Iris
by Goo Goo Dolls
- 154
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 30
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
In early 1998, producer Rob Cavallo took the Goo Goo Dolls to a screening of the first edit of City of Angels. His father and co-producer Bob took Alanis Morissette. The next morning Morissette called Rob and asked him to produce "Uninvited." Soon after, John Rzeznik phoned him with a song he had written called "Iris."
Rzeznik said he was thinking about the Nicolas Cage character, a man willing to give up his immortality to feel something human. He also wanted a place on a soundtrack beside U2, Peter Gabriel and Morissette. No character in the film is named Iris, and the word never appears in the lyrics. He took the title from the country-folk singer Iris DeMent, whose name he noticed in a concert listing in the LA Weekly. He tuned every string to D except the lowest, which went to B.
"Iris" came out on April 1, 1998, as the lead single from Dizzy Up the Girl. It spent a then-record 18 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart. No commercial single existed, so it could not enter the Hot 100. The rules changed on December 5, 1998, and it debuted and peaked at No. 9. It reached No. 1 in Australia, Canada and Italy.
Iris runs at 154 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.56 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 390 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
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