Back when the Goo Goo Dolls were a raucous local punk band with ridiculous hair and song titles like “Don’t Beat My Ass (With a Baseball Bat),” they snuck something truly subversive at the end of their second album, 1989’s Jed. After half an hour of tinny, fast-paced thrashing, the Goo Goo Dolls treated listeners to just Johnny Rzeznik, their occasional vocalist, alone with an acoustic guitar and a tender confession: “I just wanna be James Dean for a day,” he sang in a cracked whisper. Like everything the Buffalo trio did around this time, it was a little derivative: their version of the spare, melodic Replacements cuts that made you feel like you just caught the class clown opening his heart to the guidance counselor. And also like everything they did, it was kind of a joke—both because it ends with a punchline (“Then you go and tell me that you found out James Dean was gay… I don’t wanna be James Dean anymore”) but also for a broader reason: Who could imagine anyone from this scuzzy, drunken Hüsker Dü worship act ever becoming a celebrity?

Over the next 10 years, the Goo Goo Dolls would follow a trajectory of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and increasingly unlikely triumphs that more closely resembles a fictional underdog team from a Disney movie than a rock band. Rzeznik—the tortured, hard-partying guitarist who was once so shy that he had to record his backing vocals with the lights turned off—turned out to be a secret MVP, blessed not only with Bryan Adams’ rasp and Jon Bon Jovi’s fashion sense but also, when armed with a downtuned acoustic guitar, a preternatural ability for soaring, sentimental pop songwriting. Their label, Metal Blade, signed them to a historically bad deal, imagining nothing would ever come of them, but the band managed to come out on top by selling millions of records off a runaway hit, touring relentlessly, and turning the fiasco into a bigger contract with Metal Blade’s parent label, Warner Bros.

Their mainstream success hinged on “Name,” one of the best songs of the 1990s and an outlier on their 1995 album A Boy Named Goo. A DJ at KROQ discovered the song buried in the tracklist—breaking from the post-grunge formula with its drop-D, acoustic strumming and genuinely moving lyrics—and, once he put it in rotation, it basically never left, hitting the Billboard Top 5 and catapulting the album to double-platinum sales. The writing on the wall seemed to suggest this song would turn the Goo Goo Dolls into one of the decade’s many one-hit wonders, a fluke ballad that entertained a fickle public before its creators returned to a small, adoring cult audience. The fear alone sent Rzeznik down a depressive spiral of writer’s block, a move to New York City, and a separation from his wife.

One of the persistent myths of the ’90s is that, with the runaway success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, label executives stopped searching for pop stars and focused on regional scenes to uncover unlikely diamonds in the rough like the Goo Goo Dolls. That’s really only half of the story. Because when Kurt Cobain refused to make the music that the industry wanted from him, it opened a new lane for emerging talents who thought they might have a hit up their sleeves. For every young punk whose pedigree makes chasing mainstream attention feel a little like, say, nakedly swimming after a dollar on a fishing hook, there was someone else who saw it as an opportunity to escape their hometown and never look back.

Maybe it was shrapnel from Rzeznik’s turbulent childhood. Both of his parents died while he was a teenager, and he always viewed their unhappiness through the lens of dreams unfulfilled. His father had aspired to run the family business, a bar in the east side of Buffalo, only to return from military service and find it had been sold off. His mother dreamed of leaving town for New York City, fashioning herself as a bohemian and playing flute, but she spent most of her life taking care of her husband, whose alcoholism plagued the family. In his childhood friend and bandmate Robby Takac—whose comparatively stable, suburban upbringing felt like an escape hatch—Rzeznik found a champion. He has said, repeatedly over the years, that he would have quit music a million times if it were not for Takac’s faith and confidence.

It was when the 30-piece orchestra arrived to record their part for “Iris” that Rzeznik and Takac looked at each other and realized their lives would never be the same. Up to that point in the making of the song, things had happened so fast and seamlessly that to reconsider any decision felt like it might put the whole thing in jeopardy. Rzeznik was asked to contribute a song to the soundtrack of City of Angels, a 1998 Hollywood remake of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire that involves a tear-jerking love story between an angel and a mortal human. Rzeznik was moved by the devotion in the story—the idea that this guy would do anything for Meg Ryan, even if it meant fundamentally altering his identity. He put his guitar in a bizarre tuning where every string except one is tuned to the same note (a D, and the lowest string as a B). It is the only song I can think of that uses this specific tuning, and it basically turns your guitar into a drone machine unless you are specifically playing these chords.

