Iris: The Goo Goo Dolls Hit Born From Two Snapped Guitar Strings
John Rzeznik wrote the Goo Goo Dolls' biggest hit in an LA hotel, in the middle of a divorce and a writer's block, on a guitar with two snapped strings.
The Short says the Goo Goo Dolls' biggest hit started with a broken guitar. Close, but the real story is better. Nothing got smashed. John Rzeznik had been tuning his strings down so far that two of them snapped, and the four that were left pushed him into a weird new tuning.
City of Angels
Various artists · 1998
Stuck in a Hotel After a Hit
In 1995 "Name" turned the scrappy Buffalo band into a radio act, and suddenly everyone wanted another one. Rzeznik froze. He later admitted he simply stopped writing. On top of that his marriage was ending, so he was living out of a hotel in Los Angeles.
I stopped writing. I felt like I couldn't write.
John Rzeznik
Then Warner Bros. music supervisor Danny Bramson called with a job: write a song for City of Angels, a remake of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire with Nicolas Cage as an angel who gives up immortality for Meg Ryan. Rzeznik has said the real lure was the soundtrack. U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette were on it, and he just wanted his band on the same record.
Four Strings and a Borrowed Name
Back at the hotel he grabbed a VHS copy of Wings of Desire and picked up the wounded guitar. He dropped the low string to B and tuned the other three to D. When he restrung it later, the two new strings went to D as well, so the finished song sits in B D D D D D: one B and five Ds.
Los Angeles
A hotel room · where Iris was written
The song came fast. Writing usually meant an hour of doubt and self torture, but this time he wrote from the angel's point of view and asked himself what he would say to that woman. Having a script, he said, finally gave him something to write about.
The title came last. Over coffee he spotted folk singer Iris DeMent in an LA Weekly concert listing, thought it was a beautiful name and kept it, even though it appears nowhere in the song or the film.
Eighteen Weeks on Top
Producer Rob Cavallo pushed the old punks toward a string section, and session player Tim Pierce added mandolin and the guitar solo. Funny enough, the film's director found that big version too dramatic, so the movie uses Rzeznik alone with an acoustic guitar.
18weeks
at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay in 1998
Radio disagreed. "Iris" spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart in 1998, a record that stood until The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" passed it in 2020. There was no commercial single in US stores, so it could not even enter the Hot 100 until Billboard changed its rules on December 5, 1998. That week it debuted at No. 9.
It was never just a soundtrack song, either. It also landed on Dizzy Up the Girl, the band's most successful album, and earned three Grammy nominations. They lost all three, and Rzeznik later told GRAMMY.com he wore a custom T-shirt under his suit joking about it. Then Deadpool & Wolverine brought it back in 2024, and the RIAA certified it diamond.
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// Quick quiz
How many strings did John Rzeznik's guitar have when he first wrote Iris?
He had detuned so far that two strings snapped, so he wrote the song on the four that were left.
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