Robby Takac knows he isn't in Buffalo anymore. Walking into his accommodations for his weekend stay at this plush Las Vegas resort, even this veteran of the rock and roll lifestyle is taken aback in amazement. This is one of the most opulent rooms I've been in in my entire life,” says the co-founder of the Goo Goo Dolls, celebrating their 20th year together this year.
     That's no insignificant observation for someone who seemingly has had the opportunity to have “been there/done that” for such a long time. The bassist/vocalist clearly is impressed. “It's bigger than my house,” he says, laughing. He begins to tick off what he sees: eight TVs, two whirlpools, a wet bar, and the list goes on.
     “What, you didn't have this back in Buffalo?” he is asked in jest. Takac smiles and says that when he does have opportunity to return to his native upstate New York, as he and the band recently did in preparing their new album, %Let Love In%, he is perfectly happy just to sleep in an old studio.
     His relocation to L.A. has not erased an appreciation for those solid, lack of pretense, Buffalo roots; nor has it for friend and bandmate, singer/guitarist John Rzeznik, also now a Los Angeles resident. That's what led them back to Buffalo. They wanted to get away from the glitter and find the artistic inspiration again in their home so that they could return to the West Coast to record.
     Along with drummer Mike Malinin they went to work in a century-old Masonic ballroom in Buffalo. “We really felt like we needed to leave that weird business [on the West Coast],” Takac explains. The work ethic necessary to sustain a career, particularly one in music, came naturally in Buffalo. “People learn to dig the car out of the snow before they go to work for eight hours, and then they do the same to come home. It's a hardworking town. You just slug it out,” he says.
     Two decades of slugging it out in the music business is a real benchmark for the Goo Goo Dolls, known for such radio staples as “Name,” “Iris,” “Slide” and “Here is Gone.” “I can't even believe it sometimes. I have to pinch myself and remember I'm actually living this life. It's pretty great,” Takac says. “On the other hand, there is a lot of hard work and crazy stuff that has happened over that time, good and bad things. It all comes with the vagabond nature of this business.”
     Keeping it fresh for them is an ongoing challenge, he says. “For the first time in our career we felt like we may have, and I still question whether or not we had, repeated ourselves [before recording the new CD]. Still, that's a horrible thing for us to feel. I had not felt that way before. There were a lot of reasons: externally and internally and musically and the business world. I think a lot of advice was flying around that sort of left the band on a shaky leg.”
     So they approached the new album project with the idea they needed to inject new life into the band, he explains. That started with working with veteran producer Glen Ballard for the first time. “It was us sort of letting go and entrusting someone we had never worked with in our life. We've worked with two or three producers pretty much our whole career. That's a big move for us,” he says. Once again, they drew on that Buffalo work ethic. “We worked really hard for six months to make sure what we were stepping out with was real and really true to us before we put it in anyone else's hands,” Takac says.
     Ballard took a different approach than past Goos producer Rob Cavallo. “The process was so different than Rob's. Rob's was, 'Let's get in there and get it done.' Glen was way more freeform. He had a great way of making you feel. When you walked in front of that mic, he would say, 'There's a reason why you two are there. It's time for you to do something important.' It was a very freeing sort of feeling.” He adds, “Rob makes tremendous records, by the way.”
     This time around, Takac says, it was about throwing caution to the wind. In a sense, he sees the new album representing a rebirth of sorts. “This band has been through a few rebirths, and I think they are more internal rebirths than they might be [noticeable] to the general listening public,” he says. “I think we began a rebirth of the group. Regardless of if this sells a billion records or not, we are at the point where we can still be out there delivering these songs. We felt we made a step forward with this album.”
     Takac says he just hopes that people enjoy the CD and “keep pulling it out. There are a few records I keep pulling out. I hope at some point we made one of those for people.”
     Rzeznik and Takac renewed their writing partnership for this album. “In the 1980s John and I wrote together most of the time. In the early 1990s we started to learn to express ourselves lyrically and musically alone. It led to us writing more on our own. And then there was John's explosion as a songwriter. He went in a billion different directions. In order for our records to grow and get larger, the songwriting process grew into what it did, a separate thing.”
     When they began %Let Love In%, they made a conscious decision to approach the songwriting as a team. “It felt great,” he says. One of the primary lyrical themes that emerged is the idea of letting yourself be open to vulnerability. “That's a tough thing these days. It's very easy to cocoon and cut yourself off from the world, with the Internet and hand sanitizers and everything else,” he says. “There's a generation of fear out there. It's much harder these days to let someone into your life to affect it.”
     The optimistic “Better Days,” a song Rzeznik wrote on his own for what he originally intended for a holiday release for NBC, was adopted by CNN as an anthem for the recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina. That's the beauty of music, says Takac. “You don't know what's someone's thinking about a song and how it will affect them. There's a lot of gray area there [and a lot of room for interpretation],” he says. “That's really awesome.”
     He gets a similar feeling onstage. “Watching some kids standing in the front row singing a song back to you that they took the time to learn is a great feeling,” he says. He believes the relationship between the players and the audience is a special one. “I really, really love that feeling. It's a connection a lot of people don't get to experience.” Those who are seeing the Goo Goo Dolls for the first time might be surprised to find the show “a little louder than they expected,” he adds. “The songs on the radio appeal to the main population. Sometimes that doesn't show the more aggressive side of the group.”
     Whether it is live or on CD, Takac believes the band's music touches people because they write from a place that is real. “We try to express things that people feel; real issues people deal with,” he says.
     The members of the Goo Goo Dolls have dealt with those issues. It is chemistry that has held it all together for 20 years, he adds. Chemistry is what determines whether it will work or not, Takac reasons. “In the long term of a band, sometimes that is more important than anything. You're not going to get great songs from a band if you don't want to be there.”