Christmas with Weezer is a Christmas EP by American rock band Weezer. It was released through DGC/Interscope in December 2008. I’m willing to bet that Christmas with Weezer is the only Christmas EP by a major label artist to ever be originally released via iPhone game. The six tracks were originally recorded for the previously released iOS video game Christmas with Weezer. The Tap Tap versions of these songs lack the background vocals found in the released versions and are different mixes.
Tap Tap or Tap Tap Revenge was a series of rhythm games by Tapulous available for the iOS of which several versions, both purchasable and free, have been produced. The goal of the game is to tap each of the colored balls when they reach a line at the bottom of the screen. If the ball is hit on the beat, the player gains points, but if not, it counts as a miss. If a player taps the screen without a tapper on the beat, the streak will go back to 0 and a few points will be lost except for 16x. There were also “shakes”, which required the player to move the iPhone, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to the right, left, or backwards. The apps were pulled from the app store and had their servers shut down in February 2014.
All songs on Christmas with Weezer were recorded by Pat Wilson with the exception of bass guitar provided by Scott Shriner. Lead vocals were recorded by Rivers Cuomo separately. Some changes and enhancements were made to the songs when they were re-released online as a digital EP. The new versions were remixed and now contained vocal harmonies from guitarist Brian Bell, altered lead vocals from Cuomo (removing some of the extensive vocal doubling) and added tambourine on “Silent Night”.
Karl Koch has claimed that production duties on the project were informal and shared between Wilson and Cuomo: There was no producer per se. Pat and Rivers just did it with minimal assistance, in a side studio at the same facility (“The Document Room”) in Malibu that they were working on Raditude in with Jacknife Lee. Pat was basically told to make it happen, so as far as the basic mixing and producing duties, it was him, although certainly Rivers had a part to play too, at times. It was a very low key thing that they just grinded out when there was downtime up at the main studio.
The EP received a limited physical CD release in Japan in 2022. It was released alongside 25 other Christmas-themed albums and EPs by artists on the Universal Music label, as part of a set of CDs dubbed the “Christmas Album Masterpiece Collection”. This album will surely make you feel nostalgic for all those late-’90s holidays you spent listening to Pinkerton on cassette.
