‘I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and others who have covered it, for introducing it to a new generation. Three billion streams on Spotify is astonishing!’
I was going through a divorce and living in a hotel in West Hollywood when my manager said Warner Brothers were seeking songs for the movie City of Angels. They already had U2, Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morissette, so I thought getting a track on there would draw attention to us. Warners showed me the film and it was like Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. They wanted a song for the scene where the angel – played by Nicolas Cage – decides to become human to be with the woman he loves. That’s the Meg Ryan role. I thought: “What would I say to her if I were him?”
I went back to my hotel, where I had a guitar with four strings and a bizarre tuning: all Ds and a B. Like most of what was going on in my life, it was mangled. But I used it to write a song about the joy and pain of being human. It took about four hours. When I played Warners what I had – intro, verse, chorus – they loved it.
The band practised it in Swing House rehearsal rooms. We just kept playing until the bridge section seemed to shoot out of my fingers. When I was looking through the gig guide in LA Weekly, I saw Iris DeMent and thought: “That’s a beautiful name. I’ll call the song Iris.”
