Blue

on 25 years of Third Eye Blind's sophomore album

Every year, when the sky turns grey, the leaves turn orange, and evening comes recklessly barreling down on the daylight, I obsessively listen to Blue, which was released exactly 25 years ago, on November 23rd, 1999,¹ and immediately seared itself into my brain. At that time, yes, I was still obsessing over Third Eye Blind but I was also 13 years old, i.e. extra moody and weird and contemplative which, it turned out, were the perfect prerequisites for Blue. So today, to honor that past version of me, and in celebration of the album’s 25th anniversary, let’s shoot right past one song and talk about an entire album. Happy autumn, everyone. Here’s to 25 years of Blue.

The Album

Title: Blue

Artist: Third Eye Blind

Year: 1999

The Story

For years after its release in April of 1997, Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut album was everywhere. “Semi-Charmed Life” enjoyed career-defining success, but the album also spawned four other singles that were bona fide hits—“Graduate,” “How’s It Going to Be,” “Losing a Whole Year,” and “Jumper” were all radio staples for months at a time. Eventually, Third Eye Blind was certified platinum. Six times. This was a huge record, folks. (I sang “Jumper” at my 7th grade talent show. Autographs are $10 each.)

My relationship with the album Third Eye Blind is quasi-existential, but my pre-internet adolescent life meant that, despite their first release playing such a pivotal role in my life, the band’s 1999 follow-up, Blue, snuck up on me. I learned about the album only a week before its release via, of all things, a television commercial advertisement. It was a different time.

A week later, I took my copy of Blue and sat at the foot of my bed, a stereo 20 inches from my face, and listened to the album while reading its liner notes and lyrics for hours on end. Eventually, some days or weeks later, I got up and did other things—mostly move onto my bed so that I could play Final Fantasy VIII² on the CRT TV precariously balanced on the edge of my dresser—but I didn’t turn Blue off.

After the immaculately refined power-pop of Third Eye Blind, Blue is weird. So weird that, 25 years and five additional albums later, it remains the band’s strangest release by an order of magnitude. There are moments here that feel like the necessary and appropriate successors to Third Eye Blind, but there are also atypical vocals and wonky arrangements and bizarre choices that seem to defy all expectation (and, in many cases, all reason).

Certainly, some listeners waded through all that oddity and found the experience unsettling or underwhelming, but even admitting that nostalgia is an unshakeable part of this interpretation, I am one of those people who finds Blue utterly fascinating. It’s an experiment of a record, as well as a chronicle of accomplished songwriters bickering with one another as they explored every insane idea that passed through their minds, with a budget large enough to leave no wild premise or production value untouched. The result is a bold, arrogant, Frankensteinian record that desperately craves your attention, even as it does not care one bit about your expectations.

That defiance of expectation begins from the album’s first moments: “Anything,” the album’s opener and first single, is both the shortest proper song in the band’s catalog³ and their most adventurous—it’s unique in a way that barely fits into the larger Third Eye Blind canon. “Anything” is brief and aggressive and free of anything extraneous. It’s a window into an alternate reality where Third Eye Blind doesn’t become Stephan Jenkins’ Dad-Rock Emporium of Needlessly Sexual Mid-Tempo Dittys and instead becomes an exciting punk-influenced radio-rock band with better melodic sensibilities than any of their contemporaries.

Blue’s opener is all blasting guitars, pounding beats, pick slides, and shouted vocals, bookended by an acoustic intro and a clean, dreamy outro. It achieves more in two minutes’ time than any song this side of Gatsbys American Dream. Half the lyrics are nonsense, sure—the latter two verses are maybe about JFK being assassinated, I guess?—but when, in the final verse, Jenkins shouts “I’ll bring back even what’s unspoken / just to see you,” it’s as pure a pop-rock moment as anything the ‘90s ever spat out. “Anything” is short but it’s also incredible—a perfect album opener.⁴

If “Anything” is Third Eye Blind getting weirdly concise in their approach to radio-rock, then “An Ode to Maybe” and “The Red Summer Sun” represent their particular brand of weirdness fully extending in the opposite direction. “An Ode to Maybe” is one of two songs on Blue that include stage directions—keep reading to find the other!—and “lead in / night at the laundromat” is one of the stranger opening lines I can recall not only from Third Eye Blind but from anyone. Things only get more unusual from there. The song’s chorus features a chorus of Jenkinses singing “do do do do do” in a painfully strained falsetto and the second verse reads as follows:

if I could bottle my hopes in a store-bought scent / they’d be nutmeg peach and they’d pay the rent / and I’d ride a horse / and I’d teach a course / on how I got to be a star-crossed pimp

