The Goo Goo Dolls got the title for their song "Iris" from a country singer named Iris DeMent. The word doesn't show up in the lyric; lead singer Johnny Rzeznik said he was "trying to be pretentious and arty by calling it that."


One of the most enduring songs from the '90s is "Iris" by The Goo Goo Dolls, which got huge on social media and streaming in the 2020s. The song was written for a movie called City Of Angels, about an angel (Nicolas Cage) who falls in love with a human (Meg Ryan).



Speaking of the song title, Rzeznik explained: "I was trying to be pretentious and arty by calling it that. I figured if [Smashing Pumpkins frontman] Billy Corgan can get away with it, so can I. So I figured, what the hell, I'll tap into the pretentious market."



Lead Goo Johnny Rzeznik wrote this song for the movie City Of Angels, where it is sung from the perspective of Nicolas Cage's character. In the film, Cage plays an angel sent to help humans make their transition to the afterlife. When he falls in love with a human (played by Meg Ryan), he must choose between love and eternal life.

In a 2013 Songfacts interview with Rzeznik, he explained how the film influenced the song. "I was thinking about the situation of the Nicolas Cage character in the movie," he said. "This guy is completely willing to give up his own immortality, just to be able to feel something very human. And I think, 'Wow! What an amazing thing it must be like to love someone so much that you give up everything to be with them.' That's a pretty heavy thought."


"Iris" is about a person with an invisible identity no one understands. Then, he finds true love. He wants his true love to know that he exists and that she is the only person in the world who can understand and love him - hence the last line, "I just want you to know who I am."
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This is one of those songs we've all heard but can't always identify because the title doesn't show up in the lyric. Johnny Rzeznik writes a lot of songs that don't have obvious titles, which is the case here; the most-repeated line is "I just want you to know who I am," which certainly doesn't have the mystique of "Iris."


Johnny Rzeznik chose the name "Iris" for the song after seeing the name of the country singer Iris DeMent in a magazine. This was confirmed in a 1999 interview with Goo's bass player Robby Takac in Addicted To Noise.


Johnny Rzeznik didn't assign a meaning to the title, but you're welcome to find a few interpretations based on the various definitions of "Iris." Here are three:

1) The colored part of the eye around the pupil

2) A purple flower

3) In Greek mythology, a goddess who left her messages in a rainbow

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