Only In Dreams - on Weezer's Blue Album

by editor Michele Catalano

When my son was 11, he latched onto two things: the guitar and Weezer. Weezer (The Blue Album) was already ten years old at that point, but I had played it often enough that he picked it up and seemed to enjoy it. I was happy to share it with him; the album was important to me, and it was a nice break from the Van Halen he had been listening to constantly. 

One day, I heard him trying to play “Only in Dreams” on his guitar while I was folding clothes in the laundry room. I stopped what I was doing and listened. That I recognized what he was playing was proof that he was pretty good for a kid his age. But he would start and stop, and start and stop, as if he was trying to figure something out.

A few minutes later, he walked into the laundry room. He looked up at me with a furrowed brow and said, “That part where he says When we wake, it’s all been erased? That makes me sad. This is a really sad song.” And then he disappeared into his room again, to stop and start and stop and start while he contemplated the scenario within the song.

He was right. “Only in Dreams” is a devastating song, a closer appropriate for such a grand album. It makes the record stay with you. It sits in your heart and sits in your soul. It causes you to ache and yearn, and, no, it’s not just the words. The guitar does so much work in this song. I imagine the sheer emotion of that instrumental part really struck my son while he was replicating it; the same way it struck me upon hearing it for the first time in 1994.

I was 32 in ‘94. I had two kids under five. I was living in a claustrophobic apartment and wondering where the hell my life was going. Where it had gone. I had no time to delve into new music; instead, I was busy listening to Raffi and Tom Chapin songs. I depended on the radio to keep me current and lamented that I could no longer spend hours in a record store, talking up the clerk and examining every new album in the shop. I felt stagnant, musically. 

Then along came Weezer. The first song I heard was “Undone — The Sweater Song,” not “Buddy Holly,” which was the Weezer introduction for so many people. I was listening to K-ROCK in my minivan when I heard it. As soon as the song was over and the DJ said the name, I drove with my two kids to Uncle Phil’s Record Shop and asked for the CD. I was anxious to hear the other songs. I was not disappointed.

Blue had a chokehold on me from the opening notes of “My Name is Jonas” to the last musical sigh of “Only in Dreams.” I must have listened to it 20 times that first day. It wasn’t like anything else I had been listening to at that moment. Grunge was king; this kind of music—sort of a punk attitude with pop melodies— was just making itself known. I was into it. It hooked me.

Blue came along at just the right time for me. It filled a void in more ways than one. Musically, it was just what I needed. But it was more than that. It was also that I had finally found something new and exciting. Something that would help me veer off the path I had been stuck on. This music was playful and fun, as if the band was winking at me through almost every song.

The highlight for me was, and is, “Only In Dreams.” The way it soars and dips into peaks and valleys, the emotion that pours out of the instrumental interlude, the whole idea of living in your head because that is where your dreams come true, I found it to be more overwhelming with each listen, in a way that made my heart feel full and broken at the same time.

I felt a strange sense of fulfillment when my son came to me 10 years after the debut of Blue to tell me that “Only in Dreams” had affected him so, and when I heard him trying to nail the guitar parts, knowing that he was putting emotion into it. Later that day we listened to the whole album together as we cut pictures out of old magazines for a school project. We rated the songs and talked about lyrics and meaning. We agreed that “My Name is Jonas” is a great opener, and that “Surf Wax America” is an underrated banger. And when it got to “Only in Dreams,” we both sighed and stayed silent throughout, a reverie of sorts. 

Thirty years after the debut of this album, I still listen to it consistently. It feels timeless. I could plop it into any era of my life and it would feel relevant and fresh. I listen to it on streaming, on vinyl, on CD. I have the original album, the 30th anniversary remaster, and the 30th anniversary CD box set. It’s always within reach because it’s such an intrinsic part of my life. There are few albums I’ve played in their entirety more than Blue.

I will always be one of the biggest fans of The Blue Album. It remains perfect to me, a calling card to a different life, a different time. No matter what has changed between then and now, Blue has been a constant, a living, breathing love letter exchanged between decades. 

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