If that madness somehow wasn’t absurd enough for you, the song then breaks into a funky distorted-bass solo over which Jenkins’ keeps repeating the word “pimp” before putting on an absolutely infuriating falsetto-scream that I’m going to dub his rock-god-shriek and wailing, “You run along now, doggy!” This is the opposite of tightening up, the opposite of refinement, the opposite of logic. It is also, of course, a great song and deeply, deeply representative of the magic of Blue. Because, for all that utter insanity, “An Ode to Maybe” is fun and irreverent and so bonkers as to be totally charming. The song works.⁵

Much of “The Red Summer Sun” is less overt in its strangeness. Large pieces of the song feel reasonably like a Third Eye Blind track. There’s a flanged guitar solo and Brad Hargreaves doing wild things to his kit, but the verse’s melody has an uncharacteristically flat affect, and then, once the song builds to a climactic bridge, the tempo climbs a rung and Jenkins’ fully embraces the screeching falsetto of that aforementioned rock-god-shriek and lets it carry the entirety of the chorus.

Jenkins’ has a reputation as a domineering douche, but this album was recorded in a real studio with real vocal technicians, so I am choosing to believe that someone—someone—must have told him how insane this vocal performance sounds. But, presumably because he’s an egomaniacal control freak, Jenkins kept it anyway, heavily peppering the style across several of Blue’s tracks. Of course, as a fitting coda, he never deployed the technique again.

As the song continues, Jenkins rips off a couple line of punk rock shouting and delivers the bridge’s vocals with a bizarre, pseudo-operatic delivery, and then “The Red Summer Sun” ends with a 90-second outro that’s chill and spacy and which makes a return during the album’s hidden track. In a song filled with so many unprecedented vocal shenanigans, that serene instrumental ending is an unexpectedly beautiful exit.⁶

Not every moment of Blue is unexpected, though. Songs like “10 Days Late,” “1000 Julys,” “Camouflage,” and “Farther” more or less hew to the core Third Eye Blind sound. “10 Days Late” features a punchy verse and a typically catchy chorus but the song was never released as a single, presumably because it’s about an accidental pregnancy.⁷ A brief element of Jenkins’ album-long obsession with weird vocals creeps in here, too, as a children’s choir⁸ sings the cringe-inducing lines, “time has come for you to choose / baby daddy, keep your boo / many blessings come to you / baby daddy, keep your boo.”⁹ As is often true of Jenkins’ at his lyrical worst, these lines aren’t so much on the nose as deeply inside it.¹⁰

Let’s use that Jenkins-worthy transition to briefly hit on “Deep Inside of You,” the rare Third Eye Blind power-ballad. “My Time in Exile” (from the greatest hits compilation Third Eye Blind: A Collection) and the unreleased “Persephone” fit the stripped-down, man-and-a-piano ballad template, but “Deep Inside of You” is really the only time that the band goes full ‘80s power-ballad across their entire catalog. The song has that reach for grandeur that I think all full-fledged ballads require—it starts off maudlin, then hits a richly-layered climax, and then there’s more of Jenkins’ rock-god-shrieking, a surprisingly effective bridge, and more rock-god-shrieking before the whole thing comes back to normalcy as if nothing strange had ever happened. And, as with “An Ode to Maybe,” I think the weirdness here more or less works?

Part of Third Eye Blind’s magic is that the band makes power-pop that is always at least a little bit fucked up—“Semi-Charmed Life” is about doing meth, people—and, sonically, that’s where we are here. Plus, we get a pretty good Jenkins line along the way when he proclaims during the bridge that “I would change myself if I could / I’d walk with my people if I could find them.” That one, unlike so many others, has aged well.¹¹

More traditionally rock-oriented, “1000 Julys” feels like it could have been pulled from a Punk Goes Pop-like called Third Eye Blind Goes Arena Rock. It’s all loud guitars, punchy drums, and shouted vocals, to such a degree that it’s hard not to hear what Third Eye Blind is doing on this song and think that Weezer more or less went for the same target across all of 2002’s Maladroit. The song also continues three of Jenkins’ lyrical obsessions: The man loves to sing about 1) vampires;¹² 2) David Bowie; and 3) uncomfortable depictions of his sexual escapades. We get it, Stephan. You’ve had sex.¹³

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Let’s take a brief break so that I can apologize to my poor parents—hi Mom and Dad!—who had to hear me scream-singing this maniac’s weird sexual diary entries through the doors of my bedroom for years while I was a child. Ugh. I had no idea what I was saying. Again: Ugh. Sorry, you two!

