Canter Bridge

It’s not the best idea to get to know a band by way of a greatest hits album. It’s the Cliff Notes approach to music, worthy only to the degree that it leads to deeper immersion.

My son gave me this CD for Christmas. Prior to this, I knew the Goo Goo Dolls mostly via the preternaturally beautiful `Better Days’. But I’m beginning to get it.

They could have chosen no better tune from their repertoire to introduce the album than `Let Love In’. The driving drums, the brooding but persuasive lead vocals, the trademark harmonization that you only really penetrate on a fifth hearing or so, they’re all present and accounted for in this first track. A guy wants to hear more.

The Dolls oblige with `Dizzy’, a very different, edgy, unleashed kind of sound employed as a paean to rough love, after which they work their way through a number of sturdy pieces before settling on the `Feel the Silence’. This tune leans towards the more balladesque end of the GGD continuum, yet with a punchy energy that is altogether convincing. The lyrics wax evocative and mildly drunk with well-spoken pathos, an almost creedal statement of Complicated Love:

You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry
All you remember now
Is what you feel

The truth remains
In midnight conversations
I asked for this moment
But you turned away

Sad like a lonely child
Broken the day you’re born
I held the light to you
But I was so vain

And you remain
A promise unfulfilled
I ask you for more
But you push me away

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside
Everything means more now than
Words could explain

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside us
Looking for something more to say
I don’t know where I’m going
Only know where I been
But you move through my soul like a hurricane wind
We’ve been so lost for so long
I don’t know how to get back again
And we’re drowning in the water
That flows under this bridge
When you’re fighting the current
You forget how to live
And I wanted to reach you but I don’t know where to begin
And you remain
A promise unfulfilled until today

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside
Everything means more now than
Words could explain
And if we feel the silence
Leaving this all behind us
When it’s gone what will you say

How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on

You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry

Could there be a more complete and provocative juxtaposition of two hits than this melancholy ode followed by the battered-but-still-alive hope of the band’s finest hit? That would be `Better Days’, whose melody any Goo Goo Dolls fan is probably already humming:

And you ask me what I want this year
And I try to make this kind and clear
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days
Cuz I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings
And desire and love and empty things
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

And it’s someplace simple where we could live
And something only you can give
And that’s faith and trust and peace while we’re alive
And the one poor child that saved this world
And there’s 10 million more who probably could
If we all just stopped and said a prayer for them

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

I wish everyone was loved tonight
And somehow stop this endless fight
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

After hearing these anthemic pieces a reviewer’s quota of times, this greatest hits album has done its job: I’ll be listening to more of the Dolls.