Go Away

Sometimes you just have to go away to come back.

Last week, while dissociating into the void during my daughter’s naptime, I saw an email pop up with the subject line: “Weezer has mentioned you in a TikTok.”

I haven’t really been present on TikTok since I was newly postpartum, when it was basically an emotional support group for me. Watching videos of other sleep-deprived moms losing their minds was beyond comforting. To be honest, the memes and reels and TikToks about parenthood (the funny ones, not the ones that are like DON’T LET YOUR BABY SEE A SCREEN EVER OR YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PARENT) are honestly my favorite part of the internet these days.

Anyway, I opened the email, which took me to a TikTok that Weezer had posted: a live in-studio session at KROQ from 2014 where we performed a song I co-wrote and sang on called “Go Away” off their ninth studio album, Everything Will Be Alright in the End. Because I’ve been mostly absent from the goings-on of TT (I can’t keep writing “TikTok,” it makes me want to throw my phone into the sea), I was confused when I saw the caption: “In honor of ‘Go Away’ re-entering the chat, here’s us playing it live with Bethany Cosentino.”

I screenshotted it and sent a text to my manager: Wait, what does this mean? Is this song going viral?

me performing the song with Weezer in 2014.

A few minutes later he called to confirm that yes, apparently the song was going viral, and I should probably make a post about it. The last thing I expected to be doing during my daughter’s nap time was plotting TikTok content, but that's showbiz, babe!

Later that day I made a very silly little video of myself lip-syncing the song in my daughter’s room, poking fun at the idea that a song from twelve years ago was suddenly going viral and I am now somehow someone’s mom. Famously, I do not take myself very seriously, and I am always down to clown, so I grabbed a Bluey ukulele, a Ms. Rachel doll, and a pair of my daughter’s sunglasses and got to work. That video now has 3.9 million views. Lol.

@bethanycosentinoFound out during naptime #weezer #goaway

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So here is the origin story of the song.

In 2010 I went out to Santa Monica to meet Rivers Cuomo, who had asked if I wanted to write together. I had basically just started Best Coast and was a recent college dropout, so I was perplexed at why he wanted to write a song with me - but obviously I said yes. I got in my red Ford Focus, which had no AC, and drove across town to meet him. From what I remember, we talked through the idea of a conversational breakup song - two people arguing with each other through the lyrics. It came together pretty quickly; we recorded a demo, and he mentioned they might use it for a future record. Then life moved on.

It didn’t end up on the next Weezer album. Which, if you’re a songwriter, is a pretty normal outcome. Songs get written constantly. Some of them see the light of day; most of them don’t. Four years later, in 2014, I found out they were going to record it after all. They asked if I’d sing on it, which was, duh, an easy yes. We did a bunch of promo around it, including that KROQ in-studio performance that has resurfaced, and I got to perform it live with them at a few festivals and shows.

@weezerIn honor of "Go Away" re-entering the chat, here's us playing it live w/ @bethany cosentino.

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And then, like most songs, it just lived its life. People heard it. Some people probably loved it. Some people probably skipped it. They played it live without me a few times. Years passed and I made more records. Weezer made more records. The world turned and left us here (sorry, I had to).

Eventually I kind of drifted from that version of my life. Not dramatically, just gradually. The touring slowed down and the industry changed. I started figuring out what it meant to make music as an adult instead of as a chaotic twenty-something who loved getting blackout wasted. I took a break from Best Coast and made a solo album. And then I became a mom, which is maybe my biggest “go away” of all. Not in a sad way, but in the way that my entire life has reorganized itself around my daughter. The person I was before her hasn’t disappeared exactly, but she’s definitely taken a back seat these past 15 months.

Motherhood has shifted my relationship to music in ways I’m still trying to figure out. For a while I thought of that change as a pause, but seeing this song find a new life more than a decade later has made me rethink it. Songs, much like life, have their own timelines. They don’t give a shit about the schedule you had in mind when you wrote them. Sometimes you write something with one of your musical heroes in your twenties, release it into the world, and go live an entire other life. And then one day it shows back up while you’re lying horizontally on your bed obsessively checking the baby monitor to make sure the baby isn’t waking up.

The strange little lesson in all of this is that sometimes you really do have to go away for things to come back. You grow up and go live your life. You make different music, then you become someone’s mom. You stop trying to control the outcome, and somewhere in the background, the thing you made just keeps existing. Creative work doesn’t move in a straight line, but I’ve spent the last handful of years thinking it has to. “Who am I if I am not making music?” I’ve asked myself 400 billion times. This whole random viral experience has finally given me an answer to that question: bitch, you are always making music!!! Because even when I’m not on stage or in the studio, the things I have created are quietly living their little lives out there in the world, and they are forever a part of me. It doesn’t matter what my relationship to music is at the time; it’s all just seeds I’ve planted along the way. Things bloom when they bloom. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go away long enough to let them.