In advance of the release of the band's first Greatest Hits collection, I caught up with the Goo Goo Dolls founding member and bass player Robby Takac.
Bill: Congratualations on 21 years as a band.
Robby: Crazy, right? Yeah, it's crazy to me.
Bill: It looks like with the Greatest Hits collection there are 13 top 10 hits here...
Robby: Yeah, 13 top hits and also a song that we're going to work as a single and hope that people just think is a top 10 hit and it will be one, perhaps.
Bill: Is that the remix (of "Feel the Silence")?
Robby: Yeah, you know, it's funny. I guess we never thought of ourselves a band that needed a greatest hits record. I don't know why. I guess we don't really look at the band that way. You know, we read an article at some point that someone had sent us, and it said the band had 13 top 10 hits, and we said, "Oh, well that is a greatest hits album."
You know most bands' greatest hits records are a bunch of songs that were top 10 hits and a bunch of songs they love, which is awesome. That's where the idea for Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 came from. Why don't we do a Vol. 2 which is what's normally done with a greatest hits record and send out a bunch of our favorite songs. You know, that's probably what prompted that whole idea.
Bill: Can you tell me a little more about what's going to be on the second greatest hits set?
Robby: You know, we don't know yet, really. We've been spending a lot of time looking at a list of archival footage that's available to use from Warner Brothers...stuff from televison, VH1, older stuff that we had done years ago, and live recordings from PBS, those kind of places. So we really have quite a collection of unreleased live versions. We're gonna look through that list, and I think we talked about having a DVD and a couple of CDs package with, possibly, interactive software. That kind of stuff. We're pretty excited about it.
Bill: I know this is a hard question, but on the current greatest hits collection is there a favorite song or a most meaningful one for you?
Robby: That's kind of an impossible question for me to answer. We get asked it every time we do an interview. It's really hard. Obviously, I listen to every one, and some of those songs I've played thousands of times. So they probably hold a pretty special part of my heart, but at the same time I don't really want to sit there and listen to it, because it's one of those things that's played so many times through my head that I can't get to the turntable fast enough. I can't get to the audio device of choice quickly enough to shut it off.
At the same time they're songs that I love. I always feel that's a potentially loaded question.
Bill: The band has gone through some tough times in the past, but, from the outside, it seems you guys are in it for the long haul...
Robby: Well, the world changes, drastically, around us, and our world changes drastically. Within our little bubble things happen, and realizations occur along the way that make you look at what you do a little bit differently.
Like I said, it was hard to conceive of ourselves as a band that would release a greatest hits record. It was also difficult for us to conceive that there was an actual career in this thing for us...I think we had, along the way, watched the industry change around us. Just kind of out of what we do, this thing that we do, we just sort of stayed to it. I think that people kind of appreciated that.
We're certainly not flavor of the moment. I don't think we have been for a good 12 years, but at the same time we seem to be accruing fans.
