Like most people of my generation who feasted on post-grunge music as hourly sustenance, I had a well-worn copy of Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut album in my rotation in my CD player for months after it was released. “Semi-Charmed Life”, the set’s lead single, was every nuance of the summer of 1997 crammed neatly into a three-minute-and-forty-second little bundle. Its bouncy exterior was a cover for much darker subject matter; founder and lead singer Stephan Jenkins once described the track as “a dirty, filthy song” about the lure of sex and drugs that is “bright and shiny on the surface, and then it just pulls you down in this lockjawed mess…The music that I wrote for it is not intended to be bright and shiny for bright and shiny’s sake. It’s intended to be what the seductiveness of speed is like, represented in music.”
But some of the less-than-glamorous underpinnings of Jenkins’ compositions have also made them relatable to those who might find themselves in difficult places. On hearing that Jenkins and I would be chatting, a co-worker informed me that Third Eye Blind – the album track “Motorcycle Drive-By”, in particular – steered him through a trying period in his younger life. Now grown up with children of his own, he shared the song with his daughter who had been feeling upset about a recent relationship break-up. I relayed that anecdote to Jenkins, who was clearly touched by that sentiment: “Wow. What a beautiful story. Will you tell him I really appreciate that? Huh. That’s really lovely. Tell his daughter ‘I never liked that guy’!”
Those stories – and the fact that Jenkins and his 3EB counterparts have made consistently good music since their entrance into the industry – are exactly the reasons that Third Eye Blind has continued to lure enthusiastic listeners into their corner over the past twenty years. The band is in the middle of putting finishing touches on an EP that is set for release later this year, and there are plans to support with a headlining tour in 2017. Columbus fans won’t need to wait quite that long if they wish to see Jenkins perform; he is scheduled to appear at the 2016 Journeys Alternative Press Music Awards fueled by Monster Energy on Monday night at the Schottenstein Center.
2017 will be the twentieth anniversary of Third Eye Blind. Looking back, how do you feel about that album?
“I feel the same way about it as I do all of my other albums, which is that it’s not done – it’s just released. That’s how albums work out. You never really finish them, they’re never perfect things – they’re just renditions and you release them. And the second thing I always feel is that over time, it reveals things about myself, conditions, states of being that I wasn’t aware of. So just by being sort of open and musical and non-judgmentally creative, you kind of find out things about yourself that you were not consciously aware of. I’ve become aware of a person who is not who I maybe advertised myself as in some way – or made myself to be. But that’s that way on all of my records. And one other thought on that record, since you asked, is that I’m amazed at how much we took good sound for granted. We were all committed to sonic quality in a way that was a given. With the advent of Pro Tools, that all really disappeared. Pro Tools is digital recording – and you can record endlessly – that makes it so much easier to edit and manipulate and allows a lot of possibilities with music. The whole EDM world exists solely based things going digital. But the sound quality has definitely gone downhill, and in some ways it’s kind of like a lost art. What we took for granted is now something that’s difficult to even seek out. It’s almost impossible to get a group of people to record on tape together anymore.”
That quest for good sound and cohesion – is that something you still strive for when you and the band create music even if it’s a difficult task?
“Very much so. We were out at a place called Sonic Ranch – you should look it up. It’s this really, really amazing place that’s in Texas on the border lands just kind of down the road from Juarez, Mexico. It is just an analog wonderland and the whole band just holed up there for a week and recorded all day and then just did constant tracking together there as a band. And just got really creative and explored. It was really so, so satisfying to be there in a place like that. I’m so glad places like that still exist and people like the owner who, you know, it’s a labor of love for him. He just loves analog sound and being a part of making that happen. There’s an EP we’re going to be putting out this summer called We Are Drugs…”
…that was actually going to be one of my next questions. How is the new project shaping up and what direction is it going to take?
