- The Goo Goo Dolls get ready to punch the clock
When Johnny Rzeznik began writing the new Goo Goo Dolls album, he wasn’t working from a blueprint. He just knew that he wanted Something for the Rest of Us to address some of the discontent and emotional anxieties that have gripped the planet since the economic downturn.
“I’m not the kind of writer that’s going to make any overt social or political statement like, Get out of Iraq,” says Rzeznik. “I wanted to focus my attention on the stories I hear about the way our society is going and how it affects people emotionally. There’s so much heartache out there. The majority of [the album] is about the emotional impact of living with two wars that look they’re never going to end and how it affects families and what it feels like to be a man and lose your pride.”
Albums don’t come much heavier than that these days. The trick is to surround all these dark and potentially draining ideas with music that helps reality go down a little easier. “You keep sitting with it, and you get frustrated with it,” says Rzeznik about his writing process. “It took a long time, but eventually the anxiety gives way to actually doing the work.”
One of the first songs Rzeznik wrote for Something for the Rest of Us (which comes out on August 31) was the powerful “Notbroken,” a melancholy yet hopeful ballad that helped set the tone for everything that followed. It’s inspired by the story of a woman whose husband was wounded in Iraq.
Like many injured vets, the soldier felt less than whole after the incident. “I wanted to write a love letter to this guy from her, because her whole opinion was, ‘I love him every bit as much as I ever did,’” says Rzeznik. “But he was injured so badly, he didn’t know what kind of life he was going to be able to give her. He was having a hard time coping.”
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 6, 2010.