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Mid-album tracks “Camouflage” and “Farther” are the yin to those prior tracks’ yang. Where “Deep Inside of You” and “1000 Julys” have single potential (“Deep Inside of You” was, in fact, Blue’s fourth and final single), “Camouflage” and “Farther” are unmistakably destined to be deep cuts.

“Camouflage” is dreamy and ethereal, marked by heavy reverb, layered echoes, and reverse-tape vocals. The song’s bridge features vocals that are so buried beneath these effects that they’re rendered unintelligible. And that’s the point: The lines in question are represented in the album’s liner notes as “secret words never to be printed.” Reader, the internet was not readily available to me in 1999 and this secrecy drove me absolutely insane. I spent so many hours with my ear to my stereo, desperately trying to parse out what Jenkins is saying, that I imagine a swift hearing-loss cliff is just around the bend for me. And for all that, I still have no idea what those lyrics are.¹⁴¹⁵

While “Camouflage” is mystical and intentionally obscured, “Farther” is one of the most precise songs that Third Eye Blind has ever recorded. A fuzzy, iconic bass line opens things up before a reverse-tape drum fill pulls you into the heart of the song,¹⁶ with its effectively sparse verses and tightly syncopated choruses. “Farther” pretty strictly adheres to songwriting conventions, and the song’s largest departure from the form is its two-part bridge: The first has freshman year philosophy major vibes that lead to a climactic moment of Jenkins singing “you are of the earth / I am of the sky / I don’t even know what the hell that means;” the second begins when that opening bass line comes ripping back in and things build and build until a tremendous outro with counterpoint melodies triumphantly bursts up like a flower through concrete.

For all the time that I’ve spent listening to “Farther”—and boy have I spent a lot of time doing that, because I would put “Farther” on a very short list of Third Eye Blind’s best songs¹⁷—I also spent a lot of time mixing up a couplet in that excellent outro. For years, when Jenkins sings “I think about you dying / years from now / never having known who you are” I heard “I think about you dying / years from now / I don’t even know who you are.” I hear them both now, somehow, and both seem equally relevant and powerful, the two edges of a blade forged from a mix of separation and self-discovery. In both interpretations, the line reads as a delightfully valuable little passage about growth and the (perhaps wayward) consideration of others, made all the more potent by being nestled into a song about nihilistic desire.¹⁸

Are you still with me? Reader, we’ve discussed more than half of Blue’s tracks and we somehow haven’t touched on the album’s three most important songs, so let’s pivot to the album’s fourth track and biggest commercial success, “Never Let You Go.” And, look, every band, if they stick around long enough, will end up with some clunkers. To paraphrase a (recently) seasonally appropriate skit, if a band releases enough songs, they’re not all gonna be winners. And “Never Let You Go” marks the first time that Third Eye Blind had a worst song,¹⁹ which, in fairness, is not even to say that it’s a bad song so much as that it isn’t a good one. And, in 1999, that was a first for Third Eye Blind.

“Never Let You Go” is rightly remembered for its incredibly annoying chorus which is, as far as I can tell, universally loathed.²⁰ The music of Third Eye Blind is a central part of my lived existence and not one single time in my life have I met someone who admits to liking the chorus of “Never Let You Go,” a shockingly irritating piece of songwriting that features both a plodding tempo and a grating falsetto. The only thing more surprising than this song being chosen as a single is that it was actually quite successful: The song spent 22 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 and was the top single in Canada for three weeks in the spring of 2000. Maybe Y2K addled our collective eardrums.

“Never Let You Go” is not entirely without merit—the bridge is solid and that “sunburn I would like to save” line is memorable if kind of stupid—it’s just that I can’t untangle that merit from the song’s shortcomings. In my mind at least, “Never Let You Go” is inextricably associated with its worst elements—including Jenkins’ admission that he, apparently, wrote the song to “freak out” Charlize Theron who he had cited as his “muse” (God, he’s the worst)—which is an unfair assessment but also a strikingly poetic view on a song that came out when I was in junior high and my biggest fear was that people would remember me only for whichever mortifying social act was my lowest moment at the time. Speaking of which:

Sitting in the school computer lab at 13 years old, when I was both as fragile and as invincible as I ever would be, this girl asked what I was listening to on my Discman and I said, “the new Third Eye Blind” and she replied that she hated their new single. I, having spent the last few years of my life completely avoiding the radio while I listened to Third Eye Blind on repeat, didn’t know that she was talking about “Never Let You Go” because the sticker on Blue’s cover had cited “Anything” as the band’s next single and I assumed that it was hugely successful because, as we’ve already discussed, that song rips.

