BY ALAN SCULLEY
Special to Florida Weekly
Dolls bring a new album, new mindset to SunFest

A lot of the talk surrounding the Goo Goo Dolls as the band goes on tour this spring behind its latest album, “Magnetic” (and a new 5-song acoustic EP, “Warner Sound Sessions Live”) is centering on how life is better in the band than it was when the group last went through the album-making process.

That tour circles around to West Palm Beach, when the band plays SunFest (9:30 p.m. May 2).

Some of the good vibes reflect recent events in the lives of the Goo Goo Dolls’ two founding members. Singer/guitarist John Rzeznik got married to his longtime girlfriend Melina Gallo, while bassist Robby Takac became a father.

But Mr. Takac says things have also taken a turn for the better with issues relating directly to the band. The root of the problem — although it was a problem that most bands would love to have — can be traced back to the 1998 Goo Goo Dolls album, “Dizzy Up The Girl.” It was a blockbuster album, selling 3 million copies and spawning four top 10 hit singles (including the ballad “Iris,” which topped Billboard magazine’s airplay chart for a recordbreaking 18 weeks).

Suddenly, the Goo Goo Dolls, which had already enjoyed significant success with the 1995 album “A Boy Named Goo” (it included the hit single “Name”), had reached the top echelons of popularity. With that success, though, came a side effect — the pressure from the band’s label, Warner Bros. Records, to repeat the success of “Dizzy Up The Girl.”

That weight of these expectations, Mr. Takac said, was felt for the next dozen years and through three subsequent studio albums — “Gutterflower” (2002), “Let Love In (2006) and “Something for the Rest of Us” (2010).

“I think there was a lot of a lot of pressure with the ‘Gutterflower,’ ‘Let Love In’ and ‘Something for the Rest of Us’ trilogy there. There was a lot of pressure to have another record with four top 10 songs again,” Mr. Takac said. Of course, it’s a small club of artists and bands that have made even one album with four top 10 hits. Bands that have done it more than once are in that much more exclusive company.

“There’s an intangible thing that happens when a record gets that big,” Mr. Takac said. “All the planets have lined up for this to happen.” But those statistics didn’t stop Warner Bros. from being disappointed when “Gutterflower” tallied only about 800,000 copies sold, according to Mr. Takac. Making matters worse, the diminished sales of “Gutterflower” came as profound changes were starting to happen in the music industry as a whole.

Consumers were starting to download albums in big numbers, taking a mighty bite out of record sales. Panic set in with labels, and the desperation that was settling in at major labels was felt within his band.

“I’m trying to think of the right way to say this,” Mr. Takac said. “It was a difficult thing to incorporate into the creative process. When things don’t react like some folks in the industry think they should, blame gets placed in all sorts of inappropriate places.” Things got particularly difficult as the band started turning its attention to the “Something for the Rest of Us” project. “Let Love In” had been a decent success — with three singles going top 10 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40 chart. But again, it fell well short of the heights of “Dizzy Up The Girl.”

As Mr. Rzeznik — the group’s chief songwriter — began work on what would become “Something for the Rest of Us,” he ran into a severe case of writer’s block. In time, he overcame that issue, but the recording of the album didn’t go as smoothly as the band had hoped, either.

“(Producer) Tim Palmer went in to do the whole of the record with us, but our schedules ended up sort of clashing and we weren’t quite done yet by the time Tim had moved on to the next project,” Mr. Takac said. “So we ended up bringing some other producers in and they would work on some of the songs with us and we decided to cut another song at the end of the process.”

Having gone through three albummaking cycles that had their share of difficulties, Mr. Rzeznik, Mr. Takac and the other member of the band — drummer Mike Malinin — were determined to make the writing and recording process for “Magnetic” easier and more fun.

As far back as “Let Love In,” Mr. Rzeznik had started collaborating with outside writer/producers, and found he liked the co-writing experience. He continued to make that a priority on “Something for the Rest of Us” and into “Magnetic.” What co-writing didn’t address was the challenge of trying to record an entire album of songs and complete an album in a single recording session.

“It gets difficult when you have 13 or 14 songs to finish and you’re trying to finish them all at the same time,” Mr. Takac said. So for “Magnetic,” the band decided to tackle the project one song at a time. Mr. Rzeznik would get together with a songwriter/producer (Gregg Wattenberg and John Shanks were the chief collaborators), and write the song. Then Mr. Takac and Mr. Malinin would arrive to help arrange and flesh out the song and then record the finished track. Once the band was satisfied with the song, Mr. Rzeznik would move on to another song and the process would be repeated.

Mr. Takac, who wrote two songs for the new album, said this approach freshened and energized the albummaking process on “Magnetic.” “I think the last record (“Something for the Rest of Us”) was a bit of an arduous process,” Mr. Takac said. “We wanted to do all we could to not end up in that same trap we’d been in for the last couple of records, which was getting trapped under this pile of songs and having to crawl out and see how you fare by the time you get out from underneath the pile. I think this time there was never really a pile of songs because we had basically finished each one before we moved onto the next.”

Whether this approach resulted in a better album may depend on musical tastes. “Something for the Rest of Us” saw the band rocking a bit more, as Mr. Rzeznick frequently wrote about the tough times of people in the teeth of a recession. “Magnetic,” though, shifts back toward tuneful mid-tempo pop tunes and ballads in the tradition of hits like “Iris,” “Name” and “Slide.”

Lyrically, Rzeznick returns to the more personal, romantic themes of the band’s most popular albums. For fans who liked the scrappier rock sound of early Goo Goo Dolls albums like the early ‘90s albums “Hold Me Up” (1990), “Superstar Car Wash” (1993) and “A Boy Named Goo” (1995) — a sound that often earned the band comparisons to the Replacements — the move back to mainstream pop territory will probably be disappointing.

But the songs on “Magnetic” are well crafted and have lots of melodic appeal. The Goo Goo Dolls will undoubtedly squeeze some of the new songs into its hit-filled live set, although crafting a set list has become a. challenge.

“After 10 albums it gets tough to pare it down to 90 minutes,” Mr. Takac said. “We’ve been lucky to have a lot of songs people like to hear. I guess that’s a good problem to have.”