Johnny Rzeznik has reached the point in his career where he doesn’t have to pretend the machine still makes sense. The Goo Goo Dolls frontman has the catalog, the Diamond plaques, and the tour schedule, but on Chaos in Bloom he sounds less like a guy trying to keep up and more like someone pulling the emergency brake and asking, “What are we even doing?”
One answer: he’s producing his own band again.
“I wanted to produce the record,” he says. “Sometimes your original intent can get lost in translation when you work with a lot of people.” Hire a producer, hand over the reins, and suddenly everyone else has opinions about what your band is supposed to sound like. This time, he wanted final say. “I did want people’s input at certain points,” he adds, “but I wanted to still have final control over what was going on.”
Control is a recurring theme here, which is hilarious given that the whole record is about how little anyone has.
Rzeznik talks about Chaos in Bloom like a reaction to the last few albums—those big, polished “produced records,” as he calls them. This one, he wanted more “edgy” and “angsty,” a little less shiny escapism for the algorithm. “I wasn’t as concerned about what the record company thought,” he says. “I just wanted to do something that I was really proud of. It didn’t have to have a big hit single. I didn’t want to chase that.”
Instead, he chased a feeling. Locked inside for a couple of years, watching the world bend in real time, he leaned into the discomfort. “It was a very weird time,” he says. “I think it’s affected the psyche of the world. A lot of music now is very escapist in nature, and I didn’t really want to do that.”
You can hear that right away in “Day After Day,” which might be the record’s core sample of dread. It starts with those uneasy piano chords that sound like they’re walking down a hallway that gets narrower with every step. “That was definitely one of the darker moments,” Rzeznik says. “We got up in the morning, I’m sitting there with a piano, bing bing bing, recording it on my phone, like, ‘Okay, what are you going to say?’”
What he says is basically a dispatch from a country that has decided to just stop acknowledging the elephant in the room. Division, paranoia, the “unbearable feeling of being completely out of control.” He laughs at the idea of being overtly political, but he’ll admit that “the song kind of encapsulates the zeitgeist of what’s going on in our society at this point.” Then he hides it in a chorus you can still hum in the car. “I’ve always loved songs where you slip a dark lyric under a catchy piece of music,” he says. “Then it sticks to your brain.”
Because if the pandemic didn’t screw with your head, raising a five-year-old in this version of reality will. “I just wonder where we’re going,” he says. “As a people, as a society. I have a five-year-old now and when I think about the world that’s out there for her, it gives me anxiety. There seems to be this mad dash to make human beings obsolete.” He talks about power and money concentrating “into fewer and fewer hands,” how work isn’t just a paycheck, it’s dignity. Losing that isn’t an abstract idea; it was a very real question for him when touring shut down. “Am I ever going to be able to take care of my family?” he remembers thinking. “How long is this going to go on? Where are we heading?”
And then, because the universe likes to double down, there’s social media.
“Sometimes I feel like social media is a freak show circling the drain,” he says, fully aware that the entire music ecosystem now lives there. Chaos in Bloom hits that head on with “Yeah, I Like You,” a satirical snapshot of influencer culture and the new fame economy. “I kept hearing so much about TikTok from everybody during the recording process,” he says. “I avoid social media, but I was working in a studio where a lot of TikTok artists were coming in. It just looked exhausting.”
The song opens with a perfect little horror movie meet-cute: “I met the queen of Generation Fame / she said, ‘I’m sorry’ / I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’” Rzeznik laughs. “She stares at him like he’s crazy. ‘How could you not know who I am? I have 10 million followers.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m not one of them, so I have no idea who you are.’” From there, the song follows a guy watching this hyper-curated life that looks glamorous and feels hollow, a fun-sounding pop single that’s quietly screaming about attention addiction. “We’re all desperately seeking attention in this modern world of the future,” he says. “Everyone used to be famous for 15 minutes. Now everyone’s famous for 15 seconds. And infamy is as good as fame.”
For all the doomsday talk, Chaos in Bloom is still a rock record, not a TED Talk. Rzeznik chased the sound of the band he hears onstage: faster tempos, heavier guitars, a little bit of danger. He holed up in a studio in the woods, cut to tape, and let the songs wobble where modern records usually get sanded flat. “There’s a certain aggression in the live versions of our songs,” he says. “They’re always a little faster, the guitar sounds are a little heavier, there’s more abandon. I wanted that push and pull. I didn’t want to just edit the crap out of the drums.”
He’ll tell you he’s a “crap producer” because he went over budget, but he also got to hang amps from the ceiling, chase old-production tricks, and make a track like “You Are the Answer” feel like it could’ve lived in the ’70s, ’80s, or now. “That song just fell together really nicely,” he says. “I feel like it was really well written, whether it was on purpose or by accident.”
Underneath all the philosophizing, he still understands the job. “I never forget that what I do is entertain people,” he says. “I like to think of myself more as a songwriter than anything else, because that’s what has lasting value. But I like to entertain.” Which is why he has zero patience for artists who refuse to play the songs that made them famous. “You spend $200 to go see them and they don’t play their biggest hit,” he says. “That song bought you a mansion. What is your problem? You’re fucking on your audience by being a pretentious prima donna. Don’t do that.”
Chaos in Bloom exists in that tension: a veteran songwriter trying to leave something of value behind while the culture sprints toward shorter attention spans and higher follower counts. Searching for truth might be, as he sings, “a fool’s game,” but he’s still in it, still writing, still swinging. In a world curated by algorithms, Rzeznik’s version of rebellion is simple: make a record that sounds like actual human beings in a room, say what you see, and then go out and play the hits.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