And so I defended the amazing “Anything” only to have her confusedly explain to me that I must have been talking about some other song because she was talking about that awful “promise to your mother” song, at which point I carefully explained that of course, yes, that is an awful song, and no, I would have never intentionally defended such a track and, actually, “Anything” was the first single from Blue, and that song is really something but apparently it never got any radio-play and that’s when the teacher told me to stop talking and then the girl never mentioned any of this again and, honestly, I couldn’t—and still don’t—blame her for that.²¹

Unlike “Never Let You Go,” “Wounded” was never a single, but Blue’s second song has become one the band’s most beloved tracks. “Wounded” starts with some feedback and harmonics until, at the 17-second mark, Arion Salazar’s bass comes booming in with the force of a midwestern thunderstorm. If you’re a fan of Third Eye Blind, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you can feel it in your heart and in your bones, the physical sensation summoned by the very thought of it.

That heavy bass fades into the background²² to make way for a verse that, due to some wizardry or luck that I doubt even Jenkins understood, accounts for one of the purest instances of sonic-season-synchronization ever put to record: The verses of “Wounded” sound exactly like fall feels. I’m not ready to say that this was done on purpose, but Jenkins certainly noticed it, given that the second verse begins with a few iconic lines for the cider mill-loving among us: “now it’s fall and your shoulders get tighter / nervous flicks on your lighter / boots / your pissed off poets / your womens’ groups.”²³ Is this why I listen to this album religiously every October and November? Dear reader, it doesn’t hurt.²⁴

In its choruses, “Wounded” pivots away from its haunted vibes and into rock anthem territory. I’m tempted to say that the chorus is the weakest part of the track and yet, even if that’s a fair assessment, that chorus is essential to the song’s success. “Wounded” is one of Third Eye Blind’s greatest songs but it does not work without drummer Brad Hargreaves rattling off an endless series of snare rolls on the way to Jenkins’ wailing “back down the bully to the back of the bus / now it’s time for them to be scared of us” in the second chorus. The song needs that frenetic power—a raw, energetic counterbalance to the verses’ chill autumnal vibes.

And so, in a way, “Wounded” is peak Third Eye Blind. It’s sonically rich, its pieces occasionally seem incompatible, and there is an undeniable undercurrent of lyrical misogyny.²⁵ And yet! The whole thing is tinged with this humming, luminous beauty. There are moments of melodic and lyrical genius. For all its faults, it’s a tremendous piece of songwriting. I certainly love it, as do a huge contingent of the band’s fans, if concert crowds and Reddit posts are any indication. (They are.)

If “Wounded” is a clear fan favorite from Blue, then “Slow Motion” is a cult classic. A song with a tortured development cycle that has become beloved by a different if overlapping set of fans including, in this particular case, a number of the early-2000s emo bands that grew up worshipping Third Eye Blind. Panic! At the Disco,²⁶ Envy on the Coast,²⁷ and Blackbear have all covered “Slow Motion.” The emos love this song!

Of course, “Slow Motion” can’t be discussed without digging into the song’s censorship. The original version of the song included a full vocal track with lyrics about a Black man murdering an old schoolmate over a drug deal gone bad. According to Jenkins, the overdone story was meant to be interpreted as anti-violence and I think that comes through, but the lyrics are cartoonish and utilize racial stereotypes in a way that would have felt at home in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The band’s then-label, Elektra, was uncomfortable releasing the song given its lyrical content, particularly in light of the Columbine massacre which had only happened a few months prior. (The song had been written prior to that shooting and Jenkins insisted that that real world tragedy did not inform the song.) The accepted compromise was that the band could release an instrumental version of “Slow Motin” on Blue with a full version to follow on a proposed EP (at the time titled Black, later renamed Symphony of Decay, and ultimately scrapped entirely). The result is that there are now three versions of “Slow Motion” floating around the digital ether:

1. The original unedited version, which was eventually released on A Collection.

2. The totally instrumental version that currently lives on most major streaming services and was included on all pressings of the record after the initial print run.

3. The version that was included on the original American release, which cuts out all the verse vocals but retains those in the song’s choruses.²⁸

If you followed those emo links up above, you’ll have noticed that the cover versions of the song all ape the unedited version, which has broadly been accepted as canon at this point (for whatever “canon” means in the realm of music). I get it. Some prefer this version for aesthetic reasons and, of course, the unedited version represents the band’s actual intentions and there’s a cogent argument to be made that that’s enough to make it the only meaningful version of the song. What self-respecting audiophile is going to argue in favor of censorship?

