Interview with John Rzeznik in Ultimate Guitar

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com Interview by Steven Rosen Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2010 10-15-2010 Four years have passed since the Goo Goo Dolls released Let Love In, their eighth studio record that sported “Give A Little Bit,” the Supertramp cover along with three singles that all reached Top 10. No mean feat for a band that falls somewhere between the melodic and the edgy, a group that are as well known for their ballads – “Iris,” “Slide” and “Home” come to mind – as they are for their grittier tracks. When they returned this year with Something For The Rest Of Us, the Dolls wanted to reach a little deeper and not just cough up the same sort of melancholic melodies and half-time grooves that they’d previously built a career upon. “Home,” the first single from the new record does contain acoustic guitar and piano but it’s built upon a much more muscular riff than their earlier singles. And “Hey Ya,” the sole track produced by the insanely creative Butch Vig pivots on a big gang chorus and a relentless sort of feel. Something For the Rest of Us debuted at number seven on the Billboard charts. “I was so happy,” describes Goo Goo Dolls team leader Johnny Rzeznik. It means that an often fickle and capricious audience has not forgotten about the Buffalo, New York-based trio in their four-year long absence. But it’s more than that: it’s about iTunes and iPhones and the Internet and “digging a little deeper.” Here, Rzeznik talks about what the new album and what it takes to remain a vital part of the ever-changing musical community. UG: “Iris” represents a critical song in both the band’s success and your evolution as a songwriter. That was the song that helped you break through your writer’s block and actually kept you from quitting the Goo Goo Dolls. Can you shed a little more light on the song and how it happened? Johnny Rzeznik: It probably took me about an hour or two. People are like, “You wrote that song in five minutes.” To write a song on that level in even a couple of hours is still a remarkable achievement. Generally it takes me five years to write a song. I was really sort of doubting what I was supposed to do at that point. We had a hit with a song called “Name” and it was sort of like winning the lottery and everyone around you goes, “Wow, that was amazing. Do it again.” It’s kinda what it felt like; you start to doubt yourself. But it’s interesting because the thing that I’ve learned about writer’s block is that you just keep writing through it and you just get comfortable with the fact that you’re gonna write a lot of stuff that you don’t like and a lot of things that just aren’t that good. But if you see it through to the other side you come up with a lot of material. It’s a process of getting comfortable with frustration. One of the lines in “Iris,” “You bleed just to know you’re alive” has that sort of opposites attracting quality to it. On Something For the Rest of Us there are several of those types of lyrics including one in “Hey Ya” that reads: “I would drown to save you/From the sinking thoughts you feel.” Where do those types of lines come from? The thing that really helped me get out of the block was that I had my subject matter in front of me. I’d seen the film [City of Angels] and they showed me the scene in the film that they wanted the song in and so I had my characters and my subject matter right in front of me. So to me it was almost like being thrown a softball because I had something to work with; I had the story right in front of me. Well this guy is about to give up his mortality just to be with the person that he loves and he was immortal so he couldn’t die. So he’s willing to give that up which made him vulnerable which means “bleeding just to know you’re alive.” It’s like, to feel. After you had a big hit with “Iris” and did win the lottery a second time, do you think your songwriting was elevated to a new level? Yeah, it definitely gave me my confidence back and I decided, “You better run with this while it’s here.” Was that confidence in your songwriting a reason why you reentered the studio to recut some tracks on the Something For the Rest of Us album? Did you sense that something was lacking in the original music that you recorded? It just didn’t feel right; for some reason it just didn’t feel right and I knew we could do better. And luckily we had some time to do that and we said to the record company how we’re gonna go back and redo it and they were like, “OK.” We rebuilt a lot of the guitar tones and rewrote a few lines in the songs and replayed some drums on a few tracks where it didn’t feel right. And then we had the album remixed and went in the studio with a couple of other producers and got their opinions about things and worked with them. We actually rerecorded a song on the album called “Hey Ya” from top to bottom. "It probably took me about an hour or two to write “Iris”." You redid “Hey Ya” with Butch Vig. What was that like working with him? I wanted to work with him in general but he was always sort of out of our reach. He does a lot of work at Warner Bros. now and we asked him and he said, “Yes” and we said, “Great.” So he took that song and just sort of rebuilt it from the ground up. What makes Butch Vig so special as