Rivers Cuomo has occasionally gone to extreme lengths for songwriting's sake. In a 2005 interview with LA Weekly, he elaborates on the drastic method he used to write his song "Hold Me" (off the Weezer album "Make Believe"): fasting.
After a short period of starvation, Cuomo began to notice changes in his mental state. "I felt really sad, and I really pitied myself, and I felt a lot of loss, and of course I was really hungry. I think because of low blood sugar, whatever extraneous mental activity I usually have kind of quieted down, so I entered into this very concentrated state of extreme longing, and started playing that song," he says. The fasting had done what he had hoped, and not only did he like the song he'd written, the music actually made him feel considerably better.
Despite being proud of his results, Cuomo is hesitant to encourage artists to follow his example. "It can't be sustained. If you're relying on extreme emotions, you just become a wreck, and it's tough for other people to live with you. And it's just not a good life. Who wants to be constantly cultivating anger and sadness? Not me."
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