Big Machine

Album: Gutterflower (2002)
Charted: 64
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Songfacts®:

  • Like the album cut "What A Scene," this is about the fame-obsessed way of life in Los Angeles - something the band wasn't used to in their traditional, working class hometown of Buffalo, New York. This time around, lead singer Johnny Rzeznik is caught up in an unrequited romance with a girl who is caught up in the LA scene.
  • Rzeznik calls this his "disco song." He explained: "I'm really horrible at programming drum machines, but this was like pattern 74 on my drum machine, which said 'disco.' I called all my friends and said, 'Check this out, this is my disco song!'"
  • This is the second single from the band's seventh studio album. It made its best showing on the Adult Top 40, where it peaked at #10.
  • Gutterflower was the second consecutive Goo Goo Dolls album produced by Green Day's longtime producer, Rob Cavallo. Another Cavallo-produced album to drop in 2002 was Phil Collins' Testify.
  • The album art features a young girl cupping a flower in her hands. It sounds like a simple enough shoot but, according to Goo bassist Robby Takac, it was chaos thanks to the ornery child model. "The girl was going crazy," he recalled in a 2005 interview. "She punched John in the nuts… She ate all the flowers, so that flower you see in her hand is superimposed into the photo. We started taking [the photos] without them because as soon as we would put them in her hand she would eat them. The last we saw of her, her mother was dragging her out with both feet dragging off the ground because she had just whipped a bowl of spaghetti on the ground."

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