Welllllllllll, so, but, the thing of it is, the full lyrics of “Slow Motion” tell a very particular story, and I’m not sure how valuable this specific telling really is. Much of the song’s lines offer a pretty unsophisticated view into the song’s story-world. Let’s go to the bridge for evidence of what I mean:

and at home / my sister’s eating paint chips again / maybe that’s why she’s insane / I shut the door to her moaning / and I shoot smack in my veins / and wouldn’t you? / see, my neighbor’s beating his wife / because he hates his life / there’s a knock to his fist as he swings / oh man / what a beautiful thing / and death slides close to me / won’t grow old to be / a junkie wino creep

That is, uh, not doing it for me. Now, credit where it’s due, Jenkins does follow that passage by delivering a truly valuable lyrical passage in the song’s final verse:

Hollywood glamorized my wrath / I’m the young urban psychopath / I incite murder / for your entertainment / ‘cause I needed the money / what’s your excuse? / the joke’s on you

That’s good! It’s incisive and insightful and challenges the listener. Art is happening here! But when considering the unedited version as a whole, I’m left feeling like the whole experience is too heavy-handed to warrant being the default version of the song if alternative choices remain. What of the song’s other two iterations?

Well, streaming services have generally decided to use the fully instrumental version and … it’s fine? It’s fine. The instrumentation here is tremendous, from that crucial guitar lick to the crunch of the palm muting, from the plinking piano to the whirring Rhodes. Sonically, there’s a lot to love here. But it does feel empty without vocals—which makes sense, as the song was intended to have them. And I think it needs them. Just not all of them.

Reader, I think the edited version of the song, released by a censorial record label, is the best version of “Slow Motion.” Surely, some of my affection comes from circumstance. This album was and is hugely important to me and this edited version was included on the copy that I’ve played to within a millimeter of its thin plastic life. I can’t exclude that context. And yet, I think that there’s a compelling objective case to be made.

Up above I stated that the unedited version of “Slow Motion” tells a very, very specific story. And it does. (You can read the whole thing for yourself here if you want to better understand the situation.) But the edited version of “Slow Motion” tells a story, too, but that story is much more broad, much more open to interpretation. And, frankly, it’s much more poetic, with an elevated beauty. Here are the lyrics, in full, of Elektra’s edited version:

Slow motion, see me let go / we tend to die young / slow motion, see me let go / what a brother knows / slow motion, see me let go / slow motion, see me let go / we’ll remember these days / slow motion, urban life decays / slow motion, see me let go / slow motion, see me let go / oh yeah / slow motion, see me let go / ah / slow motion, see me let go / ooh

There’s a story there, right? A rather powerful one about connection, loss, and grief? And the musical context of its delivery makes it all the more impactful: After one minute of that evocative guitar riff and some gently pushing piano chords leading the way, the song hits a brief crescendo before Jenkins’ voice finally enters the fray with a mixture of surprise and delayed gratification, singing “slow motion, see me let go / we tend to die young.” What an opening! I mean, fuck!

Freed from Jenkins’ juvenile narrative, that opening “we” becomes much broader and more applicable for its listeners, who can now determine the narrator’s identity as they see fit, a trend that carries through the song to great effect—that use of “brother” is no longer an uncomfortable framing of Black linguistics and instead becomes representative of a deep familial bond. Whether that means a blood relation or found family, the connotation is heavy, especially when set against the closing refrain of “see me let go” and all its acquiescence to the oblivion of grief. Fuck, this song was more powerful when it was simpler. [Deep sigh.] It would be Jenkins who creates a compelling case for artistic censorship, wouldn’t it?²⁹

Attentive listeners can disagree about which version of “Slow Motion” is best, but there’s no argument to be had regarding its place in Blue’s tracklist. Streaming services and later pressings of the record have pushed “Slow Motion” to the album’s final spot, but it was the 11th track on the original release and you either agree that that’s where it belongs or are wrong. We’ll get to the album’s 12th track in a moment, but its rightful finale is “Darwin,” the rare Jenkins’ track that’s successfully clever and charmingly comedic. The song interrogates existential nihilism through the premise that aliens seeded humanity. Let’s go to the tape through the song’s second verse, shall we? (Lyrical repetition has been abridged.)

the chromosome divides / multiply and thrive / and the strong survive / and a spaceman fucked an ape / then cut out on the date / and now it’s much too late / the space ship has escaped / way to go³⁰ / we’re lacking something / something good / is this all for nothing? / show me the goods / something good / and the grandson of an alien wears his snakeskin boots / and shows his reptile roots

It’s certainly possible that nostalgia is clouding my vision here, but that’s pretty funny, right? And it fits perfectly with the spacy feel of the song’s reverb-drenched bells and the flitting, hammer-on-hammer-off guitar line. A taste of Blue’s weird vocal affections pop up here as Jenkins sings some “boom tick tick” gibberish about wanting to be a DJ—I’m mocking, but through my rose colored glasses, it works—and then the song and the album end with a really wonderful little passage, stripped of all the song’s prior pomp, focusing instead on a simple beat, an acoustic guitar’s strumming, and Jenkins gently singing “and it’s alright / it’s alright / it’s a long night / a long night.”

