"Only In Dreams" (Weezer)

I had a really hard time warming to most alternative rock in the 90s.  I often preferred listening to my parents' classic Beatles, Zep, Blondie, and Who records because most of the 90s bands seemed to be aping them anyway.
But there was something about Weezer that grabbed me.  I think it was Rivers Cuomo’s doing-the-Times-crossword-puzzle-in-ink-smart lyrical geekery and heart-on-his-sleeve sincerity.  Not to mention his uncanny ability to create catchy melodies, which often felt like kids’ campfire songs as reinterpreted by Pixies, or maybe The Cars.  (After all, Ric Ocasek produced the “Blue Album.”)
We won’t talk about the schlockfest that Weezer has become since the “Green Album,” though.  
A former coworker of mine had a hypothesis that Weezer has been one, big Cuomosian exercise in irony since the turn of the millennium, and I’m inclined to agree.  But I’ll take it one step further: every album/single since 2001 has been Cuomo’s poppy revenge on the world for dissing Pinkerton (1996), his dark, complex reimagining of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.  (It’s psychological revenge executed on a level that usually only surfaces in Stephen King novels.)
But let’s go back to 1994 to the track that won me over to the pre-2001 Weezer: “Only In Dreams.”
Compositionally, the song is very dreamlike.  It floats along on this pillow of air, only to explode in perfectly placed blasts of distortion every time Cuomo acknowledges that his relationship with the object of his affection exists in his head alone.  It’s like an indy rock version of “Just My Imagination” by The Temptations with just a melodic pinch of Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story, thrown in for good measure.
I realize, that makes "Only In Dreams" sound like a big, smelly block of cheese.  But there’s actually so much that saves it from slipping into Meat Loaf “I’d Do Anything for Love” territory.  
Matt Sharp’s simple but effective bassline, for one, gives the song its melancholy beating heart for a solid 8 minutes.  Then, there’s that full-throttle, goosebumps-inducing, three-minute crescendo at the end of the song, which has some pretty complex harmonic things going on in Cuomo's twin-guitar eruption.
It's one of those rare instances where 8 minutes for a song just doesn't feel like enough.  And call me a sap, but the romantic in me always hopes that, when I hit replay, he'll actually get the girl the next time around.