Make Believe

:For the Chicago-based indie band, see Make Believe (band)

Trivia

• Rivers Cuomo took up meditation in the three years between this and their previous release, Maladroit. "Pardon Me" was written after a ten day guided meditation called Metta which involved a chant of "I seek pardon from all those who I have hurt in action speech or thought." He also claimed the title of the album came to him while meditating in a closet.
• Cuomo's story behind the inspiration for "We Are All on Drugs": "I was living in an apartment above the Sunset Strip, and every Friday and Saturday night I?d hear people cruising and partying, and hooting and hollering. And I went to sleep one night and I heard those sounds all through the night, in my dreams. I had this dream about a kid on the Metro bus, blasting hip hop into his brain through his headphones. And the music sounded so decadent and overstimulating, and I woke up in the midst of that dream, in a haze, and immediately said to myself, ?Man, we?re all on drugs!? And I instantly knew that would be a cool song." The "whoo!" yells in that song are apparently inspired by the people he would hear partying and cruising on Sunset Strip. link
• "My Best Friend" was originally written to be included in the film Shrek 2 yet was scrapped when the makers of the film didn't think it fit to the timings of the visuals. The Counting Crows song "Accidentally in Love" took the place of "My Best Friend." link
• According to front man Rivers Cuomo, the song "The Other Way" was written for Elliott Smith's ex-girlfriend/possible murderer Jennifer Chiba. According to Cuomo: "I wanted to console her, but I was confused and skeptical about my own motives for wanting to do so, so I wrote that song about that." link
• Producer Rick Rubin told Rivers Cuomo to "write a Billy Joel or Elton John type of song." The result of Rubin's request was "Haunt You Every Day." Which is not the first Weezer song to feature piano, but is the first that Rivers wrote entirely on piano. According to Cuomo, Rubin told Tom Petty the same thing and he wrote ?It?s Good To Be King.? link
• "Hold Me" was written during a songwriting experiment in which Cuomo fasted for 24 hours and then wrote a song link.
• Throughout the spring of 2002 and at random points in late '02 and early '03 demos for possible use on Weezer's fifth album would be uploaded to Weezer.com's audio/visual page. Twenty eight songs were uploaded in all yet only one ("Hold Me") made the actual album. This batch of songs is commonly referred to as "The A5 Demos" or "Album 4.5"
• The liner notes feature a monologue from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. The monologue is taken from Act 5, Scene 1 of the play in which Prospero gives up his magic. This has prompted many fans to speculate that this will be the band's final album.