It was a little bit like Radiohead, where we got kind of saddled by hits and then labeled by those hits. "I just always wanted to be an indie band. "There was a lot of 'lumping,'" the frontman told me. Nearly a quarter-century later, Jenkins seems to have mixed feelings reserved for the band's critical reception after those early, gigantic hits. When I look back on it, I wanna tell myself, 'Just stay at it.'" It makes you kind of a misfit or an outcast and that's hard on you. We don't look the same, we don't talk the same, we don't dress the same, and you can see it. But I had a ferocity, a driven-ness about me. "I came up playing drums in punk rock clubs and carrying Fender Twins up stairs for other guitar players and I had so many failures and things falling apart. "I come from a deep DIY scene but I didn't even have a scene - a scene is like you have a support network and I didn't have that either," he said. Jenkins' personal struggles in the time leading up to the formation of Third Eye Blind found him alternately consumed by an overwhelming sense of isolation and tireless ambition. When I look at that record, I have empathy for the striving of that person."įugitive Wanted for Killing Krystal Mitchell in 2016 Arrested in El Salvador I think I was very hard on myself, as most artists are. So I don't really know who I am, I'm being illuminated in some way and there's some sense of autobiography or something like that going on a lot - and I hear a lot of rage, this desire for redemption and for forgiveness, very punk but sort of a lusty punk kind of thing. And what that does is that it kind of tells you where you are and who you are in that moment, in that time. You're kind of channeling it kind of in a sense of being a mystic when it's really working. "I think when I write songs, there's no forethought that goes into them - you just kind of jump into a river and the river tells you where you're going, or gives you information about where you've been. "I do have different connections to them ," he explained. ![]() Of course, these days Jenkins is a far cry from the person he was when he originally wrote them. It basically arrived custom made for the angsty teenager. The songs on that record were cathartic anthems and explicitly tackled drug use, suicide, deteriorating relationships, sexuality - hell, "Graduate" sounds like it's about going off to college (it's not). One of the reasons that the band's first album connected to the world's youth like it did was Jenkins' ability to tap into the deep emotional turmoil that a lot of us experience while growing up. It's their activity that keeps it alive." They find our music through each other and it speaks to them now and enlivens their experience now - so it's current for them. What I mean by that is that our music is kind of a playlist, it doesn't have a date stamp on it for kids who are 16 through 26 years old. And the thing is - those 16 year olds are still at our shows. How could he? Reno's not exactly the most memorable town, and to be honest, the band was riding a wave of mass hysteria at the time thanks to their debut self-titled album that spawned the rock radio/TRL mainstays "Semi-Charmed Life," "Jumper" and "How's It Going to Be." Twenty years later, the record (which would go to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide), and those songs, have stood the test of time. "I.don't remember it," Stephan Jenkins, the band's frontman, admitted after I recounted the tale over an early morning phone call. They were there for one thing and one thing only: Third Eye Blind. Of course, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with two timid, pimple-faced dweebs like us. ![]() It was basically like a 20 to 1 ratio of females to males, and we loved it. My mom dropped my friend Steve and I off, we got in line (which wrapped around the block), and quickly noticed, as teenage boys are wont to do, that we were surrounded by teenage girls. Confession: When I was the ripe young age of 16 years old, I made my very first foray into the arena of live music.
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