Goo Goo Dolls on how they made Iris

John Rzeznik wrote Iris while living in a West Hollywood hotel during a divorce, after his manager told him Warner Brothers wanted songs for the film City of Angels. He watched the movie, thought “What would I say to her if I were him?” and returned to a guitar with four strings in a strange tuning — all Ds and a B.

Like most of what was going on in my life, it was mangled, he said, but in about four hours he had an intro, verse and chorus that Warners loved. The band practised the song until the bridge “shot out of my fingers,” and Rzeznik named it Iris after spotting the singer Iris DeMent in the LA Weekly gig guide.

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