And then, as the song fades out to the point of an almost imperceptible quiet, you can hear him sing, “when a plane takes off / you know it.” Which, as written here, seems somewhat pointless, but in the moment of its performance, feels like a fitting paean to the human experience. Sure, “Darwin” is mostly about how silly the existence of humanity is, but it’s also about the wonder that we sometimes fail to feel, and invoking the accomplishment of human flight as well as the visceral experience of takeoff is a gentle reminder that humanity at large is capable of great things, but also that we as individuals are very much bodied beings, and that that’s wondrous in its own right. As I keep saying, Jenkins often seems to be the absolute worst, but he is capable of these moments of tiny brilliance that, for certain listeners like me, just won’t let go.

And so we’re left with only one undiscussed song from Blue: “Darkness,” the album’s title track and also one of the band’s deepest cuts. For 25 years, I’ve loved “Darkness,” but in writing this piece, I’ve discovered an entirely new level of appreciation for the song that, I think, best encapsulates everything that Third Eye Blind was trying to do on their sophomore album. Which makes sense—it is the title-track, after all.

“Darkness” starts with a jangly guitar riff and then a brief drumroll before Jenkins sings a line that confused me for decades: “Blue, come over / born a Joneser.” In researching this piece, I’ve learned that a “Joneser” is someone from Generation Jones, the microgeneration of Boomers born between 1954 and 1965, as Jenkins was. I still don’t know who he’s addressing as Blue, but sure, okay, carry on.

That opening riff repeats through the verse and, with gently pattering bass and drums entering the fold, the song becomes both soothing and probing as it digs deeper. After that first confusing couplet, Jenkins gets into the heart of the song’s lyrical allure: the tension between self-doubt and self-confidence that all weirdos have felt since the dawn of time. “I want someone to know me,” he sings, “maybe tell me who I am / because I’ve faced down my demons / and cried out to a god / a god I’ve never seen.” And yeah, that’s rather dramatic, but also I get it.

As a 13-year-old with no life experience but an awful lot of weird shit floating through my head, that hit so hard in 1999! I did want someone to know me, to tell me who I was! But I also felt powerful in a way that, now, I think maybe only adolescents can feel, as if I had faced down some personal demons and emerged victorious. And look, I’m not sure that the experience of being a teenager is all that closely tied to objective reality, so that kind of posturing can function as a totally appropriate as a metaphor for, I don’t know, talking to a girl or playing a show with your shitty pop-punk band, to pick two things totally at random. Here’s the thing: I think this defense is unnecessary because I’m guessing you read those lines, thought about your teenaged self, and, if you’re being honest, you get it, too. Our particulars may have been different, but the broad strokes are, I think, unavoidable, and that—that feeling of being both terrified and confident—is infinitely relatable, even if you weren’t obsessing over Jenkins’ lyrics a quarter century ago.

And then, with another stage direction—“Lights!”—we move into the chorus. The guitars get a little crunchy and Hargreaves pounds out a remarkably effective beat as Jenkins provides more adolescent insight: “and the world darkens around me / strange friends all surround me / new ideas in my head start to burn / dropped out of school ‘cause of things that I never learned.” I know that Jenkins wasn’t in high school when he wrote this but … I mean, come on. “And I never thought / there’d be any help / for somebody like me”? I mean, come on.

Halfway through the song, he starts wailing “yeah” and “whoa” like he’s auditioning for the Roger Daltry role in a Who cover band and then, in that same vein, Jenkins absolutely belts out one of the greatest “I am a golden god” lyrics of all time: “bring me the sun / ‘cause I slide off the moon.” I mean yes. Absolutely, 100%, YES. Why are you writing rock songs if you’re not writing shit like “bring me the sun / ‘cause I slide off the moon”? What’s even the point? Why even try? This is the combination of arrogance and poetry that all great rock bands can and should aspire to. Eventually, “Darkness” unwinds with a post-workout cool down, but those few moments when Jenkins is screaming his head off and guitars are riffing and Hargreaves is shredding his kit is peak Blue.

