B-D-D-D-D-D

• OVERVIEW •

Unique droning layout created by John Rzeznik for Iris, the Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 smash-hit power ballad. Balances purity and dissonance: 5-1str are all tuned to D, while the 6str is taken right down to a superlow B – giving a narrow, crunchy minor 3rd gap between the deepest pair.

 

Unless you restring, the wide tension differentials will bring quixotic phasing effects into the mix (subtly evident, even with a restring, on the original track). Although you may want to leave the 2str at its Standard-tuned B if upwinding 3 semitones proves a stretch too far.

Pattern: 3>12>0>12>0

Harmony: (D maj / B min) | 6-1-1-1-1-1

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Still the Goo Goo Dolls’ best-known track, Iris was originally written by John Rzeznik for the 1998 film City of Angels – a celestial love thriller starring Nicolas Cage as an angel who wrestles over whether to give up divine immortality in favour of his earthly love for Meg Ryan.

 

While Rzeznik notes that he “wasn’t a big fan of the movie” (“…but I love [Wim Wenders’] Wings of Desire, and it’s basically the same…”), he didn’t have to look far for sources of emotional intensity. As explained a Classic Rock interview: “I was feeling kinda schizophrenic…My wife and I had just broken up, and I’d met another girl who I was really into. I’d moved from my home…and was living in this hotel. So it was a really manic time…”

 

Written with fitting rapidity, the track was essentially finished by the end of the same day Rzeznik had first watched a pre-screening of the film: “Writing involves procrastination, fear, doubt, criticism…most songs I write I have to torture myself; be a prima donna…But Iris came so easy. I’d broken two strings on my guitar, so I’d started winding all the strings up and down in these weird configurations, and that song just came out. It was like a gift…”.

 

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• Iris (City of Angels) – Goo Goo Dolls (1998):

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“And you can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming,
Or the moment of truth in your lies,
When everything feels like the movies,
Yeah, you bleed just to know, you’re alive…”

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The track received its title rather haphazardly, via Rzeznik flipping through the pages of LA Weekly and coming across a live listing for Arkansas gospel-folk artist Iris DeMent (“I was like, ‘Wow! What a beautiful name!'”). And – contrary to my initial instinct that the tuning might have been crafted to fit around the iconic mandolin layer – it turns out that the 8-string part was only added later on, after the band overheard Dean Parks playing one in the studio next door on a session led by…Dr. Dre (I can’t trace what they were up to…yet!).

 

The final arrangement – which features a soaring 16-part string section alongside electric slide solos from Tim Pierce (who also played mandolin) – was something of a departure from the band’s indie-DIY roots. But it soon proved to be a major hit, topping rock charts worldwide and becoming the most-played song on US radio in 1998 (n.b. Iris wasn’t the film’s only hit: Alanis Morissette’s Uninvited was also written specifically for it, as was Sarah McLachlan’s Angel – in fact, the soundtrack album, also featuring Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker, topped the American charts in June of that year, arguably becoming far bigger than the film itself).

 

Still the Goo Goo Dolls’ best-known track, Iris remains popular today, over two decades later. Billboard even named it the best pop song of the entire 1992-2012 period, and it continues to resurface via countless reworks (Arthur Gunn’s competent American Idol 2021 cover ditches the original tuning, sticking with Standard, as does Robbie Kennedy pub-yelling take on Britain’s Got Talent 2013, cp.4). Rzeznik himself has also returned to it many times – including duets with Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne, and a great solo acoustic version.

 

Decades later, he reflected that Iris: “didn’t change us…but people around us changed. We started getting more attention, made a bit of money…it was actually really, really uncomfortable. It never made me wish I hadn’t written it, because now I’ll be able to send my kids to college, but obviously there are by-products of that kind of success…the number of choices you have grows exponentially, like: ‘I can have this, I can have that, I can date her, I can snort this…and, I can afford it'”. (Whoever knew that snapping a couple of strings would prove so profitable in the end? Well, I live in hope…)

 

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• Iris (solo acoustic) – John Rzeznik (2013):

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“And I don’t want the world to see me,
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand,
When everything’s made to be broken,
I just want you to know who I am…”

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	B	D	D	D	D	D
Alteration	-5	-7	0	-5	+3	-2
Tension (%)	-44	-55	0	-44	+41	-21
Freq. (Hz)	62	73	147	147	294	294
Pattern (>)	3	12	0	12	0	–
Semitones	0	3	15	15	27	27
Intervals	6	1	1	1	1	1

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• All Minor Thirds: like you hadn’t paused the ascent
• Carnatic Drone: another B-rooted textural hypnotiser
• Ostrich: or if you feel the B is muddying the waters

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Iris: read more about its inception in a Classic Rock article and GooGooFans profile, hear its creators elaborate in a Professor of Rock video and an episode of the I F’N Love That Song Podcast with Tom Higgenson, and find out what seasoned sessioneer and top-tier YouTuber Tim Pierce has to say about recording the track’s mandolin and electric slide guitar parts (“I got a phone call and was asked to play mandolin on a session…something told me I should bring my electric rig also…”)
• Songs of Cage: once described by David Lynch as “the jazz musician of American acting”, Nic’s many on-screen incarnations naturally arrive with an intriguing array of soundtrack songs – check out the WimWords highlight reel, and also see his own string-wielding scenes in The Rock (1996: topless & unhinged) and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001: unsettlingly calm). Kesha wrote a song about Cage – and he was once married to Elvis’ daughter Lisa Marie Presley (for 104 days), and his son Weston Coppola Cage used to be in a black metal band called Eyes of Noctum (I wonder if they used the CAGED system? Probably a bit too rigid and formulaic for his dad…). And – whatever you make of Lynch’s analogy above – who might be the Nicolas Cage of jazz music?

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Header image: John Rzeznik revisits Iris live