Iris: how many times the Goo Goo Dolls have played it live

Some songs get retired. Some get rationed. “Iris” has done neither. Since the Goo Goo Dolls first played it on 6 April 1998, setlist.fm, the fan-built archive of concert setlists, has logged 1,512 performances of it by the band. That's in about three of every four Goo Goo Dolls setlists logged since then, through 28 years of touring and two chart revivals.

A song for a film about an angel

“Iris” was written for the soundtrack of City of Angels, the 1998 film in which Nicolas Cage plays an angel who falls in love with a human. The film's co-producer Bob Cavallo and his son, the record producer Rob Cavallo, took musicians along to a viewing of an early cut to find songs for it. Bob brought Alanis Morissette, who came back with “Uninvited”. Rob brought the Goo Goo Dolls, and the same day John Rzeznik called him with a power ballad called “Iris”.

Rzeznik told Songfacts in 2013 that he'd been thinking about Cage's character: someone ready to give up immortality just to feel something human, and what it would mean to love someone that much. Nobody called Iris appears in the film, and the word never comes up in the lyrics. Rzeznik took the name from the country-folk singer Iris DeMent, after spotting it in a concert listing in the LA Weekly.

It's an unusual song to play. Rzeznik tunes his guitar to B-D-D-D-D-D, the lowest string to B and the other five all to D in different octaves, and the time signature moves between 4/4 in the intro and interludes and 6/8 in the verses and chorus.

1998: the first night

The single came out in Australia on 1 April 1998 and went to US radio on 7 April. The day before that, on 6 April, the band played it at MTV Live in New York, the first performance in setlist.fm's archive. On the radio it went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart and stayed there for 18 weeks, a record that lasted until “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd in 2020. It wasn't allowed on the Hot 100 itself at first, because there was no commercial single in the US. When the rules changed on 5 December 1998, it went straight in at No. 9.

It also reached No. 1 in Australia, Canada and Italy, and its album, Dizzy Up the Girl, released on 22 September 1998, became the band's biggest, certified five times platinum. On stage, “Iris” went into the set straight away: setlist.fm logs it at 53 of the band's 59 setlists in 1998 and 146 of 162 in 1999.

The industry noticed too. At the 41st Grammy Awards “Iris” was nominated for Record of the Year and for Pop Performance by a Duo or Group, and Rzeznik was nominated for Song of the Year. In 2012 Billboard put it at No. 1 on its list of the top 100 songs from the first 20 years of its Mainstream Top 40 chart, with “Slide” at No. 9 and “Name” at No. 24. In Ireland it is the 19th-best-selling single of all time, and in the UK it's now certified eight times platinum.

Every year since

What stands out in the numbers is how steady they are. There's no year since 1998 in which setlist.fm has no performance of “Iris”. The biggest years follow the biggest tours: 146 performances in 1999, 101 in 2002, 122 in 2010, 97 in 2011. The small years are the years with few logged shows: just 6 Goo Goo Dolls setlists in 2001 (“Iris” at 2 of them) and 9 in 2004 (4). In 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic shut most venues, the band has 19 logged setlists, and “Iris” is in 16.

It isn't quite every night. In a few years, such as 2003 and 2006, “Iris” appears in only about half the logged setlists. Fan-entered setlists are sometimes partial, a few songs from a festival slot or the first half of a show, so some of those gaps may be missing data rather than missing songs; setlist.fm can't tell the two apart, and neither can we. Since 2022 the rate has been high and steady: 254 performances in 296 logged setlists, about 86%, and 62 of 67 in 2025.

Not even their most-played song

Here's the surprise. “Iris” is the Goo Goo Dolls' signature song, but on setlist.fm it isn't their most-played. “Name” has 1,557 performances and “Slide” 1,533, both just ahead of “Iris” at 1,512. “Name” had a head start: it was a top-five hit in 1995, three years before “Iris” existed. “Slide” came out in 1998, as the next single after “Iris”, and has been played slightly more ever since. Close behind are two more songs from Dizzy Up the Girl: “Broadway” (1,465) and “Black Balloon” (1,462).

In other words, a Goo Goo Dolls show isn't built around one song. It's built around a handful of late-1990s singles that have each been played around fifteen hundred times, and “Iris” is one of them.

Second and third lives

“Iris” keeps finding new audiences away from the stage. In October 2011, after auditionees sang it on The X Factor, it re-entered the UK Singles Chart at No. 3, thirteen years after it first came out. In 2020 Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers released a cover, as Phoebe & Maggie, for one day only to raise money for Fair Fight, and it went to No. 1 on Billboard's Digital Song Sales chart. In 2024 the original turned up on the soundtrack of Deadpool & Wolverine and went back onto the Billboard charts. That November the RIAA certified it diamond, for ten million units in the US, and in its chart run since 2021 it has peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard Global 200.

Who else plays it

setlist.fm logs 3,066 performances of “Iris” by 221 artists, so more than half of all the live “Iris” performances it knows about are by someone other than the Goo Goo Dolls. The most frequent are Sleeping With Sirens, with 200, and New Found Glory, with 172; New Found Glory also put a cover on their 2007 album From the Screen to Your Stereo Part II. Dean Lewis (70), the country singers Josh Ross (68) and Mitchell Tenpenny (50), mgk (34) and twenty one pilots (27) have all played it too. John Rzeznik has played it 28 times on his own, away from the band, and Billy Joel has sung it live with them.

Tour by tour

1. 6 Apr 1998
   First performance on setlist.fm, at MTV Live in New York.
2. 1998–99
   Dizzy Up the Girl tour: 127 setlists logged. “Iris” at 199 of the 221 setlists logged across 1998 and 1999.
3. 2010
   141 setlists, the band's busiest logged year since 1999. “Iris” 122 times.
4. 2018
   Dizzy Up the Girl 20th Anniversary Tour: 30 setlists logged. “Iris” 56 times that year.
5. 2025
   Summer Anthem Tour 2025: 40 setlists. “Iris” at 62 of the 67 setlists logged that year.
6. 2026
   Las Vegas residency and more dates. 43 performances so far, the latest at Sea.Hear.Now on 20 September 2026.

How we counted

Every number here comes from setlist.fm, read on 23 October 2026. It's built by fans, who enter the setlists of shows they went to, so it's a good record of a touring band but not an official one: a missing or partial setlist means a missing performance. We counted only the Goo Goo Dolls themselves (John Rzeznik's solo shows are listed separately) and used setlist.fm's own totals of setlists per year. setlist.fm counts performances setlist by setlist, and we couldn't check every date one by one, so we call them performances rather than nights; in every year here the plays are no higher than the setlists logged. Chart facts come from Wikipedia's articles on the song and the album.

“Iris” sits with the songs bands never let go of. The Killers have played “Mr. Brightside” more than a thousand times, and both Gallagher brothers kept “Wonderwall” in their sets through sixteen years apart. Neil Diamond played “Sweet Caroline” 1,550 times, more than any other song he wrote. Other bands went the opposite way: Radiohead haven't played “Creep” since April 2018.