Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Nov 18, 2017, 07:00AM

Iambic Pentameter, Whatever

A 2008 Tiny Mix Tapes interview with musician Honey Owens vs. a 2017 Vulture interview with musician Rivers Cuomo.

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Rivers Cuomo: I’ve been deeply lonely.

Honey Owens: I was detoxing at that point.

Cuomo: Another lifehack. It seems kind of sane.

Owens: I get wound up and zap things; stereos, cars.

Cuomo: [Long pause.] It’s so hard to search through, so I started tagging it for syllable-count and rhyme and where the stresses fall — iambic pentameter, whatever.

***

Owens: Then, for some reason I just had this huge heart inside of me open up and swallow the world, and the world swallowed me.

Cuomo: Some girl at the University of Michigan made it.

Owens: Oh, it’s totally new age.

Cuomo: Just incredible.

Owens: It's cool when you give someone a present and they love it, you know?

***

Cuomo: There I am.

Owens: But totally organic.

Cuomo: None of that touches this other need I have for deep, intellectual conversations and searching, trying to make sense of the world and learn.

Owens: In fact, I made a CDR release and burnt a bunch of copies to take on tour, but while on the way to the first show, I listened to it in headphones and hated it so much that I took the whole run and dumped them in a dumpster in Idaho because I was sick of them and found them boring, homogenized.

Cuomo: They could be about relationships, or they could be like you’re singing about your cat or your dad or something.

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