” he said, “but we were on a private jet, flying somewhere, and Rivers asked me…” Cuomo laid out the idea: an orchestral record, no electric guitars, heavy on strings. He also gently floated the possibility that Bell might not be needed. “Internally I’m thinking, ‘fuck that,’” Bell said. “So that made me work really hard. Maybe it was reverse psychology.”
Instead of fuzz, he leaned into acoustic guitar and organ. The band ended up in a “magical studio out in the Valley” that basically doubles as a rock museum: the Mellotron used on “She’s A Rainbow,” a Telecaster tied to Keith Richards, a Gibson J-200 that “could have been Cat Stevens’ for all I know,” and a console that once sat under Paul McCartney’s elbows on Dark Side of the Moon sessions. “Who this guy is that collected all this stuff, I don’t know,” Bell said, still in awe. “But the gear was incredible.”
Faced with a real Hammond B3 and a Leslie cabinet, he did what any sane person would do: recruit extra limbs. “Being an organ player is a whole different monster,” he admitted. “You have to control a volume pedal and a vibrato knob and all these levers. So we basically had my two hands playing it, Jake’s brother on the ground controlling the swells, and Jake deciding where vibrato should go. We had like six hands working on the damn thing.”
The record was built almost like an assembly line. Bell would show up in scheduled blocks — “like a doctor” — with an iPad of parts ready to go. “Here’s my idea, let’s get this one, let’s get this one, check check,” he said. Later, most of the work was subtraction: strings carved away so it wouldn’t tip into pompous, guitars and organ tucked low so the whole thing stayed weirdly intimate.
His favorite pieces of OK Human are the ones you don’t hear right away. On “Numbers,” there’s a little breakdown where he’s chanting digits in the background. “Obviously I’m going to say some numbers,” he joked, “but I realized the only way they’d make the cut is if they meant something.” So he built the Fibonacci sequence into the backing vocal — 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 — which is to say that the guy is sneaking math nerd Easter eggs into a baroque Weezer song.
Then there’s “La Brea Tar Pits,” where drummer Pat Wilson literally answered his phone during a take. “I was kind of appalled at first,” Bell said. “That’s so Pat… he plays great but then loses interest toward the end of the song.” Instead of deleting it, they leaned in. “Because of the theme of the record being organic and human, and the lyrics about technology, it became this moment where the phone is controlling us even while we’re working. Robot must answer phone.” Mixed right, it sounded intentional — like some conceptual art move instead of a guy taking a call mid-track.
Bell is quick to underline the “human” part of OK Human: three voices in mono, low in the mix, just enough to remind you actual people are in there. He pushed hard to get Pat and Scott Shriner singing more, even notating harmonies so they could see and hear how the parts locked in. “I love the sound of our human… like, the human element,” he said. “They’re definitely not featured, but they’re just the right touch to go, ‘remember human voices?’”
Meanwhile, in a totally different lane, Van Weezer — their stadium-rock, shred-heavy record — sat ready to go, delayed only because the Hella Mega tour with Green Day and Fall Out Boy went off the rails with the rest of 2020. “It’s such a stadium rock sound,” Bell said. “Flashy lead guitar work, which I don’t really play. I play more of the fabric, the figures, the counter-melodies.” They’ll wait to unleash it until they can actually stand in front of amps and melt faces for money.
And while Cuomo has already moved on to seasonal concept albums (one supposedly Elliott Smith-inspired, another Franz Ferdinand-ish, plus what Bell calls “a Weezer-inspired Weezer album”), Bell’s quietly campaigning for something more backward-looking: a full-album live run of the Green Album for its 20th. “I think it’s a very underrated album,” he said. “As a record, it’s its own work of art… and I don’t know if we’ve ever played some of those songs live.” He also sees it as a way to honor late bassist Mikey Welsh. “That would be a nice homage to his memory.”
For now, he’s just happy OK Human is finally out of their heads and into yours. “I like music you can listen to six or seven times and hear new things every time,” he said. “That’s why a lot of music from the 60s and 70s stands the test of time… there’s always something new to discover. And I hope that’ll be the case with OK Human.”
He then laughs. “Of course, some fans are still like, ‘Oh, Blue and Pinkerton are the only ones.’ They’ll find something negative to say. Which is so bizarre. But they’re still our fans. You gotta love ’em for that, I guess.”
Somewhere between the Fibonacci sequence, the rogue phone call, and the Mellotron from “She’s A Rainbow,” Weezer made their most human record with almost no electric guitars. They’ll argue about it on Reddit for years. The band have already moved on to the next one.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
