Being someone’s muse seems absolutely exhausting, in my opinion. You have to spend hundreds of hours developing a quirky and distinct personal brand, and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and listening to sad, obscure bands, only to eventually have all of your own accomplishments eventually be subsumed by those of whatever corny dude decided he was inspired by you. It’s too much! At least that’s what I thought, until I read the New York Times’ bizarre interview with Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo, in which he seems to lie about how much time he spends online, and also offers up a far more attainable type of muse-dom.
“You signed up for Tinder for purely platonic reasons,” the Times’ Jaime Lowe notes. “How did that go?” Here’s how it went:
I met somebody in Indianapolis — we walked around the whole city. But I started talking to this one woman on the phone, and I said: “Look, I’ve gotta be upfront with you. I’m actually just a songwriter looking for inspiration,” and I think she was really disappointed. It made me feel like this is not the best experiment to continue.
If you’re looking for a genuine relationship, or even just someone to fool around with, I understand how realizing that the voice on the other end of the phone is not a romantic prospect, but a pop-punk musician looking for someone to write his next song about, could be disappointing. But if you’re looking to be a muse, this scenario is really perfect. All you have to do is sit on your bed, in your sweatpants, watching the closed captioning on Netflix while Rivers asks a couple of questions about your childhood, and then the next thing you know, bam, there’s a song about you, and you can brag about it to your friends and exes and strangers at cocktail parties.
So, Rivers … call me.