John Rzeznik says he's "maybe...halfway done" with writing for the next Goo Goo Dolls album, which he says will be "very uptempo and very sort of upbeat" as opposed to 2010's "darker" "Something For the Rest of Us."

"That (album) was just a reflection where my head was at... and trying to reflect what was going on in the world at the time, the economy and everything," Rzeznik tells Billboard.com. The new songs, he explains, "just sound a little happier than some of the material I've written in the past. Right now it just feels like a reflection of my head space, too. I don't think we're that much better than we were, but people are sort of calming down, and I think we're re-framing our expectations as a society. So I guess that's all you can do, really, is write what you are thinking and feeling."


Goo Goo Dolls Had Fun 'Blowing Things Up' on New Album

Rzeznik says he's been doing much of his writing "on my laptop, sitting in hotel rooms and backstage in the dressing room." He also has "a tiny space" in Los Angeles as well as a bedroom in his house in upstate New York, near his native Buffalo. "It's really kind of fun," he says, "because you can take a whole recording studio and it's in your laptop and do everything on it, so it's a lot easier to record on the road than it used to be."

Rzeznik says the Goos will road-test one of the new songs, "Last Hot Night In America," when the group hits the road with Michelle Branch and Parachute on July 7 in Muskegon, Mich. "It's a song about this dude who's basically fed up with everything, and he decides he's just going to go out and have a good time," Rzeznik says. "He's basically sitting in his room worrying about everything in his life, and he finally just says, 'Fuck it!' and he suits up and gets the hell out in the world and tries to enjoy himself. It's the way I think a lot of people are feeling right now."

Goos audiences may also hear another new song this summer -- "All That You Are," which the band recorded for the "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" soundtrack. "I wrote a song to order for (the film), but it didn't work for them," Rzeznik recalls. "('All That You Are') is a song I wrote with John Shanks, just for ourselves. Then we submitted it to the music supervisor and he liked it and said, 'I have a really good spot in this movie for this' and I was like, 'Great.' So it's a good thing we had another song for them."

The Goos will be on the road through August, after which Rzeznik hopes to get back to work on the next album in earnest. He won't, however, predict a timetable for it. "I want to put it out as fast as I can," he says. "It's the modern world of the future; you can't wait three or four years in between albums anymore. I really just want to write good songs. I don't know if it matters anymore if it congeals into one big conceptual product or not. I just want to write the songs and get them out there, however that happens."