‘My guitar was mangled – like my life!’ Goo Goo Dolls on how they made epic ballad Iris

John Rzeznik, singer, songwriter, guitarist

I was going through a divorce and living in a hotel in West Hollywood when my manager said Warner Brothers were seeking songs for the movie City of Angels. They already had U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette, so I thought getting a track on there would draw attention to us. Warners showed me the film and it was like Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. They wanted a song for the scene where the angel – played by Nicolas Cage – decides to become human to be with the woman he loves. That’s the Meg Ryan role. I thought: “What would I say to her if I were him?”

I went back to my hotel, where I had a guitar with four strings and a bizarre tuning: all Ds and a B. Like most of what was going on in my life, it was mangled. But I used it to write a song about the joy and pain of being human. It took about four hours. When I played Warners what I had – intro, verse, chorus – they loved it.

The band practised it in Swing House rehearsal rooms. We just kept playing until the bridge section seemed to shoot out of my fingers. When I was looking through the gig guide in LA Weekly, I saw Iris DeMent and thought: “That’s a beautiful name. I’ll call the song Iris.”

We recorded it in Los Angeles with producer Rob Cavallo, who got composer David Campbell to do a strings arrangement. We had never done anything like that before. I remember staring through the glass at all these strings-players and saying to Rob: “Once we do this, there’s no going back.” Session guitarist Tim Pierce played the beautiful mandolin parts, but had also brought also all these guitars and amps along. When I played the slide guitar solo, it sounded like fighting cats, so Tim played it and took it to another level.

When Iris came out as a single, the guys at Warners didn’t want to work on it, but their subsidiary Reprise, down the hallway, said they would. I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and others who have covered it, for introducing it to a new generation. Three billion streams on Spotify is astounding and overwhelming, but if it wasn’t for those people at Reprise, nobody would have heard it.

I never got to meet Nic Cage, but I did go to the movie premiere and sat behind him. I could pick the back of his head out of a lineup! When we were nominated for three Grammys, alongside acts like Celine Dion and Aerosmith, I knew we’d never win. So I had a T-shirt printed reading: “I was nominated for three Grammys and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” After you’re unsuccessful, there’s always a line of press asking: “How do you feel, John?” So I pointed at the T-shirt.

Robby Takac, bass, vocals

When we started, we all lived in one bedroom and had dreams of taking over the world, but you never think anything will actually happen. We were imitating the punk rock bands we loved and thought we were killing it: driving round the country playing rock shows while our friends were sitting at home. We played lots of shows to hardly any people, but over 10 years we did figure out how to be entertaining.

I was living in an apartment in Buffalo with my girlfriend when John called to tell me about the film. Then he called again and played Iris for me over the phone. I thought the song was awesome, but then I love everything he writes. However, I never thought: “Wow, this is going to be a transformational song we’ll be talking about in 30 years.”

At one point, John made a demo of it – guitar, possibly with a drum machine. Later, the studio version would switch time signatures and take the freaky middle section in a different direction, but the bass part stayed simple and it still felt like the sort of song we’ve always done – until we found ourselves sitting in front of an orchestra. At that point, I thought: “This is a long way from that bedroom we shared.”

The craziest thing is that after we went in and recorded the version everyone loves, in the movie they used another version – solo acoustic – of John playing it. After they’d spent all that money! So we said: “Can you at least put it on the soundtrack album?” And they did. Iris has kind of overshadowed all our other songs, but it’s an amazing wind to have behind us.