Losing A Whole Year | Third Eye Blind
There are people out there who are gonna shit all over me for posting a Third Eye Blind song, and I have to admit I understand. The singer’s ego is enough to turn anyone off of them, and it didn’t help that songs like “Semi-Charmed Life” and “How’s It Gonna Be” got played to death back when this album (their first, the self-titled one) came out. In fact, I wrote them off without a second thought back then. “Semi-Charmed Life” was sorta catchy if you were in the right mood, but I was a lot more serious about straight edge back then, and I couldn’t endorse any song that prominently featured the line “Doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break,” and then followed it with four more lines about how great that particular drug was. “How’s It Gonna Be” just sucked. I tuned out after that.
Then in 2002 I was seeing this girl who never did commit to me, but was a total sweetheart despite all of her issues and really seemed to like me. We used to make each other mix CDs, and the CDs she made me were heavily informed by her teenage experience of being an alternateen who had no idea what punk rock even was. (By the time I met her she was into goth, but had only recently gotten into it, and gravitated towards modern goth groups, like VNV Nation and Apoptygma Berzerk, that didn’t much interest me.) She put Third Eye Blind’s “God Of Wine” on a mix CD for me, and I absolutely fell in love with it. Which made me feel incredibly weird, because my impression of Third Eye Blind before that had been of a band with shallow lyrics and no real ability to make complicated emotional statements with their music. “God Of Wine” disproved all that.
Thankfully, this was right after the age of downloading began, and I was able to hunt down a copy of the self-titled Third Eye Blind without spending any money. Because see, that’s how I roll—when I hear a song I like, I have to hear the whole album. My whole life feels like a constant quest for the perfect song, you know? I’m just trying to find that transcendent moment—and really, not just in music, in books and other things as well, but music provides the most immediate version of it—where all my cares disappear and I ascend to some higher spiritual plane, even if it’s only for three minutes. Any time a band gives me a hint of something like that, I have to track down the rest of their stuff. I could be missing out on something great if I don’t! Or so I always tell myself.
Anyway, “God Of Wine” is the last song on the self-titled Third Eye Blind CD. The first one is “Losing A Whole Year,” so this song was the first thing I heard when I finally downloaded the album. I’m not sure why it went down this way, but it was at least a year before I downloaded this thing, so it was late in the fall when I first heard this song, and that girl who’d turned me on to “God Of Wine” was long since out of my life. “Losing A Whole Year” sounded completely free of bullshit even the first time I listened to it. My life was pretty empty at that point, living by myself with no girlfriend and no prospects, hardly ever hanging out with anyone. When Stephan Jenkins sang “I remember when you and me used to spend the whole goddamned day in bed,” it brought up a whole host of remembered images and experiences in my head, none of which felt very good to think about. But it was real, it was something I was going through then—and, to some extent, am still going through now—and it felt like Third Eye Blind understood, like they’d accurately captured within a piece of music that low-down feeling you get when the breakup doesn’t even hurt so much anymore, when you’ve settled into your aloneness and almost don’t even notice the way the days are always slightly grayer than they used to be. Almost.
I mean, shit, even the music… this isn’t what some dumb buzz band with a cloyingly catchy radio single that gets played in dance clubs is supposed to be capable of. Third Eye Blind are frustrating that way, because this is only one of about eight songs on that first LP that rules, that would work as a song by an unknown emo band on an indie label whose EP you listened to some nights inbetween Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day Real Estate. You wanna tell kids that you like them, but all they know of Third Eye Blind are songs that make even you kinda wanna gag. So, how to reconcile that? How to make sense of the fact that this song and “Graduate” and “God Of Wine” share an album with “How’s It Gonna Be” and “I Want You” and fucking “Semi-Charmed Life?” And what about the singer being a total prick in every interview I’ve ever read?
I know, and I can’t explain it. But I guess the good thing about music is that you don’t really have to. You can just listen to it, take what’s there to be taken, and leave the rest. Which is what I do with this band. And I’m not sorry.
