As anyone who turned on a radio during the late '90s can tell you, Third Eye Blind's catchy hit songs helped to define the post-grunge musical era. But decades later, an all new generation of listeners is finding meaning in the band's music — thanks, in part, to a recent partnership with Instacart.
When Instacart launched their nostalgia-based "throwing it back to '99" campaign this summer, Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Kinda Life" was the obvious choice for a soundtrack. Still, as frontman and guitarist Stephan Jenkins tells Parade, having a brand feature your song in an advertisement is always a "dicey" prospect.
"You are in this position of having your song be molded into somebody else's brand," Jenkins explains. "If you care about your work, that's going to give you pause. And there have been multiple times where we've said no."
When it came to Instacart's retro commercial concept, on the other hand, Jenkins saw the campaign as a way to connect viewers with Third Eye Blind's music — and he wasn't disappointed with the "cute" and "charming" results.
"When I saw the first commercial, I said, 'I think I like this better than the music video for the first single that we did,'" Jenkins admits. "I looked at my first video and I was like, 'This doesn't reflect me at all,' and I never watched it again."
Jenkins goes on to say that because he doesn't watch TV, he didn't realize how often the commercials were being played until he was backstage at an event.
"There was a TV on, and I was waiting with some other people to go on," he recalls. "And the ad got played like every seven minutes. It was just constant...but the point is that it definitely got people hearing it," Jenkins adds, noting that the exposure helped to boost Third Eye Blind's streaming numbers.
Reflecting on Third Eye Blind's appeal for young listeners who are just discovering the band, Jenkins says their music is "illuminating what there now is," adding, "it's a different present tense that it was for people 10 years ago."
Over the summer, Third Eye Blind played to thousands of people on the festival circuit, where Jenkins was inspired by the "energy" of the "kids" in the audience.
"It's saying something to them...helping to tell them who they are," he says. "And it definitely keeps the music alive to me as well."
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Jenkins had Third Eye Blind's young fans in mind this August when the band played a free, first-come, first-served concert at Terminal 5 in New York City as part of their partnership with Instacart.
"The idea of doing a free concert especially in New York City, where everything is so expensive, was just something we were enthusiastic about," he says, pointing out that when he was a teenager going to "off-the-hook little punk shows" in San Francisco, he didn't have a lot of money to spend on concert tickets.
Even if Jenkins appreciated Instacart's love letter to the '90s, he's looking ahead to the band's next musical chapter, working on a new album and continuing to perfect his craft onstage.
"It's really about having an authentic abstraction through music," he says. "And that's why I keep working at playing live and why it continues to matter to me because it's all about the more real and connected I am within myself, the more it's actually able to transfer."
If the recent reaction to the resurgence of "Semi-Charmed Kinda Life" is any indication, Third Eye Blind's fans will be more than willing to follow them into the future.
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