Songoftheday 11/24/21 - A thousand other boys could never reach you how could I have been the one, I saw the world spin beneath you and scatter like ice from the spoon...

 

 

"Black Balloon" - Goo Goo Dolls

from the album Dizzy Up The Girl (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #16 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 22

 

Today's song comes from the Goo Goo Dolls, who had fully transformed themselves from the protopunk band to a pop hitmaking machine by the end of the 1990's, landing a massive radio hit with "Iris" and a top ten follow-up in "Slide", both from their 1998 album Dizzy Up The Girl. The third single from the record, "Dizzy", probably was as close as to their original sound on the album, but while it was a decent hit at rock radio, making both the Alternative (#9) and Mainstream (#13) Rock radio charts in Billboard magazine, the single ran cold with mainstream pop stations, only "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #108 in the spring of 1999. 

The fourth offering from Dizzy Up The Girl was the one with the heaviest theme, "Black Balloon". Possibly based on real life, it's about a woman who's addicted to heroin and the man who loves her that's trying to help. The lyrics are dark and fatalistic but the jangle-pop production underneath is a soothing fakeout (much like the drug it references). The record swells as the string section sweeps in, and you're caught in the euphoria that maybe it will end alright, but alas, no it doesn't...

"Black Balloon" became the third top-40 pop hit from Dizzy Up The Girl in October of 1999. The song rose to #13 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, and made it to #28 on the Mainstream Rock list. But where the song was most successful was at the older-skewing "Adult Top-40" radio format, spending a week out of its 49 total weeks at #3. Internationally, the single peaked at #3 in Canada, made the top-40 in Iceland at #28, and was a minor hit in the UK at #76. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "Black Balloon" earned the group a nomination for Best Duo/Group Rock Vocal Performance, which went to Santana and Everlast's "Put The Lights On" from his unstoppable Supernatural juggernaut (I felt the Goo Goos were robbed). Both the Goo Goo Dolls and this album will return to this series.

(9/10)

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Here's the Dolls performing the song on a televised concert for GQ magazine in 1999...

In 2003, the band released a video album Music In High Places: Live In Alaska, which included an acoustic version of "Black Balloon"...

Next up, in concert in Buffalo in 2004...

and finally, from their Live and Intimate DVD in 2007...

I'll return on Friday with a another boy-band remaking a country hit. Happy Thanksgiving!