a producer? He’s got really amazing creative ideas and he’s very, very, very particular about sounds and the feel and the tone of things. You know what I mean? He’s very ego less and very supportive of the artist and respecting their space. He makes great records. He’s one of the last of what I call the truly great producers left; there aren’t that many anymore. When you listen to Butch Vig’s production of “Hey Ya” and then you listen to the other tracks that were primarily produced by Tim Palmer, can you hear a difference? Yeah, a little bit. I think Butch was listening to the rest of the record and kind of saying, “We have some parameters we have to work within.” Yeah, I definitely hear a difference; they have different styles of producing. Very different styles. Tim’s a very good producer. One of the beautiful things about Pro Tools for some people is you can go back and do take after take after take after take and it’s really great. The bad part about Pro Tools, I think, is that it can tend to make people lazy where it’s like, “OK, yeah, yeah, we got it, we’ll fix it.” I think a lot of people go that route. And it’s like, “No, I want the second chorus to sound different than the first one; we’re not gonna fly it in there.” It’s amazing; it almost makes me wanna go back to using tape just for the limitations because there is such a thing in the digital world as the tyranny of choice. And there is the temptation: it’s faster and easier to just cut and paste and fix things. Have the engineer fix it instead of just, “Naw, I’m a little flat that, let’s go back and sing it again.” That’s the way I choose to do it. Did you record some of the first albums analog? Yeah, we did the first three or four records analog. It was interesting because when we did A Boy Named Goo, we used tape but that was the first time we’d ever seen Pro Tools in like ’94 and it was like four-track. And Lou Giordano who was the producer used it to edit drum takes and we were just sittin’ there and going, “Whoa, that’s insane.” If you look at some of the other big singles the Goo Goo Dolls have had with songs like “Iris” and “Name,” “Home,” the first single off of Something For the Rest of Us is a little different. We felt it was a really strong song and had a big hook. It was something a little different than anything we’d put out as a single before. It’s a more uptempo song and it’s got big rock guitars in it and we just wanted to come back with something that wouldn’t get us pigeonholed immediately again into, “Oh, they write really beautiful ballads.” You know what I’m saying? We wanted to have like a rock song. We’ve been away for a couple of years from radio so let’s come back with something a little bit different that’s still identifiably us. John Fields, a third producer, on the album, worked on this song. Was he brought in specially for “Home”? Yeah; we asked John to do it on the advice of our live soundman [Paul Hager] who also mixed the album. The guy’s amazing; that guy works fast and he’s got really great sonic ideas and he builds songs like tanks: they just keep runnin’ through anything. When I listen to that song, I’m just like, “Man, this is really solid.” When I listen to that song, I’m like, “Listen to how solid that is; that is solid production.” “Home” opens with acoustic guitar and piano – were those your ideas? Are you typically out in the studio with the producers tossing out suggestions about guitar parts and what instruments should sound like? Yeah, I get completely freaked out about tones, you know. Between me and the other guitar player, Brad Fernquist, he got an additional production credit on the album because me and him sat there and between us we have like 60 vintage guitar amps and a million guitars and a million pedals. We went on a tonequest [laughs.] We were like, “Man, you know, let’s do something crazy” and we wound up starting an amplifier on fire but right before it caught fire we got this great like fuzz solo out of it. And then we had to get the fire extinguisher. We had a kid sittin’ there and then we got the amp fixed and when we went back to use it again, we had a kid sitting there in the studio with a fire extinguisher. In case it started on fire again. Microphones, too, and mic-pre’s and compressors. I’m insane about that. Well, we had our own studio for a lot of the album and we recorded a lot of it in the studio we had in Buffalo. So I brought all this insane, crazy, weird, old gear and old amps and that kind of thing. That was really crucial to me to make things sound like really … I wanted to build somethin’ that sounded permanent. You know what I’m saying? In a lot of instances we went back in time to get the tones. Were there any particular pieces of gear you really dug? One of the amps that we used a lot was this Park amp; it was a 2x12 combo but, man, it is the greatest rock amp ever. What songs did you use the Park on? Dude, I can’t remember; it was almost everything. And we used an old Fender Bassman on a lot of stuff. And an old 50-watt JCM800 and a couple of crazy boutique amps; I found these really bizarre boutique amps. This guy has this company called River City and he made an amp called the Lunchbox and that thing was like the dark horse. I almost gave it away to a friend of mine and then I just plugged it in one day to a 4x12 and went, “Oh, my