Goo Goo Dolls frontman Johnny Rzeznik dialled in with Kyle Meredith and talked about their most famous song ‘Iris.’ When Kyle pointed out that the song starts out as if it’s a B-side track, despite its popularity, Johnny explained how the song came to being and ended up in the ‘City of Angels’ soundtrack:
“It kinda starts like a B-side, yeah. It started more as an album track because -like a deep cut- because when the music supervisor for that film asked me if I’d be interested in doing a song, I was like ‘Okay, who else is on the album?’ And he was like ‘Well, it’s gonna be U2 and Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette.’ And I was like ‘Well I have to get on this record because I wanted to be on a soundtrack with all these people.'”
Rzeznik also mentioned that the popularity of ‘Iris’ was unexpected:
“We had had one hit, which was a relatively big hit, but you know, I just wanted to be in that kind of company, you know what I mean? And I never expected that song to just blow up like that.”
1998 ‘City of Angels’ soundtrack features tracks like Eric Clapton’s ‘Further Up On The Road,’ ‘Angel’ by Sarah McLachlan, and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House.’ Johnny once mentioned that while working on ‘Iris,’ he wrote the lyrics from a third person view, rather than his own POV.
Goo Goo Dolls released their latest album ‘Chaos In Bloom‘ last August. They recently released a single ‘Run All Night,’ which you can listen to here. Also, you can listen to ‘Iris’ below.