Pitchfork

Hey have you heard about this YouTube thing? It's just the bee's knees, man! It would seem Rivers Cuomo has heard about this YouTube thing, and he's already putting it to good use.

The Weezer frontman and charity footballer reached out to his fans recently via YouTube for what he's christened "Let's Write a Sawng", an interactive songwriting project of sorts.

"Here's the deal," declares an amusingly mustachioed Cuomo in the introductory "Sawng" dispatch. "I'm in my music studio, trying to write a song. And I need your help. That's right. Me, and all of yous, are gonna write a song together."

For Step 1, Cuomo selected an "attitude" for his song, essentially "fun and poppy, but tough." For Step 2, he tapped his fans for a song title. "80's Radio" emerged as the victor, beating out "Riding in Geos With Katie", "Showdown in Candyland", and even the seemingly indomitable "Big and Bouncy".

For Step 3, still in progress, Cuomo has asked us to "come up with some chords yo." Word.

As of March 21, Rivers was heading over the river and through the woods to his grandparents' house for a week on a dial-up modem, which means you probably have until March 28 or so to pick the perfect chords for "80's Radio" and post them to YouTube. Make haste, yo.

Many thanks to reader Matthew Dunn for the tip!

And as much as we'd delight to find the fruits of the "Sawng" project on the forthcoming Weezer album, that seems unlikely given a recent posting to the Weezer website.

"We have one song left to mix and then it's on to mastering," that one reads. "We should be all done very soon. Then we chill for a minute." The record should be out in June, it's not called Tout Ensemble, and apparently it's "meaty, crunchy, and melodic like a good Weezer album should be." So there you go.

Oh, also, we're promised a new Weezer single on the radio soon. Cheeky Rivers won't disclose the title, but he does tell us it begins with T, ends with R, and is a single, twelve-letter world. So obviously it's called, um, "Treehuggerer".