Johnny Rzeznik wanted to push the envelope for the tenth Goo Goo Dolls album so he brought in four producers to get the energy happening.
Magnetic features songs produced by John Shanks, Gregg Wattenberg and Greg Wells as well as Rzeznik and Johnny says that he achieved the result he was after.
“We wanted to get fresh ideas and energy into the room every few days so that we weren’t sitting around in a recording studio for months on end with the same people pounding away with it,” he tells Noise11.com. “We wanted to get one song done at a time and then go away and write another song and come back into the studio and work on it. I would do a writing session, then a recording session, then a writing session, then a recording session. Everything was done individually”.
The four producers expanded on the ideas for Magnetic. “It gives me four different influences on what’s going on,” he says. “I think all of those add up to a more interesting sounding album. One guy mixed the entire album and that kept the cohesion”.
One of the people he worked with was Grammy-award winning producer, songwriter John Shanks. “We had written songs together in the past,” he says. “We got together again and wrote some songs and really enjoyed working together so we kept going. He wound up not only co-writing the songs with me but producing them”.
The Shanks sessions were done in LA. Goo Goo Dolls went to New York to work with Greg Wattenberg. “He produced about six cuts on the album,” Johnny said. “He and I are really good friends and we had known each other for a long, long time. We have written for other people together and messed around on some one-off projects. We had a lot of fun. It was hanging out with a friend from school writing songs.”
Greg Wells also worked on the album. He has worked with Adele, Rufus Wainwright and Elton John. “He did one song on the album,” he said. “He was really amazing taking the music to a place that it had never gone before. He took this piano ballad that I had written with a friend of mine and turned it into this sweeping epic”.
Goo Goo Dolls 10th studio album Magnetic is out now through Warner Music.
