Weezer: 10 Worst Songs You Need To Forget
5. Stand By Me
Weezer’s Teal album was a comical rollercoaster ride. Treating us to hearing an ageing band trying to capitalise on the success of their fluke Africa single with an album full of karaoke cover songs in January 2019. Covering the biggest hits from pop legends such as A-ha, Tears for Fears and The Turtles made sense with in the Weezer world. Then the album started to get weird.
An embarrassing cover of TLC’s No Scrubs is then followed by a passable cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. What united these songs were big choruses, heavy production and pop enough to meld with Weezer’s sound. This low energy cover of Ben E. King’s 1961 song Stand By Me isn’t any of that. Not really synthpop, not even really pop.
Unlike a lot of other songs on the album, Stand By Me has been covered well by numerous different artists who took it into their own, it is often mistaken as a John Lennon song. The harsh Weezercore guitars riffs cut through the sincerity of this song, never coming close to the quality of the original. Stand By Me is a thin imitation, a random choice to close Weezer's attention-grabbing covers album.