“My guitar was distorted, like my life!” Goo Goo Dolls Talk About How They Made Their Epic Song Iris | culture

John Rzeznik, singer, songwriter, guitarist

I was going through a divorce and living in a hotel in West Hollywood when my manager said that Warner Brothers was looking for songs for the movie City of Angels. They already had U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette, so I thought having a track there would draw attention to us. Warner showed me the movie and it was like Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. They wanted a song for the scene in which Angel – played by Nicolas Cage – decides to become human to be with the woman he loves. This is Meg Ryan’s role. I thought: “What would I say to her if I were him?”

I returned to my hotel, where I had a guitar with four strings and a strange tuning: all D and B. Like most of what was happening in my life, it was distorted. But I used it to write a song about human joy and pain. It took about four hours. When I played Warners with what I had — the intro, the verse, the chorus — they loved it.

The band practiced it in the Swing House rehearsal rooms. We continued playing until the bridge section seemed to slip out of my fingers. When I was browsing through LA Weekly’s party guide, I saw Iris DeMent and thought, “That’s a beautiful name. I’ll call the song Iris.”

We recorded it in Los Angeles with producer Rob Cavallo, who asked composer David Campbell to arrange the strings. We’ve never done anything like this before. I remember staring through the glass at all these string players and saying to Rob: “Once we do this, there’s no going back.” Guitarist Tim Pearce played beautiful mandolin parts, but he also brought all these guitars and amps. When I was playing the slide guitar solo, it sounded like a cat fight, so Tim played it and took it to another level.

When “Iris” came out as a single, the folks at Warners didn’t want to work on it, but their label Reprise, down the hall, said they would. I’m grateful to Taylor Swift and others who covered it for introducing it to a new generation. Three billion streams on Spotify is amazing and overwhelming, but if it weren’t for those guys at Reprise, no one would have heard it.

I never got to meet Nic Cage, but I went to the film’s premiere and sat behind him. I can pick the back of his head out of the lineup! When we were nominated for three Grammy Awards, along with artists like Celine Dion and Aerosmith, I knew we would never win. So I had a t-shirt that said, “I was nominated for three Grammy Awards and all I got was this crappy t-shirt.” After you fail, there’s always a line from the press asking: “How are you feeling, John?” So I pointed to the shirt.

Robbie Takac, bass, vocals

When we started, we were all living in one bedroom and dreaming of taking over the world, but you never think anything will actually happen. We were imitating the punk rock bands we loved and thought we were killing: touring the country playing rock shows while our friends sat at home. We’ve played a lot of shows for a few people, but over the course of 10 years we’ve figured out how to be entertaining.

I was living in an apartment in Buffalo with my girlfriend when John called me to tell me about the movie. Then he called back and played Iris over the phone to me. I thought the song was great, but then I loved everything he wrote. However, I never thought: “Wow, this is going to be a transformative song that we’ll be talking about in 30 years.”

At some point, John made a demo of it – on guitar, perhaps with a drum machine. Later, the studio version switched up the time signatures and took the weird middle section in a different direction, but the bass part remained simple and it still sounded like the kind of song we’d always done – until we found ourselves sitting in front of an orchestra. At that point, I thought: “This is a long way from the bedroom we used to share.”

The craziest thing is that after we went in and recorded the version that everyone loved, in the movie they used another version – an acoustic solo – of John playing it. After spending all that money! So we said, “Can you at least include it on the soundtrack album?” And they did. Iris has kind of overshadowed all of our other songs, but she’s an amazing wind behind us.