god.” Any weird stuff guitar-wise? We did a lot of eclectic things. The guy that runs Greenwich Village Guitars, he builds Rangemaster pedals but he builds ‘em out of all these old, old parts. And he builds very limited quantities of ‘em; a couple a dozen a year maybe and everyone is different. It looks different and has got different knobs on it but they basically do the same thing. That’s a pretty amazing tool to have; it gets that classic kind of tone. You talk about classic tones and the pursuit of them. Were there records from back in the day that you looked at for inspiration? All the Zeppelin stuff and a lot of the later Who stuff I was really into for guitar tones. Some of the later Kinks stuff had some really amazing tones. Gosh, who else? You know who gets amazing guitar tones now? That band The Hold Steady; it’s awesome. You know what? The first Darkness album, Permission to Land, had some of the best guitar tones I’ve ever heard in my life. Are there other modern bands like The Hold Steady that you listen to? Maroon 5? Kings of Leon? Umm, well maybe not those bands in particular [laughs] but, uh, a lot of the bands that I like are actually are more keyboard-based. There’s a really interesting band, Death Cab for Cutie; really, really interesting like the things that they do musically. And the arrangements of their songs; it blows my mind. I really love Muse; it’s such an insane sci-fi journey. It’s kind of like progressive rock. What about Radiohead? Radiohead? Yeah, you know what I mean, I kind of tuned out to Radiohead a while back like right when Kid A came out. That’s when I was kind of like, “Eh, I’m losing the plot; I’m not quite understanding what’s going on here.” Yeah, it got very psychedelic and experimental and they definitely pushed out the boundaries of what you can do. To me, and I love that band, but to me there was a certain point where I started to not be able to understand what they were trying to do. I mean I’m a sucker for hooks and melody; I love hooks and I love melodies. If we go right back to the beginning, did it start with the Beatles for you? Did they mean as much to you as they meant to everyone else? I think Kiss meant a helluva lot more to me than the Beatles. Is that right? Yeah, well, I was a stupid little kid and I’m like, “Yeah.” When I get older, when I got to college, I really started to appreciate the Beatles and that kind of thing. Because I was heavily into the punk thing and that wasn’t so much about production as it was trying to say something shocking or socially relevant or whatever. "We rebuilt a lot of the guitar tones and rewrote a few lines in the songs and replayed some drums on a few tracks where it didn’t feel right." Paul Westerberg loomed large in your creative development, right? Yeah, yeah, I would say, yeah. I got asked the question “If you were gonna save one album in your house fire,” I was like, “It would be the Replacements’ Tim.” That album was seminal; that’s where I really felt like I’d found the artist that I could relate to. I found the artist and I’m like, “Oh, my god, this guy is speaking my life.” And when you’re a new band and you’re young and you start writing songs and you sound exactly like the Replacements. We wanted to be the Replacements. It was like, you know, fuck it. But time goes by and you start to outgrow your influences. Or you add to them. That’s something on a weird note if I’m gonna gab about it, that’s one of the things that I see now going on in the music business is that the really young bands don’t get a lot of opportunity to grow and there’s not a lot of nurturing from the record company. That’s exactly right. And so they don’t get a chance to grow beyond their influences. Most of these kids get thrown in the studio with one of five or six different producers and they always try to bring in other writers. And it’s just like, “Wait, wait, you’re not letting them develop into who they’re gonna be.” A lot of times I listen to the radio and it’s like everything has the same sort of production quality to it. Everyone is doing exactly the same stuff. I don’t get it. You’ve touched on going beyond your influences – did you do that on a song like “Not Broken”? Lots of people singing background vocals; it was mostly me singing background vocals. Just doing lots of “oh oh oh” and stacking ‘em up in big harmony stacks. That arrangement kinda came about before we recorded it. ‘Cause I was really experimenting. I was like I’ve never done like big harmonies and background vocals that are sort of choral, I guess you would call it. Choiry kind of background vocals and things like that. That song was obviously written on an acoustic guitar and then I started messing around with little keyboard parts and then stackin’ up vocals behind my vocal. That was fun; that was a really intricate puzzle to put together. At the end of the day, are you listening to Tim Palmer about the permanence of a particular vocal? Or do you have the final word on what ends up on the record? Definitely. I tell him, “Dude, all the direction you can give me, give me. Tell me what I’m doing wrong; tell me if I’m flat or sharp” ‘cause sometimes you don’t know. But yeah, I have the final say. I’m like, “No, I don’t like that vocal take, let’s do it again.” But I did find one thing that I tried in the studio this