Guitar Player October 1998
By Kyle Swenson

SONGCRAFT: GOO GOO DOLLS

After more than ten years together and five albums, the Goo Goo Dolls finally hit #1 on the Bill board 200 chart with "Iris," from the City of Angels soundtrack. Guitarist/frontman Johnny Rzeznik concocted those five minutes of power-pop fireworks in merely an hour, but his songwriting muse is usually more fickle. The songs on the Dolls' forthcoming Warner Bros. album--tentatively titled Dizzy Up the Girl took between hours and years to come to fruition. "The one thing somebody told me which helped me a lot was, `The A material definitely lies beneath the B material,'" says Rzeznik. "You have to let yourself go and accumulate a lot of crap, and then sift through it to get to the good stuff. You can't rush it. A lot of times I'll pick up the guitar and play, and if a song's not coming, I do something else--clean the house, listen to some music--and come back to writing later. "There is a time for your internal judge to come in and make the call, but you have to free yourself from that in the beginning stages of the creative process. I've often stifled myself because I was trying to bash the music into shape instead of letting it lead. When I shut off the judge in my head, music usually comes quite easily. "That kind of self-censorship may be a holdover from music lessons. Teachers can put so many rules and restrictions on kids when they're learning how to play that it ultimately squelches their creativity. I don't mean to say that lessons are inherently bad. You should take a few lessons to learn how to get around. But as soon as you understand the building blocks of music, it's up to you to decide how you're going to put them together. "For me, music is not so much about technical skills as it is about staying in touch with my emotions and feelings. I was never into technique for its own sake. Every time I heard someone play a technique-driven solo, I just wanted to throw them a fish."