How John Rzeznik became the latest Disney lyricist

By: Jennifer H. Tomooka
Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2002

During an interview for his latest Disney animated project, TREASURE PLANET, producer Roy Conli (HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) discussed how Goo-Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik became involved with the project. Rzeznik composed and performed two songs for the film, "I'm Still Here (Jim's Theme)" and "Always Know Where You Are."

"Interestingly, Glen Keane (TREASURE's supervising animator for John Silver) came in early on with a CD [that had the song] 'Iris' on it," Conli relates. "We were looking at Irish bands [and] we knew we wanted a kind of Irish flavor and lilt to this thing. There was a certain kind of Irish percussive thing that was going on in 'Iris' that we really liked."

What really sealed the deal in Conli's mind was how beautifully "Iris" matched the emotions in the film it was written for, CITY OF ANGELS.

"I saw a copy of CITY OF ANGELS and saw how well that song fit in and so we called John in," says Conli. "We played for him the story reel, which at that time, probably [had only] 10 minutes of animation and the rest of it [was] story. At the end of it, he just was blown away because he totally related with Jim and he saw where we were going with this guy. He came back about four weeks later. He had maybe two or three lines of dialogue, and started [working out the percussion for the song]. From that we could feel the excitement for what the performance would be. And then a couple weeks later he came back with the lyric."


TREASURE's producer couldn't be happier with Rzeznik's contributions to the film, as they add a layer of emotion that can't be completely expressed in the animation.

"The lyric was brilliant because the great thing about how John writes for film is that he writes from a poetic standpoint instead of a narrative standpoint," explains Conli. "Because when you are seeing something on film, you don't want to just re-encapsulate it by what the narrative is. You want to somehow just reinforce it from the poetic and he's able to do that. I think he did that with both songs."

TREASURE PLANET opens November 27.

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