Songfacts®:

• This is the third single and title track of the Goo Goo Dolls' eighth studio album. Lead singer Johnny Rzeznik wrote the anthemic tune with producer Glen Ballard and Gregg Wattenberg (Train's "Hey Soul Sister"). On the surface, it seems Rzeznik has let love in by allowing a girl to break down his walls, but he's really singing about the need for love in a hate-filled society.
  
  "I have been writing more about social and political stuff lately. It's scary, worrying times down here right now," Rzeznik told Canada.com. "People think I just write songs about girls, but they're not really about girls. It's just a metaphor that works for me. I can try to address some social issues in a sort of cryptic way, but writing about politics has never really been my thing."
• The band's previous album, Gutterflower, was a commercial success with more than 700,000 copies sold, but in the eyes of the record label, it was a failure in comparison to their monstrous 4-million seller Dizzy Up The Girl. The band tried to figure out where they went wrong and decided they needed to bring in some new collaborators, including Alanis Morissette hitmaker Glen Ballard.
  
  "He's such a great producer," Rzeznik told Vice magazine's Noisey in 2015. "That record sounds so good! There was a certain amount of strength, this perfect balance of strength and sentimentality in the guitars. Glen was the first producer that was so compassionate with what the 'artist' wanted to do. It was almost like a psychologist. He wanted to know what we were trying to say here. He didn't kiss our asses, like we were writing in an echo chamber and him telling us it was good. He was very, very adept at steering us in the right decision."
• With just over 500,000 copies sold, the Gold-certified album wasn't as commercially successful as its predecessor, but Rzeznik ranked it as his second favorite Goo Goo Dolls album behind 2013's Magnetic.
• The bulk of the album came together in the Goo Goo Dolls' hometown of Buffalo, New York. Failing to find their creative spark in Los Angeles, the band retreated to their old stomping ground in the midst of a freezing winter and set up shop in a century-old Masonic ballroom. Reinvigorated, the trio worked 10 to 12 hours a day on material they brought back to Glen Ballard in LA. Bassist Robby Takac recalled in a 2006 interview: "By the time we walked into Glen's place, which was his house at the time, we had sessions that were essentially musically together. There were not any sounds we would have kept, but with the vibe of Buffalo and all those things; those vibes were brought right into his house."
• The music video, directed by Paul Brown, features the band performing against a backdrop of images that reflect a range of social issues. Takac described the concept to MIT's newspaper The Tech: "The video deals with poverty, the video deals with politics, social issues, military action, with the dawn of the nuclear age, with fear, with the dawn of the nuclear family; the concept of love is much larger than a boy and girl holding hands at the park."
• The girl on the album cover is Danielle Fillmore - not, as many fans assumed, actress Natalie Portman - a model the band spotted on a modeling agency's website. Rzeznik explained he was drawn to Fillmore because he could sense a depth behind her facial expression. Shots of the model are also included in the video for the album's second single, "Stay With You."
• Around the time of the album's release, the Goo Goo Dolls began working with ad execs on creating music and licensing their existing music for commercial spots. It wasn't a big stretch. They'd allowed their songs to be used in media many times before - their seminal hit "Iris" debuted in the movie City Of Angels - but it took the band much longer to go the advertising route. By the mid-2000s, the world of multimedia was expanding and the Goos realized they needed to branch out beyond radio if they wanted their music to be heard. "Artists can have a say in not wanting to be exploited in this way or that, but these days, you have to embrace other forms of exposure," Rzeznik told Billboard. As long as the brand makes sense, he didn't mind. But perhaps it made a little too much sense when "Let Love In" was used in an ad for Trojan condoms, which riled sensitive viewers over the all-too-specific title.