“When we got in the studio, the instruction that I gave everybody was that I didn’t want to have everybody to have any preconceived notions of what our sound was as a band or what our purpose was in the instrument – or what role anyone was playing. For example, there’s a new song coming out soon and we recorded a guitar part on it. And then we took the guitar part and put it into a sampler and just chopped it up – chopped it to bits so it’s really kind of deconstructed. So what is it? Is it a guitar part? Was it a keyboard part? It doesn’t matter. It’s just what we’re doing. We would all get on different instruments, and just a lot of different things were allowed to happen. So the result of it was that some of the tracks were very rock, and then some of the other tracks were just super kind of electronic and and loop-based. Some of it’s very pop, the record, and some of it’s really rock, but the pop tracks probably have the most incendiary lyrics on them.”
You and the band started out with a label, but you’ve since gone independent. And you’ve been vocal about that being a deliberate choice. Does the benefit of being free from the confines of a record company outweigh the risks and stress of doing everything yourself?
“Yeah, it’s always an equation, you know. It’s not like ‘this is better than that’. But, I much prefer – I think I measure things more in terms of happiness quotient and you have to be able to make a living at that in order to have the security to do what you want to do and have happiness and blah, blah, blah. But I also don’t like to be beholden to higher powers of record companies – and I no longer am. A lot of times when we were on a record deal we were told what we could not do – what songs to put out, or how the video is….what we say. Just all kinds of stuff. I think it’s very destructive to the band because there’s a real misunderstanding of what we are as a group. Our record label just really sort of cashed in – and that’s how they looked at everything…’how do we cash in on this?’ Which is what corporations are supposed to do, you know? They’re supposed to flick flies into their mouths with their tongues, right? Now, what do what we want – and that’s really great. But the downside to that is that I don’t have any pull. To get a radio station to play your song…to get a big artist from a big label to play (the radio station’s) Christmas show, for example, then (the label is) going to say ‘well, we want to put this other band in rotation and get their song going’. So, that happens all the time. None of that happens for us. So, we don’t have any pull and we don’t have any power. But what we have that nobody else has is we have an audience – and it’s really large and it’s really intense. And, you know we played Bonnaroo recently and we have one of the biggest audiences, according to the powers that be, of anybody there. It was huge. I think it was, like, the third biggest of the weekend. It just really blew our minds. People pay attention to that.”
I was reading about your involvement with Make Room, which is a non-profit organization that aims to help families who struggle financially to consistently pay their rent. You’ve shared what you experienced as a child when your own family was in a similar predicament. In your opinion, what needs to change politically and economically that will improve people’s chances of achieving stability?
“I’ll gladly answer this stuff, but you realize this interview’s about to get really boring. I mean, this is the stuff I like to talk about, but it’s about to go really badly for you here…”
Actually, I think it’s important for people to hear. Columbus is a city that experiences a lot of economic marginalization and transiency because of housing affordability, so I’m interested to hear your perspective.
“Salesforce is in San Francisco and they give millions of dollars to family housing projects, and (founder and CEO) Mark Benioff has been really helpful in reducing the period of time that families are homeless, for example. Google has also been a really good partner to San Francisco in terms of homelessness and in reducing the impact of homelessness of families. But that’s individual corporate giving. What needs to happen is that the loopholes that have been written by corporations that have been written as a way of fleecing the United States – that they’ve done over, and over, and over again…for example, Apple doesn’t pay taxes and they’re a company that was founded in the United States and has benefited from everything in the United States. They don’t pay taxes. They keep their money overseas. And it’s the same thing with General Electric. These companies – Exxon, Shell – the US Navy is basically there to keep shipping routes intact for oil. So they have their own Navy and they don’t pay for it – they don’t pay taxes for it. And then Congress which has done, almost equally between Republicans and Democrats – more Republicans than anything else…the Republican party has just become one of the most obstructive forces in American culture, really, in so many ways. The Congressional districts make it so money will flow into people’s districts from the F-36 Strike Fighter. So, the Republican party will go into endless, endless military spending – and endless war, which we’ve clearly perpetuated as well. Four trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody thought that was actually going to change the fundamental security of the United States. Nobody thought that. If they did, they were just utterly naive. They could’ve spent, say, half a trillion dollars and invaded Detroit and made it the solar energy capital of the world, and they could have dealt with homelessness with jobs and that would’ve been a Republican solution here. So my point is that corporate America has to…it’s not even about paying more taxes, it’s not having a higher rate. It’s actually paying the cost that it is to be here. I think that’s really important. And in doing that you’d be providing security in the United States by providing the opportunities for families to get stability. And you can get stability without rent, and you can’t make rent long-term without employment. So that’s basically it in a nutshell.”
