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Shannon
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Exclusive Interview: Robby Takac (Goo Goo Dolls)
« on: May 25th, 2010, 3:38pm » |
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Exclusive Interview: Robby Takac (Goo Goo Dolls)
The Goo Goo Dolls are pumped. On the heels of completing their first studio album in almost four years, the boys from Buffalo are fist-bumping the Goo Goo nation with some fresh new tunes and a tricked-out tour. The Alternative Rock trio has taken some time out to observe, reflect, and create. Now they're taking the new songs out for a spin, and their fans could not be happier. The Dolls, after all, have a habitual fondness for the plight of the common man. Perhaps it's why they've endured for 25 years. That, along with their capacity for crafting catchy, yet relevant songs. This thinking-man's band made up of John Rzeznik, Robby Takac, and Mike Malinin, is in it for the duration -- and they're ready to rock and roll.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Goo Goo Dolls bassist/vocalist Robby Takac about the tour, the new record, the anatomy of a great song, and how current Internet trends have brought the band, and the music industry as a whole, a flash of optimism.
Here's what he had to say.
The new record is your first in four years. It's called "Something For the Rest of Us." Can you tell us what inspired the name, and how it ties in conceptually with the songs on the record?
John actually came up with name for the record. The times that we're going through right now, in general, are not the easiest times to get through. There's an awful lot of people who control an awful lot of what goes on, and then there's the rest of the people. I think it's become very, very obvious that that's how things operate these days. Because our records tend to be documents of what's gone on in our lives over the past few years, I guess that's the forefront of subjects that got tackled on the record.
You were once quoted as saying "For years, we've been playing and writing songs that sound happy. And yet, if you listen, the words are like 'My brains are falling out of my ears; would someone please pull me together?'" That really does seem to sum it up. Was that an intentional move on your part, or was it just the way it worked out artistically?
I think that's just one of the ironic things about this band. We tend to write the kind of music we like, and that generally happens first. Then it comes time to write the lyrics. It's always an interesting journey when that happens, because we like to tackle stuff that's kind of, if not personal to us, something that becomes personal to us if they're not our own. And sometimes that can tend to go a little dark, especially when you live in these times. That tends to be the way that we go.
It's funny because sometimes we're at a show and we're playing, and I'm looking out into the crowd thinking, "Oh my God, are they listening to what he's saying right now?" (laughs) But it's one of those things that keep things fresh around here. There's interesting fusions that happen with music. Music has that unique ability to confront a lot of different things and through that, work in sarcastic manners, which is an interesting thing too. By mixing a couple of colors, you end up with a different color. Music is morphed now with visual, it seems, in a lot of cases. There's a really interesting component that's being brought into the mix as something that is sort of just understood to happen.
Is there a "method to the madness" of writing a song that stands up over time?
I think you just answered the question within the question. You need to write a lot of them. You need to do it a lot, because sometimes it's not necessarily the song's fault when it doesn't stand up to the test of time. It's the times' fault. Sometimes in that time, a song is amazing and could make a huge impact on people in a very general sort of way. That's what a song like "Iris" did. There's also songs that you think the general public never paid attention to, that may have made the most difference to someone in the process of their life in general. That's called staying power too. It's still effectively reaching people on a one on one basis, and the psychosis and the coincidence of a hit record is a whole other thing, beyond a great song, I think.
(cont'd)
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Shannon
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Re: Exclusive Interview: Robby Takac (Goo Goo Doll
« Reply #1 on: May 25th, 2010, 3:38pm » |
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(cont'd)
The business of making music and delivering it to the masses has evolved dramatically in recent years. The Internet has become such a game-changer in terms of marketing and promotion for artists today. How have the Goo Goo Dolls integrated this media form into its own playbook, and do you see it as a better way to reach out to fans?
Yes, I think it's the only way, actually, if you want to remain current. If you want to become a catalog act and fade away into the darkness, play that one summer tour where you put nine bands together and go out and make a little money, you could probably pull that off. But these days, this is how the world operates. One of the first things I do every morning is get up, log myself on, and start my day. And a really interesting thing happened on this record, and I may go off topic for just a minute. When we were working on this record, we worked with Tim Palmer as a producer. In the past we've worked with other producers who kind of led us through it. But with Tim, he came in and we were like "Let's make a record." We finished it and we had some time, so we listened in and found some things we wanted to change. So we ended up going back in and redoing a bunch of stuff, and we missed the deadline because we were working on it. We were also recording another song, which ended up being our first single, so I'm glad we did that.
