Songoftheday 4/17/22 -The cowboy kills the rock star and Friday night's gone too far, the dim light hides the years on all the faded girls...

 

 

"Broadway" - The Goo Goo Dolls

from the album Dizzy Up The Girl (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #24 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 8

 

Today's song comes from the Goo Goo Dolls, whose 1998 album Dizzy Up The Girl had already spun off three huge pop hits with "Black Balloon", "Slide", and the #1 radio hit "Iris" (title track "Dizzy" also made the top ten on the modern rock radio chart).  The fifth and final single from the album was the song "Broadway", written by lead singer Johnny Rzeznik and produced by the band with Rob Cavallo. In it Johnny sings about a beaten down old town, presumably one of the many former industrial hubs that had gone dry, with its population just stuck in a pattern ("going to old man's bars") with a Springsteen/Mellencamp workingman's gravitas along with Bruce's wall of sound style sped up to pop-punk tempo. It's a good mood piece, if not overly descriptive like the best of Bruce and John's work...

"Broadway" became the fourth top-40 pop hit from Dizzy Up The Girl in America in July of 2000. The song climbed to #38 on Billboard magazine's Alternative Rock radio chart, while rising to #5 on their older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Canada (#7) and Iceland (#6). The Goo Goo Dolls will be back to the series.

(7/10)

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Here's the band performing the song live on Conan O'Brien...

Next up, in concert in 2004...

Two year later, the group did "Broadway" on their Live and Intimate live DVD release...

and lastly, showing up on the Howard Stern radio show in 2019...

Up tomorrow: Mississippi Girl applauds your mode of romance.