Songoftheday 5/23/21 - And I'd give up forever to touch you 'cause I know that you feel me somehow, you're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be and I don't want to go home right now....

 

 

"Iris" - Goo Goo Dolls

from the albums City Of Angels (Original Soundtrack) and Dizzy Up The Girl (both 1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #1 (eighteen weeks)

Weeks in the Hot 100: 14

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 45

 

Today's song of the day comes from the band Goo Goo Dolls, who had transformed from punk rockers to adult-pop hitmakers with their single "Name", which reached the top ten on pop chart in America at the beginning of 1996. A year later, their song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack, "Lazy Eye", made the top ten on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart at #9. In 1998, they put another song on a movie record, this time the Nicholas Cage/Meg Ryan film City Of Angels. "Iris", written by lead singer John Rzeznik and produced by the band with Rob Cavallo, has lyrics relaying the theme of the movie, which has an immortal (Cage) willing to give it up for love. This is all over a waltz-timed acoustic soft-rock production. Released as the second radio single from the soundtrack after Alanis Morissette's "Uninvited", it became the biggest airplay hit of the year, and setting an all-time record...

Since at the time that "Iris" was first promoted to radio, it wasn't available as a retail single, so it wasn't able to place on Billboard's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song was so massive on radio that it spent eighteen weeks at #1 on the airplay component of the tally, It was definitely one of the biggest deciding factor for the trade magazine to change the rules of the list to include all songs commercially available as a single or not at the end of 1998, where "Iris" still had enough radio love to still place in the top ten in December. The track also spent a whopping 17 weeks on top on Billboard's older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list, while getting to #22 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart. It also topped the Alternative Rock chart for five weeks, and peaked at #8 on the Mainstream Rock list. Internationally, the single went to #1 in Canada, Australia, and Italy, and reached the top ten in the UK (#3 as a double-sided single with "Stay With You" in 2011), Belgium (#3), Ireland (#5), Iceland (#5), and the Netherlands (#9). The song would go to appear on the Dolls' album Dizzy Up The Girl, released in September of 1998. That record crested at #15 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, moving over four million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 1998, "Iris" won the award for Best Pop Duo/Group Vocal Performance, while also nominated for Song of the Year and Record of the Year, both of which went home with Celine Dion for "My Heart Will Go On". 

(7/10)

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Here's the band performing "Iris" on Letterman in 1998...

Next up, live in concert in 2004...

And finally, for an acoustic live take for tv....

Up tomorrow: Incendiary rockers enter normality.