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My face is involved in whatever the emotional landscape of the song is, my face is in it, and that’s like Frank N. If you ever see us live, I kind of take it upon myself to animate. Tim Curry is a huge influence on me as a performer. I think the song “Get Me Out of Here” on the new album is kind of an ode to that. When I was 13 I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and to this day, I think it’s amazing. That kind of stayed with me, although I don’t know how much those are influences. I remember I heard Led Zeppelin, and the first time I heard them I thought they were scary, it was dark and exotic. I literally had bangers and mash with Noel Gallagher, that was a big deal.ĪllMusic: Oasis and Third Eye Blind were two bands I couldn't escape when I was 13. Liam was ridiculous, he was totally being Liam, and Noel was great. And there we were, playing them in front of a big crowd in San Francisco, it was grand.
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In terms of America, it was their peak moment. We’d been playing the club scene for 60 people, and that would get us really stoked, and here we were playing for 7,000 people, and it was Oasis when “ Champagne Supernova” and “ Wonderwall” were just banging all over. I was pretty standoffish to the record industry at that point, and we went to New York and sat down with Dave Massey, and he started talking and there was this moment of chit-chat, about talking about something else, and I just didn’t have the patience for it, and I said, “What can I do for you?” And he said, “Well, you could sign to Epic Records, when can I see you play next?” “Well, you could have us open for Oasis, they’re on your label and playing in San Francisco next week.” And he looked at me like, “Who is this guy?” and then went, “OK, that makes sense,” and he put us on the bill. Nothing ever, ever happened for us, and then in one week, everything happened. A song like “Wounded,” for example, it doesn’t really open up until the very end of the song. I get a lot of criticism that my songs don’t take off until the very end. To me, I can’t really write from structure, I wrote from a more emotional sense.
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There’s a chorus, then it goes beyond that. The first time I heard it I said, “Oh, it’s just perfect.” The interesting thing about Oasis is right when you think they’re at the chorus, they’re willing to go another step, and I love that. Jenkins: “Umbrella” by Rihanna comes to mind. It’s great.ĪllMusic: What are some songs you can point to that have a perfect chorus? But still, “Hit me, baby, one more time,” that’s amazing. From a very young age, I could tell when things were trite. But I always picked up the narrative aspects of songs, too, so a song like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a line like, “Mama, just killed a man/Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead,” that just woke me up to what was going on. Jenkins: When I was a little kid, I loved pop music, I loved pop radio, and I learned so much about song structure from it. They don’t go, “Is this too long, will this play on radio? How will this be perceived?” Those are the times where something really happens, and those are always the songs that become my favorite.ĪllMusic: For some people, lyrics are just a melody delivery system, but the content seems really important to you. A song never holds together until all the lyrics are done, and then when they are done and I’m in the studio with musicians with whom I have a kind of empathy, there are moments where everyone puts down their egos, puts down whatever hat they’re wearing, and they go into an exploration and they do it without any sense of what the outcome’s going to be. In the recording process, if I have the lyrics done, then I really enjoy it, but if I don’t have the lyrics done, I feel like a fraud. Stephan Jenkins: I don’t have one favorite part, but I have different parts where it’s a really, really happy thing.
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We talked to Jenkins about whether fretting over subtleties yields rewards, some of the non-musical influences on his performance style, and how opening for Oasis in 1996 put his band on a new course.ĪllMusic: Now that you're five albums in, have you pinpointed your favorite part of the album cycle? With an over 20-year career, featuring high points ranging from early hits like " Semi-Charmed Life," "How's It Going to Be" and "Jumper" to this summer's amphitheater-filling tour alongside Dashboard Confessional, Third Eye Blind has carved a career out of sticking to its hallmarks: respecting the strength of the pop music structure and the vocal hooks of frontman Stephan Jenkins.ĭopamine, the band's latest, came out this June, which editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote features "insistent, surging, miniaturized arena rock," and its creation brought about much hand-wringing on the part of Jenkins, particularly in the lyric department.