As Ebuka Okorie of Stanford University prepared to shoot a free throw at a recent postseason college basketball game, a hush fell over the crowd. And then a lonely voice pierced the silence with an instantly recognizable lyric.
“AND I DON’T WANT THE WORLD TO SEE ME,” a drum major in the University of Pittsburgh’s band screamed, “’CAUSE I DON’T THINK THAT THEY’D UNDERSTAND.”
The moment, audible on the national broadcast of the game, created an internet sensation. And it was yet another moment where “Iris,” the anthemic 1998 ballad by the Goo Goo Dolls, showed itself to be culturally resonant once again almost 30 years later.
“Iris” is a song that millennials never quite gave up on, but that members of Gen-Z have discovered and given new life. Most recently, this has come through a nostalgic social media trend in which people post pictures of themselves from the 1990s with “Iris” playing in the background, and the caption: “What were you like in the ’90s?” Courteney Cox posted pictures of her “Friends”-era outfits. John Stamos revisited his Uncle Jesse period on “Full House.” The Backstreet Boys flashed back to their commercial prime.
But even before this year, “Iris” was making a resurgence. Last year, it was among the most streamed songs in the United States — in part because it was featured in the movie “Deadpool & Wolverine,” as well as in the Apple TV series “Shrinking.” That prompted John Rzeznik, the singer and guitarist who helped form the Goo Goo Dolls in Buffalo in the mid-1980s, to tell The Wall Street Journal last year that this was — somehow — the “biggest our band has ever been.”
In 2025, “Iris” reached 338 million streams in the United States, where it was the most-streamed song from the 1990s, according to the tracking firm Luminate. A spokesman for Spotify, where “Iris” has been streamed more than three billion times, said the song had appeared every day so far this year in its Global Top 50 chart, and 60 times in the Top 25, peaking at No. 15.
This month, the D.J. Steve Aoki released a remix of “Iris.” The new version came about after Rzeznik joined Aoki, whose audiences skew younger, for a performance of the song at the Stagecoach festival last year.
“When you see it happening in front of you, this bridge between the newer generation and a classic track, that’s when the magic starts to happen in my head,” Aoki said in an interview.
“Iris” was, in some ways, lightning in a bottle. Rzeznik was invited to contribute a track to the 1998 film “City of Angels” starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan at a time when people still bought soundtrack albums. The Goo Goo Dolls had one hit under their belt: the 1995 single “Name.” Rzeznik was coming off a divorce and had writer’s block. Seeing a scene from the film helped break Rzeznik’s fog.
“I just love that concept of, ‘Yeah, I’m so in love with you, I will give up everything for you,’” Rzeznik said on the podcast “Song Exploder” last year. “You want to feel so bad, even if it feels bad. And this helped snap me out of the writer’s block. To have the script and a film, instead of just trying to pull stuff out of thin air.”
Rzeznik wrote the song that night, and Brad Silberling, the film’s director, recalled being “floored” by the demo. (The version used in the movie is an acoustic version of the song.)
“‘Iris’ just has this unabashed heart on its sleeve,” Silberling said in an interview. “It’s the song of yearning, but it’s from a dude. To be that open and explicit and yet still muscular and anthemic, that’s just a really rare combo.”
“Iris” is an unusual hit song by a rock band better known for its punk origins. A mandolin is prominent in the introduction. There’s an eight-piece orchestra. Rzeznik used a nonstandard guitar tuning — four strings are tuned to a D in different octaves, and the top E string isn’t used at all — to put the song in a different register.
“The open tuning of the guitar, it kind of instantly — inherently — has that nostalgic sort of feeling,” said Justin Craig, the musical director for the Tony Award-winning play “Stereophonic.” One of Craig’s collaborators, the songwriter Abby Hamilton, said the ballad was “the most beautiful way to say ‘I love you’ to someone.”
“Iris” was an immediate hit, spending 18 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts and sending the Goo Goo Dolls to a new stratosphere of fame. But in recent years, the song has found itself being heard by new audiences, both old and young, in various genres. In 2021, Rzeznik appeared onstage at a Billy Joel concert to sing the song. He did the same at a Demi Lovato concert in 2022, and then last year Rzeznik performed “Iris” at Lovato’s wedding. The Goo Goo Dolls played the song during last year’s season finale of “American Idol,” sharing vocals with the finalist Mattie Pruitt. In the fall, the band played an NPR Tiny Desk concert, which has been viewed nearly 2.5 million times on YouTube. Last month, Apple Music introduced a series where artists perform their most-beloved song at the streaming service’s Los Angeles studio. Their first guest? You guessed it.
Notable younger artists who have covered “Iris”= include Machine Gun Kelly, the teenage rock band Trueblood and Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers (in a duet).
Brian Newman, a longtime collaborator with, and musical director for, Lady Gaga, added the song to his own performances months ago, only to phase it out.
“It just felt like everybody was doing it,” he said. “And then I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not cool anymore, it’s not a fresh new thing.’ Somebody else is doing it. It’s all over the internet.”
It is on social media — particularly TikTok — where millions of younger listeners have discovered the song. The Goo Goo Dolls aren’t the first act to find an unexpected burst of popularity among Gen Z. In 2020, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit “Dreams” surged back onto the charts after it accompanied a widely shared TikTok video of a man skateboarding and showing off his “morning vibes.” TikTok and the show “Stranger Things” helped resurrect the 1985 Kate Bush hit “Running Up That Hill” in 2022.
The “What were you like in the ’90s?” trend is steeped in nostalgia, a throwback to an era before screens dominated our lives The longing in “Iris” provides an ideal backdrop for such recollections, Jennifer Billinson, an assistant professor in the Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries at Syracuse University, said in an email.
”Life is difficult right now for so many and for so many reasons,” said Billinson, who has studied the connection between popular music and emotion. “It makes sense that we have rose-colored glasses for a time we perceive as simpler and less complicated.”
Lisa Velez, the singer known as Lisa Lisa, said she took part in the trend because she found the Goo Goo Dolls song “relatable.” Hearing the song on the radio in the 1990s “woke me up,” she recalled, and broke her own writer’s block.
“You get more out of a song from back then than you do today,” she said.
“Listen to the lyrics,” she added. “It’s beautiful. It takes you there.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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