Friday, June 16, 2006

The Goo Goo Dolls bring their ballad-heavy sound to White River

By GENE STOUT
P-I POP MUSIC CRITIC

The song "Better Days" from Goo Goo Dolls' new album is a heart-on-the-sleeve ballad that took on a different meaning when CNN began playing it during the network's Hurricane Katrina coverage.

		COMING UP
	GOO GOO DOLLS AND COUNTING CROWS WHEN: Thursday night at 7:30 WHERE: White River Amphitheatre (near Auburn) TICKETS: $26.25-$67.50 at Ticketmaster

CNN producers had discovered the song, written by lead singer and guitarist John Rzeznik, on a department-store Christmas compilation.

"Someone at CNN heard it even before the new record came out and thought, 'Wow, this is a pretty powerful song,' " singer-bassist Robby Takac said in a phone interview this week.

"And so they connected it to their coverage, and the song took on a completely different meaning from what John had first intended. It's a vivid example of what happens with a lot of songs. Because no one really knows what you're writing about. So listeners apply it to their lives and their own situations."

The "Better Days"/CNN connection also resonated with producer Glen Ballard, who led Takac, Rzeznik and drummer Mike Malinin through the recording process. Ballard had grown up in New Orleans, and his parents were living there when Katrina tore through the city.

"The song set a really hopeful, positive tone for the record-making process," said Takac, an affable musician with a slightly raspy, son-of-Wolfman-Jack voice.

The album, "Let Love In," is Goo Goo Dolls' first studio album in several years -- and eighth studio album overall. For fans who have followed the band since the late 1980s, it's radically different from the group's first record, which Takac describes as "sounding something like a bad version of a Ramones" album.

"Let Love In," unlike the group's harder-rocking albums of the 1990s, is tuneful, romantic and stocked with big ballads. There's also a nice version of Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit," a song the band performed at the July 2004 Fourth of July concert captured on the "Live in Buffalo" DVD.

"I think John and I just said, 'We want to grow up a little bit more,' " Takac said of the album's glossy, romantic sound.

After working on outside projects over the past few years, Takac and Rzeznik decided it was time to be a band again.

"When we got together to talk about doing the next record, I think the consensus was that it was pretty cool to be in a band. Everything else is uncharted territory. This is something we know how to do," Takac said.

The next step was getting out of fast-paced, high-stress Los Angeles and back to the band's hometown, Buffalo, N.Y.

"In L.A., people care about what happens in the next six weeks of your life. That's it. After that, they roll you up like a tin-foil ball and, if you're lucky, you hit the recycle bin," Takac said.

"At this point in our lives, we know that. So when it was time to make musical decisions, which we knew we'd have to defend later on, we wanted to be relatively coherent while making those decisions. So we went back to Buffalo and spent a lot of time there, playing 14 to 16 hours a day. We'd sit in the room and just work on the songs."

The "room" was a century-old Masonic ballroom rigged up as a recording studio.

Ballard, a star producer renowned for his work with Dave Matthews, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Alanis Morissette and more recently P.O.D., is known for his ability to switch gears stylistically and establish a "creative, enabling" atmosphere in the studio.

"He refuses to have a bad mood going on," Takac said. "He'll leave the room and come back red-faced and you don't know what the hell went on, but when he walks back into the studio whatever was upsetting him is gone."

Takac describes the recording of "Let Love In" as part of a long evolution for the band.

"It's happened over 20 years. So it's been a very comfortable growth process," he said.

Goo Goo Dolls, which recently returned from a brief tour of Europe, begin a U.S. tour next week. The trek includes a show with headliner Counting Crows Thursday night at White River Amphitheatre.

Fans are encouraged to bring non-perishable food items for USA Harvest, which collects food for homeless shelters.

"We've raised over a million meals worth of food at this point. If you bring a whole bunch of stuff down, we usually invite you backstage," Takac said with a chuckle.

"And when I say a whole bunch, I mean a truckful."

More headlines and info from Auburn, Enumclaw.