That “Darkness” is peak Blue is all the more emblematic because on this song, like about half of the record, Jenkins shares the songwriting credit with Kevin Cadogan, who was fired from the band only a few months after Blue’s release. Cadogan also shared songwriting credit with Jenkins on all but four of the songs on Third Eye Blind³¹ and his deeply ‘90s but also deeply idiosyncratic style of guitar playing and songwriting was fundamental to the band’s success. Another Third Eye Blind aficionado once told me that, if Jenkins’ was the beating heart of the band, then Cadogan was its soul. He was right.³²³³

Much of the magic of Blue lives in that conflict and contrast, Jenkins and Cadogan, the heart and the soul, pushing up against one another, sometimes in contention, sometimes in coordination. Certainly, given its often sexual nature, Blue is a deeply adult record but, at the same time, much of the album’s success comes from this immaturity, this inability of its creators to be reasonable, to find common ground, to comfortably coexist. Those are adolescent problems and while Blue speaks directly to my teenaged self due to our shared history, I think much of the album speaks to the juvenile in any listener, the unsophisticate who feels big feelings but lacks a coherent way to express them.

Blue was recorded White Album-style, with the band’s members largely performing individually in the studio and, after recording 20 tracks, the band voted on which should be included on the album. Undoubtedly, there was some songwriterly one-upsmanship going on in those isolated sessions, as both Jenkins and Cadogan tried to outdo their creative partner, pushing their craft to extreme places³⁴ in an effort to get more of their own songs onto Blue’s tracklist. (Cadogan was, reportedly, furious that “Never Let You Go” was included over some of his tracks. Amen, brother.) And that ambition, maybe more than any other singular component, seems to resonate throughout Blue. This is an album made by a band with talent and resources but also anger and jealousy and, consistently, the result is that no idea was too ridiculous, no technique too extravagant for consideration and inclusion.

Blue is a behemoth, filled with sonic and lyrical experimentation, not all of which succeeds. Third Eye Blind swings for the proverbial fences here and while they hit some home runs—songs like “Anything,” “Wounded,” “Farther,” and “Darwin”—they also logged some strikes. (I’m with Cadogan: They should have left “Never Let You Go” off.) Considering Blue closely and in retrospect, it’s hard to believe that not only did one small group of songwriters and performers craft this majestic madness, but that a major label let them release it. 1999 is often cited as one of the greatest years in pop music history and Blue is rarely mentioned in those discussions.³⁵ It should be. What an unbelievably strange and wonderful record we were gifted all those years ago. Sure, this is an album that isn’t going to resonate with everyone, and even its ardent supporters are likely to find fault with it at various points. But Blue’s highs are just so unbelievably high, and its strangest and most unique moments—here’s looking at you, “An Ode to Maybe”—are unlike anything else, from this band or any others.

Given the last 25 years (and the preceding 7,000 words), it’s clear that I can’t be fully objective here, so others may land at different conclusions, but here’s the one I can’t escape: After all these years, and for all its warts, Blue remains a remarkable record. It’s a glimpse into an incredibly specific power-pop/alt-rock universe that only exists within the bounds of this album’s runtime. And, a quarter century after its release, I am still absolutely, entirely here for it.

I give Blue five out of five stars.

1. Typing that year out, I mistakenly typed 1888 and, honestly, that feels equally distant. Most babies born in 1999, which feels like it only ended about 45 days ago, are old enough to rent cars. I am a mummy.

2. Reader, I spent so much time playing Final Fantasy VII and listening to Third Eye Blind—my favorite album and video game are bound together in the shaping of my personhood. Their sequels, Blue and Final Fantasy VIII, have a similar relationship, only knocked down several degrees and made much, much weirder.

3. Technically “Carnival Barker” is shorter, but that’s only because the version of the song released on 2009’s Ursa Major is only an instrumental outro. The full track, initially intended to be part of the (eventually doomed) Symphony of Decay EP, was independently released by the band in 2006. Anyway, I’m giving “Anything” the ‘shortest song’ nod.

4. I give “Anything” five out of five stars.

5. I give “An Ode to Maybe” four out of five stars.

6. I give “The Red Summer Sun” three out of five stars. I really wanted to give it four—there’s some great stuff here, particularly that outro—but the quantity of the rock-god-shriek is simply too much. I had to knock it down a peg.

7. One of the song’s awkward and uncomfortable lyrics on that subject: “funny how she always cried out ‘daddy.’” I need a shower.

8. More specifically, the Golden Gate Boys Choir. Or, at least, that’s the only choir cited in the album’s liner notes, though on which tracks they appear is not stated.

9. The “10 Days Late” children’s choir had to crawl so that the real choir in Paramore’s “Ain’t It Fun” could walk. Running, in this metaphor, was actually just Freddie Mercury recording a million Freddies singing every conceivable harmony on every possible Queen song.

