“The first two albums were written during times when I didn’t feel scrutinized,” Stephan relates. Then it came time to hunker down and begin writing and recording their new album. In other areas, after his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Stephan organized the Breathe Benefit Concert in Los Angeles, which brought together a wide range of artists to raise money for breast cancer treatment and research. Our challenge is to make music for ‘now’ that maintains the purity of analog sound.” “Artists like Led Zep and Bob Marley set the sonic bar for music, for me. “I want people to know that this album is homemade,” says Stephan. Once it was complete, the band set up its collection of vintage analog recording gear, vital for capturing their organic sound. Upon coming off the road, rebuild they did, literally, constructing their own studio, right down to a summer spent putting up brick and sheetrock. But it’s hectic and it’s crazy, and after two albums back to back I had to stop for a year to rebuild.” But they miss out on the intensity of the exchange with a live audience, which I would never give up.
“We’d make more albums if we didn’t like playing live so much,” declares Brad Hargreaves Jenkins adds, “In a way, I envy hip hop producers like Missy Elliott, who can stay home and make more records. One might construe three years between albums to be evidence of slacking, but nothing could be further from the truth. Their 1999 follow-up, Blue, approached double platinum on the strength of the Stones-inflected single “Never Let You Go” and a sold-out worldwide tour that lasted a year. They scaled the charts with the album and its first single “Semi Charmed Life” they then made clear their intention to stick around by reeling off four more undeniable rock anthems - “Graduate,” “How’s It Going To Be,” “Losing A Whole Year” and "Jumper." The album sold six million copies, and remained on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart for well over a year. But as soon as real opportunity presented itself – in the form of their self-titled 1997 debut album with Elektra – they took it, and took off. In the mid ‘90s, Third Eye Blind spent a couple of years coming together, falling apart and coming together again, sleeping on floors and playing on the barely-existent San Francisco club scene. It retains the band’s rock songcraft, but it also captures the kind of jamming and improvising that happens when musicians become keenly tuned in to one another.
Out Of The Vein is a diverse and powerful statement of where the band is right now, thirteen songs full of energy, tension, contradiction and beauty – raw but lovely, lush but stripped. One listen makes it clear they have achieved their goal. “I think we’ve opened a vein, so to speak, and we’re going to let it bleed.”įor a band that has always found inspiration in authenticity and a DIY ethic, getting back to that place was essential to recording the album the band knew it could make. We’ve spent some time soul-searching, getting back to the nitty gritty.” According to Stephan, the album sessions mark the start of a creative period that will generate several more releases, including an EP, a live album and an “unplugged” album. “There’s been enough of a break that it isn’t a continuation. “This album is a beginning,” says Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins, of Out Of The Vein, the San Francisco quartet’s first new album in over three years.