You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece

tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language.

Gugu dolls formed in 1986 in Buffalo, New York, and by the time 1998 rolled around, they'd already had a pretty successful

career. They'd released five albums, and one of their songs, Name, from 1995, had become a top

ten hit. But things really changed for them when they made the song Iris. It originally

came out on the soundtrack for the movie City of Angels, which came out in 1998 and starred

Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. Iris spent a record-breaking 18 weeks at number one on the radio

and became one of the best-selling songs of all time, with over 14 million copies sold

in over 4.5 billion streams. So for this episode, John Resnick of Gougu Dolls came over to my place, and he told me about

how he wrote the song.

He told me how the Grammy-winning producer Rob Cavallo helped them expand their vision, and

how the version of the song in the movie isn't actually the version that everybody knows.

And I don't want the world to see me, because I don't think that they're My name is My name is John Resnick.

And who else is in the band with you?

Robbie Takeak.

It's just me and him.

We are the band.

And Robbie and I make the records.

And how did you two first meet?

Oh, I met him in college when I was 19. And we were playing hardcore music. And how did it two first meet? Oh, I met him in college when I was 19 and we were playing hardcore music.

And how did it go from you guys playing hardcore to the sound that it became? Because that's a pretty big shift.

Yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with being exposed to a lot of different music that I'd never really heard before.

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