The Pin

Album: Boxes (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik told American Songwriter that this is the Boxes track he is most proud of. "It's a song about one of those places that you go to," he explained. "It's about someone who's really really longing to be accepted, and it doesn't happen, but you keep going back. That seems to be a theme in a lot of my music – where do I belong? Where do I fit? And I think a lot of people feel that way, which is nice that people relate to that."

    "I mean, it's not nice, but it's just how I think. I'm always an outsider, so I'm always looking in on everyone living their life, which gives me a good perspective to write about," Rzeznik continued. "But then it feels incredibly lonely."
  • With their 11th studio album, the alt-rock veterans wanted to explore outside the box with some new sounds, including synths, electronic effects, and hip-hop beats. Rzeznik told Entertainment Weekly: "I don't wanna live within the walls that I built, so we just broke them down. Everyone changes, you have to change. I didn't want to make the same record again."
  • Rzeznik wrote this with Drew Pearson, a producer and songwriter known for his work with Kesha, Switchfoot, and the Zac Brown Band.
  • For this track, Rzeznik took inspiration from John Lennon with the use of echo. "I'm a huge fan of that Lennon style," he told Sound & Vision. "We did a song called 'The Pin'… and I loved that song, because we used a big tape echo on it and an old spring reverb that we had that's the size of a refrigerator, and then this piano thing. And Lennon, he hated the sound of his own voice. On a lot of that Lennon solo stuff, they used this really heavy slapback on his vocal, and I thought it was really interesting because, to me, 'The Pin' was sort of this cross between Lennon and [David] Bowie, production-wise. I wanted to try to do that again on this album where we could, because I love that."

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