‘My guitar was mangled – like my life!’ Goo Goo Dolls on how they made epic ballad Iris
📖 Full Retelling
<p>‘I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and others who have covered it, for introducing it to a new generation. Three billion streams on Spotify is astonishing!’</p><p>I was going through a divorce and living in a hotel in West Hollywood when my manager said Warner Brothers were seeking songs for the movie City of Angels. They already had U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette, so I thought getting a track on there would draw attention to us. Warners showed me the film and it was li
Entity Intersection Graph
No entity connections available yet for this article.
Original Source
‘My guitar was mangled – like my life!’ Goo Goo Dolls on how they made epic ballad Iris ‘I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and others who have covered it, for introducing it to a new generation. Three billion streams on Spotify is astonishing!’ John Rzeznik, singer, songwriter, guitarist I was going through a divorce and living in a hotel in West Hollywood when my manager said Warner Brothers were seeking songs for the movie City of Angels. They already had U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette, so I thought getting a track on there would draw attention to us. Warners showed me the film and it was like Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire . They wanted a song for the scene where the angel – played by Nicolas Cage – decides to become human to be with the woman he loves. That’s the Meg Ryan role. I thought: “What would I say to her if I were him?” I went back to my hotel, where I had a guitar with four strings and a bizarre tuning: all Ds and a B. Like most of what was going on in my life, it was mangled. But I used it to write a song about the joy and pain of being human. It took about four hours. When I played Warners what I had – intro, verse, chorus – they loved it. The band practised it in Swing House rehearsal rooms. We just kept playing until the bridge section seemed to shoot out of my fingers. When I was looking through the gig guide in LA Weekly, 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 got composer David Campbell to do a strings arrangement. We had never done anything like that before. I remember staring through the glass at all these strings-players and saying to Rob: “Once we do this, there’s no going back.” Session guitarist Tim Pierce played the beautiful mandolin parts, but had also brought also all these guitars and amps along. When I played the slide guitar solo, it sounded like fighting cats, so Tim played it and took it to another level. When Iris came out ...
Read full article at source