Music for Cougars

Music for Cougars
Studio album by Sugar Ray
Released	July 21, 2009
Recorded	September 2008–March 2009
Studio	Pulse Recording Studios (Silver Lake, California)
Genre	Pop rock
Length	42:04
Label	Pulse Recordings
Producer	Josh Abraham, Steve Fox, Stan Frazier, Tim Pagnotta, S*A*M and Sluggo, Luke Walker
Sugar Ray chronology
The Best of Sugar Ray (2005) Music for Cougars (2009) Little Yachty (2019)

Music for Cougars is Sugar Ray's sixth studio album, released in 2009. This was the last album to feature turntablist Craig "DJ Homicide" Bullock, bassist Murphy Karges and drummer Stan Frazier before their departures in August 2010 and early 2012, respectively.

Background and music

In the six year gap between Music for Cougars and Sugar Ray's previous album In the Pursuit of Leisure, some of the band members started families, while singer Mark McGrath began focusing on roles in the media industry. This included a role as host of entertainment news program Extra, which he began in 2004. During the break, the band continued to play a handful of shows a year, and when McGrath's role on Extra finished, it freed up time for the band to record another album. It was their first album to not be released on a major label, as they departed Atlantic Records in 2006, following the release of a greatest hits compilation in 2005. They would later return to a major label for 2019's Little Yachty, which was distributed via BMG.

Since they were no longer working with a major label on Music for Cougars, the band said they had less pressure on them than with previous albums. Sugar Ray felt as though they needed help getting back into a "groove" with the album, after being largely inactive for the past few years, so they enlisted the help of outside writers, including Paul Weber of their new label Pulse. Guitarist Rodney Sheppard said that they "collaborated a lot" with Weber, and that he was "responsible for kicking the cobwebs off our songwriting abilities". They labelled the album a "labor of love" in 2009, with Sheppard saying in 2009 that he considered Music for Cougars to be his "second or third favorite" of the band’s records.

Music for Cougars includes a cover of an unreleased Weezer song called "Love is the Answer". Sugar Ray had shared occasional bills with Weezer beginning in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 they a recorded a song called "Rivers", which was an ode to Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, and written in the style of a Weezer song. It appeared on the soundtrack album of the horror film Scream 2 (1997), in addition to appearing in the credits of that film. Regarding "Love Is the Answer", guitarist Sheppard said in 2009 "it was so surreal for us; we've been huge fans of Weezer since the first record. On the Scream 2 soundtrack, we had a song that we named 'Rivers'. So years down the line, to actually have a contribution from him is so amazing for us." A few months after Music for Cougars was released, Weezer decided to include their version of "Love Is the Answer" on their seventh studio album Raditude.

The track "She’s Got the (Woo-Hoo)" includes the lyric "She comes when she's ready/She's Sex and the City/She'll bring you to your knees", which lyrically parodies the television series Sex and the City.

Title

The title references the largely female fanbase Sugar Ray started attracting following the release of their 1997 album Floored. In 2009, McGrath told Rolling Stone that he became inspired to use this title after a friend of his brought up their crowd demographics at a show. He said, "we were playing at the Grove [mall] here in Hollywood, a funny gig on a Sunday, people walking by with strollers. And a friend of ours goes, 'All your fans are cougars'. That’s fucking brilliant." McGrath added that, "to me 'cougars' is an empowering word. It’s like role reversal. Cougars are proud, they take care of themselves and they know what they want." Regarding their audience, Rodney Sheppard said to The Daily Gazette in 2009 "for the most part, we’ve always had a real variety, from skinheads with mohawks, to moms with their daughters. Granted, the majority is women in their 30s and 40s seeing us." Sheppard also said that "we don’t want to exclude the guys who still come out, and some kids. We're curious to see how young of an audience we can attract now."

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(54/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Entertainment Weekly	B
L.A. Times
Rolling Stone
The Tune	(C+)

Release and reception

Commercial performance

The album was not as successful commercially as previous Sugar Ray albums. It reached number eighty on the Billboard 200 chart, with none of the album's three singles charting. Shortly before the album's release, McGrath told the New York Post that "there are no commercial concerns for Sugar Ray now. Sure we'd love to sell a million records, who wouldn't? But look, when a U2 record and a Guns N' Roses record both [recently] fail commercially, it’s far from us to think we can sell millions."

Critical response

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album three-and-half out of five stars. He noted its heavy usage of autotune, and wrote "they make no bones about making Music for Cougars, those cougars being the very girls that shook their hips to 'Fly' back in 1997 and are looking for a little bit of the same breezy vibe 12 years later, a little bit of sexy nostalgia to get them through their summer, a soundtrack to a few girls' nights out." Billboard claimed in 2009 that it "marks a return to the tried-and-true formula that made 1997's 'Fly' a radio staple."

Track listing

1. "Girls Were Made to Love" (featuring Collie Buddz) (includes a sample from Eddie Hodges' "(Girls, Girls, Girls) Made to Love", 1962) – 3:38
2. "Boardwalk" – 3:26
3. "She's Got the (Woo-Hoo)" – 3:35
4. "Love Is the Answer" (cover of a previously unreleased Weezer track, written by and featuring Rivers Cuomo; later reworked and re-recorded for Weezer's Raditude) – 3:57
5. "Rainbow" – 3:17
6. "Closer" – 3:33
7. "When We Were Young" – 3:21
8. "Going Nowhere" – 2:49
9. "Love 101" – 3:17
10. "Last Days" – 3:33
11. "Morning Sun" – 3:44
12. "Dance Like No One's Watchin'" (featuring Donavon Frankenreiter) – 3:53

External links

• Music for Cougars at Metacritic