March 16, 2002

'Gutterflower' By Goo Goo Dolls Blooms on Warner

By: Melinda Newman

LOS ANGELES--Goo Goo Dolls cofounder Johnny Rzeznik is expounding his New Year's resolution to give up judging other people's music. He then goes on to passionately hold forth on how no band should take reviews and all the other vagaries of the music business personally.

"You get your ass kicked by the press in certain areas, you're subject to the whims of popular taste or whatever," he says. "The thing that I'm realizing about it is you have to build a big wall around yourself to protect what's really going on inside there." Then he stops, slowly looks up from the floor, and says, "But don't you even hear a hint of me trying to convince myself of what I'm telling you? I mean, I'm full of shit!"

Dolls co-founder Robby Takac dissolves into giggles.

It's unlikely that the trio--guitarist Rzeznik, bassist Takac, and drummer Mike Malinin--will suffer the slings of many critics on Gutterflower, the band's eight album, out April 9 on Warner Bros.

The project's 12 songs--eight penned by Rzeznik, four written by Takac--deal with communication or, in many ways, the lack thereof, and are set to a driving, melodic, accessible musical background.

Takac sums it up as: "A failure to communicate is in general what we've been writing about for 15 years."

"Pretty much all of the songs I wrote on this record [are] my trying to relate more to myself than other people," Rzeznik explains. "I'm still evolving in my own damn way, you know. I've had a pretty severe case of failing to communicate with myself for a long time. This is the first time I've ever lived alone. Your thoughts tend to get a little louder when you're alone."

They also got loud when Rzeznik found himself re-entering the dating scene after the end of his six-year marriage. "These songs are about male/female entanglements," he says. "Oh God, I've gone after hundreds of things I shouldn't have gone after. It's like I'm a dog who's been on a leash most of his life, and now I have to learn to walk myself."

He has few regrets about the confessional tone of his lyrics, although he admits, "I've got a feeling that all my interviews this year are going to be like an episode of the Ricki Lake show."