Tag Archives: grunge

MOMENTOUS MONDAYS: INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF ALL TIME – WEEK 60: GOO GOO DOLLS

This upcoming band that I’m about to discuss was a band that I initially didn’t think I’d touch with a ten-foot pole, nor did I even have a good preconception on how this band actually was. You know when you sit down to write about something (or in the case of my blogs over the last year or so, someones), you come to the table with assumptions of what you’re about to write about, things you’ve believed over time, things you’ve heard from other people, and once you go through the musical journey yourself and listen to the artist in its entirety through all their songs and start to see the music that they really make, that what they create and stand for is so much different than what you were even led to believe? Maybe these sentences just aforementioned mean nothing to you, and now you’re just thinking that I am some over-analysing person who likes to over-think things. And that’s ok if you think that. But I’ve been on a journey of late, a good one. My eyes have been open to the wonderful music of artists gone by, from Josh Groban, Bryan Adams, Sara Bareilles and Lady A, to Lecrae, Hanson, John Mayer and Colbie Caillat, to name a few, and in each of these cases, I came into it with a certain idea in my head of what I thought that particular artist was going to be, and that wasn’t what it was…in a very, very good way. As I enter into my 60th blog of this series, discussing rock band Goo Goo Dolls, I came into it in a similar way- assuming that the band was only influential and impactful for their chart-topping hit ‘Iris’ and nothing else. Boy was I mistaken, in a way that I can say now that I was glad that I was.

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MOMENTOUS MONDAYS: INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF ALL TIME – WEEK 27: EVANESCENCE

‘…when we were making Evanescence I was a normal kid, going to school. But I guess not normal in the sense that I spent almost all of my free time working on making music. I’d be up until three in the morning, with headphones on, on my keyboard. My mom would complain in the morning that all she could hear all night was ‘thump, thump, thump’. But I just loved it. Being a composer, honestly, was my original dream. That’s why it’s so beautiful that I get to work with David Campbell and all these brilliant musicians on Synthesis [the latest album] – people who went to [music] school and didn’t cheat their way…I didn’t fit into a clique. For the most part I hung out by myself a lot. I really enjoy being able to be quiet and think…[now] it’s interesting. I almost feel like that wasn’t a choice [using sexual images to sell records] – I had to be who I was. What rock’n’roll is to me is being yourself, unapologetically, and not changing to fit within the machine. Being a female in the music industry a lot of the time means being overly sexualised. It was just kind of an easy, cheap way to get people to pay attention to you. I was like, that’s not who I am, and I’m not gonna pretend to be anything that I’m not…’

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