Notbroken

Goo Goo Dolls' singer and guitarist Johnny Rzeznik was inspired to pen this song by a traumatic situation faced by a casualty during the occupation of Iraq. He told the story behind this song to Artist Direct: "It's based on some communication I had with a woman whose husband was a soldier in Iraq. He's paralyzed now, and he doesn't want to come home because he's afraid that she's not going to see him the way he was. He has a huge amount of anxiety and he's been hiding out from her because he's afraid she's not going to think he's the man that he was. She loves him very, very much, and her letter really moved me. I wanted to write a love letter for her to him, you know, that, 'I'm here, I love you and nothing's going to change.' I was imagining the anxiety that this guy's feeling. He's a kid like 26 or 27. You've got your whole life ahead of you and you're doing the right thing and then all of a sudden - boom. In an instant, your life completely changes. Life will always come at you on its own terms and we have to learn how to face that and adapt. I just wanted to speak for other people, more so than myself, on this album."

The music video, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, closely follows Rzeznik's vision for the story of a wounded soldier who returns home to his waiting wife. Estrada also directed the clip for Clipping.'s "Work Work."

Something For The Rest Of Us, the band's ninth studio album, was released four years after its predecessor, Let Love In. Rzeznik chalked up the delay to both personal and professional issues. "I wanted to really dig deep and there are a million songs I threw away, like, 'Nah, it's not good enough. I wanna do something different. I wanna do something better, go deeper," he explained to Star News Online. "I also wanted to have a life with my girlfriend for a while. I owed it to her to spend some time with her and be normal and be in one place. That was kind of important."