Ruling Me

Album: Hurley (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a track from Hurley, the eighth studio album by Weezer. Frontman Rivers Cuomo penned the song with Minnesota-based singer-songwriter Dan Wilson, who like Cuomo, attended Harvard. They pair teamed up again on the 2016 Weezer track "California Kids ."
  • Dan Wilson is the lead singer of Semisonic, for whom he wrote the hits "Secret Smile," "Closing Time" and "Chemistry." He also co-wrote with the Dixie Chicks' some of their 2006 album Taking the Long Way, which won the Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. One of the tracks he contributed to was "Not ready To Make Nice," for which Wilson won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year along with the Dixie Chicks.
  • Dan Wilson explained in an interview with American Songwriter how he collaborated with Cuomo on this song: "We wrote some lyrics for the verse, and he generated most of those, and I helped. And then I wrote the lyrics to the chorus, except for the last line, which is the title, which is his, and amazing. We kind of wrote the verse together, and then I said to him that I thought it sounded too innocent, and he said, 'We'll revise the innocence out later.' And then a week later he e-mailed me new lyrics and it was exactly that; the same story, the same song, but everything innocent and sweet was removed and replaced by something really funny and zippy and great, and sort of spicy. That was real collaborative, on the lyrics, and we wrote the music together."

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