From post #13014 in this thread ;)

Premiere tonight at:
8 pm (Berlin)
7 pm (London)
3 pm (Rio de Janeiro)
1 pm (New York)

At 8:22, Jon talks a bit about She's A Mystery and the songwriter's retreat it was written at:

I wonder if that's where he was two posts up in 1998? It looks like a castle

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That's how the discussion started a couple of posts ago...

Instagram post of Goo Goo Dolls says 1996. That's what made me think it was possibly 1996.

She's a Mystery was co-written with Greg Wells. The same guy that co-wrote the song Naked from DA. But DA booklet says Naked is from November 1996 so maybe that's when they first worked together and he invited Jon to the retreat in 1998. She's a Mystery does sound like a DA B-side however.

Based on Jon's look, it's 1998.

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Aha, gotcha!

Based on Jon's appearance he looks more like 1998 to me. Looks like they were mostly on the road up until July of 1996 though so who knows. If the guy who took the video says it was 1998 I doubt he's wrong though.

I agree that writing the song Naked was most likely the occasion which had him being invited to the songwriter's retreat and it vaguely resembles some ballads off DA, but I'm pretty confident it wasn't really written until that meeting in 1998 and that the year for the picture is just off on IG.
However, I don't think Jon was the kind of guy to go into such an event completely unprepared, so he might've had that idea floating around from earlier sessions. Would be cool to hear the demo they made that day, if it still exists.

On a side note, and I'm probably the only one, but I love that mellow vibe the song gives off. :)

"She’s A Mystery I wrote, believe it or not, at a songwriter’s retreat. I was invited to the South of France at what was truly a castle in the middle of nowhere and it became one of the truly great writing. You would sit in a room with 2 other people and develop a song - not for you, not for them, for the wind, just to see what would happen, and you were forced to demo that song that day. So it was almost like a test, could you or could you not. I got up really early at dawn, picked up my guitar started playing and came up with this progression and that title and started writing it so that when we walked in there that day we knocked it out in ten minutes. The song turned out so well that it actually made the band record which is not like us to do anything like this."

If you're excited about a song you don't let it sit for 3 to 4 years. Kinda stands to reason it was 1998 right before the writing sessions for Crush (or during? Not sure when it started. Richie came to Rome while Jon was filming U-571 so that might predate most things)