We all know the story. The Goo Goo Dolls’ front man John Rzeznik had been a huge fan of The Replacements for a long time. If memory serves well, they even opened for them in a few occasions before 1992. The band wrote the demo for “We Are The Normal“, just the rough, instrumental version of it, and sent it via regular mail to Paul Westerberg, the lead singer. He wrote the lyrics for it and sent the material back to the Goo’s.
In reality, the Goo Goo Dolls did not only send him just the one song, and he did not only write lyrics for the one song. The post quoted below, taken from an old message board (Archived version here) provides some more interesting details:
2.3.6) We Are The Normal
Here’s a quick summary. The Goo Goo Dolls sent a 4 song almost instrumental (1 song had some lyrics) demo to Paul and asked him to give birth to some lyrics. “We Are the Normal” and “So Far Away”, which appeared on the demo, were the two Paul wrote lyrics to. Paul sent them back and the Goo Goo Dolls retained the lyrics to “…Normal” and archived the ones for “So Far Away”.
“We Are the Normal” peaked at #5 (charted 10 weeks) on Billboard Modern Rock tracks on 3/6/93.
An Old Post In A Message Board
Temple of Goo - The rarest Goo Goo Dolls releases, for real Goo fans only 