You’re also a strong supporter of the Wounded Warrior Project, and I know you surf with veterans as a form of therapy. What does that look like?
“So my favorite, favorite thing is surfing with vets. I love it – I just love it. I love surfing and I love sharing it. There’s just nothing that makes me happier. When you have PTSD – and they’ve learned a lot more about it…a lot of people who have been exposed to concussive force when a bomb blows up, right? It fucks your brain up on a cellular level. There’s been so much of those concussive blows that we’ve exposed people to. Now, there’s a real understanding that PTSD has a physical cause. But then its reasons are also community. You have people who…they have a community and they have a purpose. They have an immediate reason to navigate through their world, which is the safety of the people who are near them, right? And then when the go home and they have injuries – they lose their sense of community. And then they get kind of stuck in these positions, and they can’t re-engage in the present tense. And the thing about surfing is that it does, more than anything else in the world with the possible exception of combat, is…when a wave is coming at you, and that wave can kill you – or it can take you into, like, the garden – you’re not thinking about any other thing. It is the one moment – yoga doesn’t do this, snowboarding, sex – there’s no other thing that so wholly, completely puts you in the right now. It puts you in the now, it brings you home. You’re no longer in that moment in this kind of divided world. You’re here. It brings you home. You can see it on vets’ faces when they have that kind of thousand-yard stare and there’s just this ongoing cloud of anxiety that they carry with them. And then you get them in a good wave…and another good wave…and you see them powering back…(pauses) I’m getting emotional just talking about it. You see these endorphins explode in their bodies. And that’s it. There’s no other therapy. I don’t talk about anything else with those guys – all we do…is surf. That’s it. And it’s fucking magic. And I just think…(pauses)…I think we’ve mistreated our vets, and I think it’s horrible that we do that.”
You’ve accomplished a lot since Third Eye Blind arrived over two decades ago. What hopes and dreams are you still reaching for?
“Well, I don’t feel the least bit like I’ve arrived – we still feel like a young band that’s gunning for the gig. I seek to make a really good song, a really good album and to be in a creative state where I can translate what I feel into rhythms and to words – and have that turn quickly into music. I want to be in that kind of condition. I want to be more awake and more engaged in the moment that I’m in musically with my band and with the audience. Basically, I just want to keep getting better at it. And really it’s just getting closer into the feeling, and making that feeling take shape and travel for other people. Oh, and I wanna fuck some more models (laughs)…’cause that all sounds so goody-goody. I don’t wanna be too much of a goody-two-shoes.”
Stephan Jenkins will appear at the 2016 Journeys Alternative Press Music Awards fueled by Monster Energy on Monday, July 18th at 7:00 pm at the Schottenstein Center, 555 Borror Drive, Columbus. Tickets for the live event are still available via Ticketmaster.
Can’t attend in person? You can watch the APMAs online by going to www.amazon.com/apmas for complete viewing instructions. To watch on your television, download the Twitch app from your TV’s app store. Open the Twitch app and search for amazonmusic. To view on your mobile phone/tablet or computer- go to www.twitch.tv/amazonmusic on Monday, July 18th at 7:00 pm Eastern. The Twitch platform can be viewed on both iPhone and Android. You can also watch the APMAs via the Twitch platforms on Playstation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Nvidia Shield.
To find more upcoming live music events, CLICK HERE to visit our Event Calendar.