We all know “Iris,” and nothing I can say will change your relationship with the song: not knowing that it’s actually named after the legendary country-folk singer Iris DeMent, or that Billy Corgan’s cryptic song titles inspired Rzeznik to not just call it, I don’t know, “Made to Be Broken” or “Who I Am.” Learning that these guys were devoted pupils of SST Records doesn’t make its slow-dance waltz feel any less saccharine, and realizing that Rzeznik saw in City of Angels a metaphor for his own crippling self-doubt and longing for honest connection doesn’t add to its emotional nuance. The song is written in such broad strokes so that everyone on Earth can understand.

Like so many hits in the ’90s, the words often emerge like a pulsating cluster of meaningless vowels, reverse-engineered to sing at karaoke without actually knowing the lyrics. Like a lot of other hits in the ’90s, once you actually learn the lyrics, they are surprisingly visceral, full of blood and angst. “When everything feels like the movies” is a funny distinction to draw in a song specifically written for a movie—one that is sometimes criticized for swapping out the poetic symbolism of Wenders’ original for something slightly more manipulative and soapy—but it establishes an important distinction about humanness that both “Iris,” with its me-against-the-world drama, and City of Angels, with its sepia-smog glow, are trying to distinguish. Even if you’re not following the plot, we all recognize the feeling.

Two visual accompaniments will always be tethered to “Iris.” One is the music video, which anyone who was near a television set in the late ’90s can probably still conjure with their eyes closed, as Rzeznik swivels in his chair all over some kind of clock tower, watching the world through a bunch of antique-looking telescopes. I understand the idea: “Iris” takes a bird’s-eye view of the world, a vantage on humanity where everyone besides you seems tiny and indifferent, and your worries can comfortably fill the whole frame.

The more enduring video, however, is from a concert film in Buffalo, where they play the song in the pouring rain, six years after it led Dizzy Up the Girl and its sturdy legion of follow-up singles to become the band’s breakthrough, shuttling them past one-hit wonders into actual ’90s superstars. When you listen to “Iris,” it is always pouring rain. You have to just let it rain, standing there defiantly, clothes plastered to your skin, glamorously feathered bangs getting all in your eyes. You have to feel it. And they do. For all their fears of turning away their early supporters with this sweeping, orchestral stab at pop stardom, it seems like a fair trade for the unbridled emotion of this screaming audience, singing along with every word, staring into the meaningful eyes of their hometown heartthrob on stage.

Being James Dean, of course, has its drawbacks, and even back in the ’80s, Rzeznik only really wanted it for a day. If one-upping “Name” was a challenge that almost broke them, then returning from “Iris” was where they had to draw the line. In the aftermath of its success, Rzeznik came off shell-shocked, disturbed by his sudden ascent to celebrity and exhausted by defending his band to unsympathetic music critics. Compared to actual innovators like Nirvana or Pearl Jam, he suggested to Kerrang! in 1999, perhaps the Goo Goo Dolls were never meant to signify anything beyond another link in the chain. “Maybe that’s why we’re here,” he offered, “just to keep rock’n‘roll alive until the next great band comes along.”

Even if nothing the Goo Goo Dolls did in the 21st century ever brought them anywhere near its heights, “Iris” never went away. In 2025, after it appeared in a bunch of popular TikToks and a Deadpool movie and American Idol and a celebrity wedding, The Wall Street Journal called it the “Song of the Summer.” Just last month it hit 3 billion streams on Spotify. The Goo Goo Dolls still make new music and tour all the time, and they close with “Iris” every night. Rzeznik, whose plan B involved attending vocational school for plumbing, seems grateful: If staying a punk band would have been the more sustainable creative path, then “Iris” at least assured they’d never be out of work. Nearly 40 years into his career, it can be a strange legacy. “Sometimes I feel like I wrote one song,” he told the Journal.

To this day, the only thing Rzeznik and Takac express unqualified regret about is their choice of band name. In the early days, the story goes, the closest thing they had to a manager was the guy who sold them beer at the deli. They had a show coming up, and he was urging them to change their name. Why? Because their current name, Sex Maggot, could not be printed in the newspaper. I imagine Rzeznik and Takac giggling mischievously, a little drunk, pretending not to care as they flipped through a magazine. On one page, they spotted an advertisement for a gruesome little children’s toy. They read the name out loud, burst out laughing, and there you have it. It’s a story they were forced to retell countless times on their ascent to fame and the long ride after, and even still, the memory rings with a tone of disappointment and squandered potential. After one recitation in the ’90s, Takac sighed, “If we had had 15 more minutes….” But as you really only learn in retrospect, that’s all most of us ever get.