time and it worked really well for me. Instead of standing in front of a [Shure] 67 or an 87 or a [Telefunken] 251 or whatever you got, a foot from the microphone and you got the pop filter and you gotta sing right there and you can’t move around too much, I found that really constricting as far as trying to get the emotion across of what you’re doing. I grabbed a handheld microphone and I basically just sang into that. I held the microphone in my hand and I sang it like I would sing a song live. That’s very different. I used a [Sennheiser] 441, that long, skinny rectangular thing that Stevie Nicks used to sing into. We just wrapped a pop filter around it and taped it up to it and yeah, just plugged it in. You can give a performance; if you want to bend over just to get a note you can do it. It’s almost like you’re live on stage when you sing that way. I think a lot more emotion comes across in that. And it sounded good. So it’s like would it have been a more hi-fidelity situation had I used my favorite 251? Yeah; definitely. But the important thing is getting the feeling across. Are you typically playing the main acoustic guitar rhythm parts on a song like “Not Broken”? Yeah. It was really funny because Brad and I got together in the studio and there’s a lot of parts on the record where we’ll be sitting there listening to the record – we were listening to the record later – and we’re like, “Who played that? Did you play that? I don’t know. I don’t remember.” We would just sit there and pass the guitar back and forth. He’s a technically superior musician to me; guy plays guitar eight hours a day. But there were times where because he’s so fluid on the instrument that I’m like, “Damn, let me do it ‘cause I’ll gunk it up a little bit and it won’t sound so perfect.” He’s got such good timing; he gets the best tones and he plays all these beautiful chords and stuff. He did a lot of work on the ambient guitars, the really freaky tones. If you listen to the album with the headphones on there’s a lot of stuff goin’ on. He’s really, really good at that and he’s a genius at like me saying, “Well, how did Jimmy Page get that tone on the first album?” And he’s like, “Well, that was a Supro and a Telecaster and a Rangemaster.” And I’m like, “Well, let’s go get a Telly, a Supro and a Rangemaster.” So you go on eBay and you find one and a couple days later it shows up. And then you mic it up and you’re like, “Holy shit! That sounds exactly like Zeppelin.” When you realized you could bring auxiliary players out on the road with you and still maintain the integrity of the band, did it expand your songwriting? When you sensed that could write songs that went beyond the three-piece format, did that open up your songwriting? Yeah, I would play the extra guitar parts or we would call a guy in. This is the first album we’ve ever done without Tim Pierce [one of the most in-demand session guitarists playing today] playing with us. Tim would come in and play the really crazy freaky shit or I would overdub stuff. Tim played that amazing mandolin part on “Iris” and has been a big part of the Goo Goo Dolls’ recorded sound. It’s amazing how above the rest of the pack he is. He’s always creative; everytime I’ve worked with the guy, I’m just like, “That’s insane. How in the hell did you do that?” And he was a big inspiration to me when I started buying guitar amps and pedals and things ‘cause he was always really nice about, “Yeah, I got this crazy [thing.] He got me hooked on all the different crazy things you can do with a guitar and an amp. Exactly. But now, yeah, I feel that we don’t really have any boundaries now. And definitely I don’t worry about, “Well, how are we gonna do this live?” Because it’s like Brad [Fernquist] and Korel [Tunador; touring keyboardist] are here. And the interesting thing about Korel is he came into the album recording process later. He’s our keyboard player and he came in and re-sang a lot of the background vocals so it wasn’t just my voice on there. Like he added some keyboard stuff that’s just really, really interesting stuff, man. He’s an immense talent: he plays the keyboards, he plays guitar, he plays saxophone, and it’s just like, man, he’s a triple threat. And he sings so well and we’ve learned to work our voices together really, really well. He blew a lot of walls out for us, too. The title track of the album has this very cool feel to it and you can really hear all that ambience you were talking about earlier. Yeah, that’s in 6/8. It came in the studio. There’s a version of the song out there somewhere with just me singing it and Korel playing piano. That’s a really interesting version because that takes it stripped completely down to just the meat of the song. But when we did it it definitely grew in the studio and Tim [Palmer] was really interesting the way he worked that song out for us. Tim and I definitely had our disagreements about things but he did a lot of really interesting things. The thing at the beginning he sorta came up with that I don’t know what the hell that is. Just laying little beautiful things in there; he was pretty crucial to that song. "We actually rerecorded a song on the album called “Hey Ya” from top to bottom." Would you ever talk to Tim Palmer about sounds he’d created with other bands? How he came up with the bass drum sound, for