Scott Murphy (left), Rivers Cuomo (right); Photo: Facebook 

Weezer‘s songwriter and frontman, Rivers Cuomo, is also in another band, Scott & Rivers. And for some reason, they’ve decided to write songs in Japanese.

The other half of the duo is Scott Murphy, who’s also in the pop-punk band Allister and the only non-Japanese band member in the Japanese rock band Monoeyes. After falling in love with the Japanese language, he moved to Japan in 2014, according to The Japan Times.

And when Cuomo heard of Murphy, he was all-in.

“[Cuomo] saw me on TV singing in Japanese,” Murphy said. “We were on the same record label, so I came into the office one day and there was a stack of Weezer CDs on the desk. They were like, ‘Rivers Cuomo from Weezer came by and he said he wants you to check out his band.’ As if I’ve never heard Weezer!”

So they started working together in 2009, and started playing shows in Japan in 2012. Cuomo’s interest in the Japan culture is clear — Weezer used an ukiyo-e print on the cover of their album Pinkerton. Also, his wife is Japanese.

Their second and most recent album dropped in April of this year, Nimaime (meaning “second album”), is completely in Japanese.

“Rivers really wanted to do it 100 percent Japanese,” Murphy said.

But to understand what they’re singing about, you can’t just translate Japanese straight to English.

“You can’t ‘translate’ lyrics from English to Japanese,” Murphy says. “I guess that’s the correct word for it, but you really can’t just copy what you said. Because of the way the syllables work, you have to filter down when making it Japanese because English will have twice as much.”

But let’s give it a try anyways.

The single from the album is called “Doo Wop.” The bridge goes “誰もが持ってる 僕らの羽がある,” which is pronounced “Dare mo ga motteru, boku ra no hane ga aru.” It translates to:

We have wings everyone possesses

But that’s not exactly what they’re saying in Japanese.

“For some reason, in Japanese, you can have really simple, basic lyrics that affect in a way that they wouldn’t if written in English,” says Murphy.

Watch the video for “Doo Wop” here, and listen to the audio below.