Why do you say the Goo Goo Dolls have never sounded better?
Robby Takac: We’ve been a three-piece band for a long time. Then we started playing with some other people. The first couple people we got were our friends; guys we knew. We went on a whole tour. By the end, we weren’t all as good of friends as we were. [Laughs] We learned a little bit about having people play with your band. Maybe they weren’t the right players. I’m not saying they weren’t good players. They just maybe weren’t the right ones. For the next one [tour], we had auditions. We hired two guys and they [became] really good friends of ours. I think we learned from that, too. Now, I think we knew pretty much what we wanted out of guys this time. I’m talking about as guys, too, not just musicians. These guys came on the scene, and it seemed to be what the doctor ordered for our band. We buckled down and rehearsed like we never have before. Now we’ve put ourselves in every piss-poor situation possible for the past five weeks. Going around the United States playing boats, Chinese