instance, on a U2 record? Umm, it didn’t really go there except I asked him a lot of questions about the U2 stuff. It’s like, “Well, you put a delay and a compressor on everything.” And it’s like, “Alright, that’s how you get that sound, huh?” It has been about four years since Let Love In, the last Goo Goo Dolls album, came out. Now that Something For the Rest of Us is completed does it feel good to you? Do you think this is the album your fans have been waiting for? I’m really proud of the album. And for me, yeah, I think we definitely pushed it out. It was the kind of situation where it was like, “Every song on the album doesn’t have to be a single or a hit. Let’s try and set a mood here” in a lot of ways. I’m at the point in my career where I’m just kinda like, “Well, I don’t really have to chase down every single song with the intention of having a top ten hit” or whatever. Believe me it was a little scary, it’s a little scary. But that’s where you have to go; that’s where you have to go. Whatever you’re afraid to do or, “Gee, I don’t know about this,” if you start to include the outside world in your process, you’re screwed. Because then you’re not producing for yourself; you’re producing for other people. At the beginning of the writing process it’s like it has to be a selfish thing; you gotta do it for yourself. And you gotta speak your mind and you gotta take risks. There’s no question about it. That being said, I want people who listen to this album to come away from it feeling like they’re part of it; like they own a little piece of it. Like a lot of the material on the album, not all of it but a lot of it kind of deals with the emotional kind of underpinnings of where we are as a society and how that affects people emotionally. Just the angst of everybody being downsized and outsourced and losing their homes and two wars going on and America is on high alert at all times. And I think it’s really starting to push people to the limit of what they can take emotionally. But I can’t make a blatant social or political statement in a song; I won’t do that ‘cause I’m not a preacher. I want to leave room for interpretation for people and that way I think people feel like because they have their own interpretation of a song that they own it. And that’s what I want; I want everybody to feel like they have a vested interest in what they’ve just heard. Is the reason you don’t do much co-writing because you want to keep the vision as yours only? Well, I did some co-writing on this record with a buddy of mine, Andy Stochansky. And Tim [Palmer] wrote a bridge to one of the songs. There’s nothin’ more fun than sittin’ down with a good friend in the living room and playing guitars and writing lyrics and things like that. You get other people’s perspectives and Andy is an amazing songwriter. I actually met him ‘cause I produced a record for him about eight years ago and I was just so taken with his songwriting. I was just like, “Wow, this guy is good.” And we’ve been friends ever since and sometimes it relieves a little of the pressure and makes the process fun ‘cause you’re sitting there sharing thoughts, ideas and different perspectives with someone you respect. You’ve been performing these new songs live. Yeah, we’ve been out on the road since the end of March. Here’s an interesting thing for people that are trying to get their songs noticed, every night when we were playing a new song off the album we’d tell people, “Alright, this is a new song. Whip out your camera phones and record it and put it up on Youtube.” You said that? Oh, yeah. I don’t think the record company was very happy with it but in retrospect it was the best promotional tool we could ever use. It’s amazing; it’s like boom, the entire world can hear something new. I think that helped us because we waited so long between albums and I that that got us back on the radar with people. And you know what was really fun about it was two or three days later, you’d be in another city and you’d be playing a song that’s not even released yet and people are singing along to it. And it’s like, “Wow, that’s an awesome feeling.” Have you noticed that when you bust open a new song on an audience that they all stand there looking at you like a little dog with the head cocked? “I don’t know if I like this yet or not.” And it’s kinda like ooh, that is so uncomfortable. It’s funny ‘cause on the first part of the tour after we played a new song that people hadn’t heard before, we’d always play a hit and we’d segue immediately into the hit song. ‘Cause people are just looking at you baffled but the Youtube thing really helped because it’s like your following can get a taste of your music and be introduced to it before it’s released and they see it live. It eases the blow of introducing new material too fast. Could you sense that some of the new songs were resonating better with your fans than others? Yeah, the song “Not Broken.” It’s really interesting because the album debuted at number seven on Billboard which is fantastic; I’m just blown away. The interesting thing was we sold 11,000 or 12,000 copies of the album on iTunes, right? But we sold 18,000 copies of the song “Not Broken.” I was like, “Whoa, that’s a freaky scene, man. What’s going on here? That’s kind of interesting. I think I know what the next single is gonna be!”