02-06-2025
How ‘I Love the USA' Became the First Weezer Song in Space
Long before Katy Perry went to space, Weezer went to Jupiter. Back in 2016, lead singer Rivers Cuomo said, 'NASA contacted us through Apple and asked for a song for the Juno mission and we gave 'em I Love the USA and they dug it and there you go.'
The Juno spacecraft traveled through the solar system for five years before reaching Jupiter's orbit on American Independence Day—July 4th, 2016.
Cuomo says that when he wrote the song, he had been spending a lot of time away from home, touring and missing his home country. 'But there are all kinds of mixed feelings, I'm sure everyone has mixed feelings about where they are from, so, I tried to get all of it out into a song. I guess, I think of America, at least compared to the place I was at, at the time, as a place where there is respect for the individual and it seems like everyone's opinion counts and you're free to speak your mind. Of course, it's not perfect but, compared to some other places on earth…'
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I Love the USA appeared on The White Album (2015), and it was written during a time when Cuomo spent a lot of time on the beach hanging out with strangers—meeting up with people he met on Tinder and X (formerly Twitter). At the time of this interview, he said it was hard to think back on that period because he was so focused on their next album, The Black Album, which had put him in a completely different mindset.
Today, there's word of a Weezer movie in the works, with whispers of Keanu Reeves being cast as the villain.
