Rivers Cuomo, the singer and guitarist of Weezer, was born in New York City and raised in various spiritual communities around the Northeast. Throughout this time, he had very limited contact with his father, a painful experience he writes about in the band’s first album. Recently, after his father’s passing, Cuomo began sorting through correspondence between his parents and letters his father had written him. As he looked at everything, he “started to reconstruct a different perspective on that relationship,” Cuomo tells Amanda Petrusich. Read their full conversation:

Rivers form those huge winding bends because erosion wears away the outside of curves while sediment builds up on the inside. Over time, the bends can become even more pronounced