Third Eye Blind Singer Steps Back From That “Album-Only” Ledge

jotyco | October 21, 2008 12:30 pm

Stephan Jenkins, otherwise known as “the dude from Third Eye Blind,” recently came out of semi-charmed radio obscurity to deliver the keynote address at SanFran MusicTech Summit During his chat, the man who made “doo doo doo, doo da-doo doo” forever entwined with idle thoughts about blowjobs and meth posited that the art of the “album” is a dying one: “I don’t think it’s necessary or useful… The album is an arbitrary concept. It’s not something that has to exist.”

In his broadside against the album, Jenkins also claimed that he disliked “album filler.” (That should come as little shock to those of us who believed “Narcolepsy” and “Burning Man” to be the true gems from his band’s debut.) “Everything I do, I mean it,” Jenkins says, suggesting that the band’s upcoming album Ursa Major, slated for release in February 2009, will in fact be “all killer.”

Jenkins isn’t the only moderately successful ’90s star to lend an opinion on this zeitgeist-defining issue. Joan Osborne, on a break from her search for the divine came down on the other side, saying that what was important was interaction:

“It’s so much more about the single now, but I’m still stuck in this mentality of thinking about the album as a whole. A lot of people will still sit and listen to it as a whole. The individual songs impact each other and refer to each other, and that makes it a richer listening experience….

“I was able to travel all over the world with [One Of Us],” she recalled. “People were attracted to the album [‘Relish’] by the hit, but they saw that there was a lot more on the record–a lot more stuff they could be interested in. And that is the basis for becoming a fan who will stay with an artist for years, as opposed to just hearing the one single and then moving on.”

Lou Bega hasn’t weighed in on this crucial issue yet, but give him time.

Third Eye Blind vocalist: Albums unnecessary in digital age [cNet] Putting out albums in a single-minded world [Chicago Sun-Times]