10. I give “10 Days Late” three out of five stars.

11. I give “Deep Inside of You” three out of five stars.

12. Has Stephan Jenkins consumed human blood? I’m not ruling it out.

13. I give “1000 Julys” four out of five stars.

14. When I moved into my freshman-year dorm and had the first reliable internet connection of my life, this was one of the first things I looked up on AltaVista Google. The internet of 2004 had no answers for me but now, in the Year of Our Google 2024, I imagine that I could perform a light amount of internet sleuthing and finally uncover the truth of those mysterious lines. Except that, at this point, I’ve come to prefer the mystery. Blue’s own track record, as well as all the evidence provided across the Third Eye Blind’s subsequent releases, suggest that whatever Jenkins wrote is likely underwhelming anyway. (“Camouflage” also drove me to look up Georges Seurat, but that was an easier, if more esoteric, target.)

15. I give “Camouflage” four out of five stars.

16. A lot of reverse tape shenanigans on Blue. Presumably this is what you do if you’re a band with a greatly increased budget for your second record.

17. This, despite the cringe-inducing final lines of the song’s first verse: “though I’m not the type who begs / I’m thinking of how you’d open up your legs.” For what will not be the last time, let me just say that Jenkins sure seems to be the worst.

18. I give “Farther” five out of five stars.

19. A title held by “Never Let You Go” until the release of the miserable “Non-Dairy Creamer” and later claimed by the inexcusably terrible “2X Tigers.”

20. In fairness, some reviewers seem to have spoken positively about the chorus at the time. Of course, this only tells me that we can’t trust these particular reviewers.

21. I give “Never Let You Go” two out of five stars.

22. We’re not talking about “The Background” from Third Eye Blind today, but if we were, this post would be 10,000 words longer.

23. Is the back half of that passage potentially problematic? Why yes, yes it is.

24. It’s worth pointing out that Jenkins delivered one other song perfectly attuned to fall: “Red Star.” The 2008 single is arguably one of the band’s top five songs both musically and lyrically—I cannot begin to describe how shocking it is that Jenkins, of all people, wrote this wonderful little political romance—and despite having a totally different timbre than “Wounded,” it’s equally (read: perfectly) seasonal this time of year.

25. To come at a now familiar point from yet another angle: Setting aside all outside accounts of the man, if evaluated exclusively through the lyrical material that he deliberately chooses to release, Jenkins seems like he is just the absolute worst.

26. I love Brendan Urie telling a crowd of screaming fans “you probably don’t know this song” before breaking into a track from a certified platinum album. Honestly, he’s probably right! But it’s not like he was about to play something from A Society of People Named Elihu.

27. EOTC has actually been covering “Slow Motion” for a long time.

28. Somewhat strangely, the album’s packaging identified this as an instrumental track.

29. I give the edited version of “Slow Motion” five out of five stars, the unedited version four out of five stars, and the purely instrumental version three out of five stars.

30. Internet lyrics databases like Genius seem to think that this line is “let it go” rather than (the much more sarcastic and humorous) “way to go,” but I’ve always heard it as the latter and this is my post, so here we are. The album’s liner notes don’t include this line.

31. The four Jenkins-only tracks: “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Jumper,” “I Want You,” and “Motorcycle Drive By.”

32. Credit to Nick Hurwitch for that brilliant little gem of analysis.

33. Back in the summer of 2017, Third Eye Blind was touring in celebration of the 20th anniversary of their debut, playing that album front to back. I went, of course, and it was good. My enjoyment of the show can, I think, mostly be attributed to my love of the material rather the band’s adequate performance in a partially-filled amphitheater.

In that same summer, in a tiny, fully-packed bar, I saw another group play Third Eye Blind front to back. (Actually front to back this time, since the Jenkins-led show excised “Motorcycle Drive By” from the album’s tracklist so that it could be used as the encore finale.) That band was XEB, an act made of former Third Eye Blind personnel—i.e. all the talented musicians that Jenkins had wronged over the years (plus some young kid on drums). Tony Fredianelli, who replaced Cadogan before having his own falling out with Jenkins, acted as a more than passable Jenkins proxy and then there was Cadogan himself, alongside longtime bassist Arion Salazar and, reader, it was so, so wonderful. A full set of pure joy. There was only love in that tight, cramped building because that was the only reason for any of us to be there, as performer or observer. I can’t imagine that there is substantial money to be made playing such tiny venues on a poorly advertised, limited run tour, and so both the artists and fans in attendance were only there because we all loved these songs and the role that they had played in our lives.

What does it say about Jenkins’ and Third Eye Blind proper that what was essentially a cover band was able to deliver the more memorable anniversary tour?

34. Extreme relative to Third Eye Blind, of course.

35. That Buzzfeed article does mention Third Eye Blind … but only in citing “Jumper” as being unavoidable in the summer of ‘99, prior to Blue’s release.