Let’s look back at 1997. The band’s frontman, Johnny Rzeznik, was going through the absolute worst phase of his life. Even though their previous track “Name” had finally brought them mainstream recognition, the sudden fame fractured the band’s internal dynamic. Rzeznik was hit with a brutal, paralyzing writer’s block, unable to pen a single meaningful sentence. To make matters worse, his marriage had just fallen apart. He packed a single suitcase and moved into a lonely hotel room in Los Angeles, feeling completely burnt out and cut off from the world.
After returning to his hotel room, Rzeznik picked up a cheap acoustic guitar to try and capture that feeling. In a fit of sheer frustration and raw emotion, he strummed the instrument way too hard and snapped two of the strings. He was left with a broken, four-string guitar. But instead of throwing it into the corner of the room, he started turning the tuning pegs in a completely random, chaotic fashion. When the band entered the recording studio, brilliant arrangement choices fully realized the magic of the song—bringing in a full orchestra and adding mandolin hooks that gave the track its cinematic grandeur. The result? A record-breaking 18 weeks at the top of the Billboard Radio Songs chart and global alt-rock legends.
For us devoted fans, however, the definitive moment in the history of this song occurred in 2004 during a concert in their hometown of Buffalo, New York. Right as the band started playing “Iris,” a massive, torrential rainstorm opened up over the stadium. The stage was literally flooding, and a soaked-to-the-bone Rzeznik sang with such intense passion it felt like his life depended on it, while tens of thousands of fans screamed the lyrics right back to him in the pouring rain. It was the ultimate proof that a song born out of total isolation in a tiny hotel room had grown into a shelter capable of weathering any storm with us.
