Third Eye Blind bassist Arion Salazar said that although the songs on his group’s self-titled debut were mainly the babies of lead singer Stephan Jenkins, the songwriting process on the band's sophomore effort “Blue” was more collaborative than most people realize. He also gives key insights into the new album and the inner workings of the band after the ouster of guitarist Kevin Cadogan.
Calling from 3EB's pre-tour rehearsal space, Salazar talked about the controversial lyrics on the song ''Slow Motion,'' which were too graphic for the band’s label Elektra Entertainment. Executives frowned on the graphic lyrics in the anti-violence song that Jenkins had penned years before the series of school shootings that have plagued the U.S: ''Miss Jones taught me
English, but I think I just shot her son/ 'Cause he owed me money, with a bullet in the chest/ With a bullet in the chest he cannot run/ Now he's bleeding in a vacant lot.'' Jenkins agreed to rewrite a portion of the song, and as a result, a tamer ''Slow Motion'' appears on the record.
Fans may have the opportunity to judge for themselves later this year, because the band is planning a self-produced EP that will include the original version of the song, along with new instrumental and vocal songs.
Christina Fuoco: ''Blue'' is a style change from your debut. It's grounded in rock, similar to your live shows. Was this planned?
Arion Salazar: Absolutely not, not from what I've seen and not from my perspective. It was just something that happens with us. We don't try to make anything sound a certain way, a certain genre or style. We work from the heart and from the moment for the moment.
Vocalist Stephan Jenkins has called this record ''The Dawn of Arion'' because of the amount of work you put into ''Blue.''
Yeah. I was just telling somebody else that doing this record, as far as fun, has been the high point of my musical life so far. It was just a blast. It's incredibly fulfilling. It's a self-gratification thing that happens when you're constantly being artistic. You get to work, you work really, really hard, and you use your brain and your heart, and you see the fruits
of your labor afterward. You can step back and be proud.
Did you chose not to work on the first record?
We had kind of a different band dynamic on the first record and a different political, you know, structure, for lack of a better phrase. It just kind of naturally happened that way. There's a certain amount that we were involved [on ''Third Eye Blind''], more than some people know. It's definitely totally different on this record. The environment had changed a lot. I think that comes with being on tour and living together for two years.
I'm assuming that Stephan wrote most of the first record?
... I think that's true to a certain extent. A lot of those songs were his babies that he had had, maybe, before he met me. They were his creations. He felt very controlling about them. I think that's an accurate description. With this record, these songs were more our babies.
Did you do a lot of writing on the road?
I did a lot of writing on the road. A lot of stuff that's not on the record. I can't speak for the other guys. One of the songs that Stephan and I co-wrote on this record was written on the road. I think that Stephan wrote a few songs on the road. I can't speak for Kevin. I think the rest of the stuff, one or two were written on the road, the rest of it was written in a rehearsal space shortly before we recorded. The whole thing was conceived,
rehearsed, recorded and finished in five months or a little more. We were really jammin', working hard.
Did you record any differently than the first one?
We were a little more interested in not limiting ourselves as far as instrumental textures--dabbling with keyboards and strings, a theremin, which is a really bizarre instrument, sitars. We just went crazy. We wanted to make the scope of what we could use as big as possible. That was different than the last record. We were more experimental this time.
''Slow Motion'' underwent a bit of a change. Tell me about the controversy.
That was a little bit of a weird situation that turned into this incredible positive for us. We didn't want to change anything. It's a song that Stephan wrote many years ago, and it's got incredibly brutal lyrics--not brutal in terms of profanity, but brutal in terms of imagery. They're not that brutal,
really. Some people, some higher-ups, were very concerned that it was going to cause a big ruckus with right-wingers and conservatives. So they were trying to pressure us to take it off the record. Intially, we said, ''No, no, no, no.'' We put our foot down we were going to keep it on. [But] because of the fuss that was being made, it seemed like if we did keep it on
the record, it was gonna cause a big ruckus, and it was going to take the focus off the rest of the record.
Without telling them that we were totally had come around and realized that maybe we should do something else with it, we said, ''We'll take it off if you give us a bunch of money and allow us to make our own independent record on our own label. We'll put the song out on that. We can use a different distributor. You can distance yourself from the project.'' They said, ''Yeah
sure. Whatever it takes.'' It was really cool. It was like a little bit of a, you know, bluff. Now what we're going to do is use that song, a couple vocal songs and a bunch of instrumentals and put it out on an EP at the end of the year. We want to make it really, really cheap and just a little taste of Third Eye Blind for people that want to hear more. It's really exciting.
The EP's going to be called ''Black.''
Now that Kevin is no longer in the band, how will that affect the future of Third Eye Blind?
I don't know. I think that the songwriting process for the last two records was a lot more communal than people might think. It'll definitely change, but I don't know if it's going to be a drastic thing. It's too early to say. I do know that the vibe and the feeling is really healthy, not that it wasn't before. But it continues to be amazing. I can't see anything kind of detrimental happening.
Published: Fri Mar 3, 2000 at 17:51:21 Pacific Time
Added: March 9, 2000
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