So then we booked the tour and the tour is in mostly smaller venues, like 1400 -3000 seat venues. Our manager was saying "Are you sure you want to do that, because you haven't had a record out for four years and you've got a bunch of new songs, and I know you're going to play them." What started happening was, we started to do some shows and we were getting e-mails from some kids who were saying, "Hey, Warner Brothers just called us up and told me to take my camera footage of your new songs off of my YouTube site." I was thinking, "Oh boy, here we go." Within five or six days, they just couldn't control it anymore. So now, we're playing and all these new songs are on YouTube. And the thing is, there's a thousand people singing the songs back to me now (during a show), and they're not out yet.
So back to your question. What do I see having changed in this industry right now? There's a flash of optimism. Everybody knows the change. I don't have to tell you about social networking, about downloading, about stealing. You know about all this. The change I'm seeing right now is being out here, prior to our record being out, and our fan base knows this record already. It's not even out yet, man. They are going to have a record that they know six songs on already. This is huge. It's a whole other way of doing things.
I haven't seen a flash of optimism in this business for a long, long time. It's got to be five, six years. Our record label will tell you the same thing that I'm telling you. I'm telling it from the position of a guy that likes to write songs, stand on a stage and make music for people -- share music with people, and make a living. I see a model developing here and in it, everybody's role changes just a little bit. Our involvement with fans is direct now. I can reach a half a million people at once now, literally, it takes me five seconds. I could tell them anything I wanted right now. It's crazy. I would have paid tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars for that privilege ten years ago. So I think this is really an eye-opening moment for the band, and I think it's a good time for us to have this record. I think it sounds fresh and the fans have figured out how this operates now. For a while it felt like you were tossing information down a hallway that nobody was in, because the Internet was out there, but nobody really knew how to funnel it down into their brains. But it's an exciting time, and we're embracing it.
Tell me about Music Is Art, the charity you founded back in 2004.
It's a charity I started in my hometown, and my father actually runs it for me because I'm gone an awful lot. Basically it's an advocacy group in Buffalo, and we partner with a lot of different organizations there. We do stuff locally there in Buffalo, like Battle of the Bands at the arena during a hockey game, so the high school kids get to play to an arena full of people. Things like that.
That's sort of the thing I do on my own, but the Goo Goo Dolls as a whole, have been working with an organization for twelve years called U.S.A. Harvest. They work at all of our shows. The Goo Goo Dolls street team works in concert with them. They show up together and they collect non-perishable canned goods at the show, and whoever brings the most canned goods gets to come backstage and take a picture with the band. Through this process, we've raised over 9 million meals over the past twelve years working with them. It's a pretty cool thing, and everything goes into food pantries and shelters in the area. Usually it's there before the sun rises the next day. A guy named Stan Curtis runs it actually, and we just started a new thing with him called Blessings in a Backpack, which sends kids home from school on a Friday with a backpack full of lunches and snacks for the weekend. Unfortunately for a lot of kids in our nation here, that's pretty much their sustenance is whatever they get when they're at school because things have been pretty tough at home. It's a program that allows people to adopt classes of kids, so we've been helping out with that for about the past two months. We're figuring out a way to work that into what we do with our street team.
What is the best part about touring for you?
I would say the best thing is just being back out there again. After a little while of being in the bubble too long, it's nice to get reactions from people standing right in front of you, and not just your interpretation of what their reactions may be. I think that's huge for us, and I think now, just like we said at the beginning of this conversation, we're sort of seeing how this thing might operate now, and knowing that even before this record's out, we've got people singing the songs along with us. That's a feeling I've never felt before, doing this for twenty-five years of making music with this band, so it's an exciting time, and I look forward to the future for sure.
Is there any message you'd like to send out directly to your fans?
Yes, you're going to have plenty of opportunities to see us. We're going to be touring for a really long time here and we're really excited about it, so let's whoop ass, man! (laughs)
...everybody in? PopStar will be covering the Goo Goo Dolls' show as they roll through Chicago this summer. Watch for our full re-cap along with photos. For more information on Music Is Art, visit musicisart.org , for U.S.A. Harvest visit usaharvest.com , and for Blessings in A Backpack visit blessingsinabackpack.org.
http://news.popstar.com/Article/1894
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