When Rivers Cuomo started to think about writing Weezer's tenth studio album, he was coming up with songs that sounded totally different from their previous record 'Hurley', which had been kind of dark, whereas the new songs seemed to be more upbeat. During the time that Cuomo was writing these songs, he experienced several important life events: On December 6, 2009, during Weezer's tour in support of Raditude, the bus carrying Cuomo, his wife, his daughter, their nanny, and his assistant Sarah Kim, skidded off an icy road in Glen, New York. Cuomo suffered three cracked ribs and some internal bleeding, resulting in Weezer subsequently having to cancel the remainder of the tour. He eventually recovered from his injuries, but another tragedy was around the corner, and on 8 October 2011, former Weezer bassist Mikey Welsh was found dead in a hotel room as a result of an overdose. Around this time, Cuomo also lost his grandfather, a former girlfriend, and his Vipassana meditation teacher, and was separated from his family for five months due to the difficult birth of his son, Leo, during this period. All this made Cuomo re-evaluate his life, and so for the band's next record he came up with a concept album titled 'Ecce Homo' (Latin for "Behold the man"), deriving the title from the book of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche. The concept for 'Ecce Homo' centred around a character named Sebastian who, for deliberately ambiguous reasons, appeared to exist throughout various eras of history and, over the course of the narrative, comes to realize the necessity of faith in a higher power. The album cover would have been the 1474 Antonello da Messina painting, also called 'Ecce Homo', which was later used for the fan-club single 'Everybody Needs Salvation', and the plan was that the album would have included a fold-out star map, and a picture of the Tower of Babel. In the end the idea was scrapped, and four of the tracks eventually appeared on Weezer's actual tenth album 'Everything Will Be Alright In The End', which was released in 2014. A selection of demos considered for 'Ecce Homo' were included as part of the digital compilation 'Alone XI: The EWBAITE Years' in 2020, and this gives us a starting point in piecing the album together, which is based on a track listing from Weezer's own website.
Track listing
Act I:
01 Semper Fidelis
02 The Rules Of Life
03 Gravity Will Bring You Down
04 Sing My Blues Away
05 The British Are Coming
Act II:
06 Narcissus Blooming
07 Ain't Got Nobody
08 I Won't Flake On You
09 Ivory Telephone
10 Cleopatra
Act III:
11 The Waste Land
12 Bless The Whole Wide World
13 Everybody Needs Salvation
14 A Boat On The Sea
15 Anonymous
16 Resurgam Fidei ('Return To Ithaka')
