Blue (Third Eye Blind album)

The band enjoyed extensive success in 1997 with their first album, Third Eye Blind, which eventually went platinum six times.[2] The band maintained popularity into 1998 through extensive touring and a number of singles that performed well in the charts, including "Semi-Charmed Life," "How's It Going to Be," "Graduate," "Losing a Whole Year," and "Jumper," but by the end of the year, the band looked to start working on new material.[2]

In promoting the album, frontman and lead vocalist Stephan Jenkins recounted a pleasant experience in recording the album, referring to it as "too much fun and feeling like...a complete recording group for the first time...We had these jam sessions that were fun".[3] He also commented that it had been more collaborative than their prior album; bassist Arion Salazar became more involved in the writing and production, while drummer Brad Hargreaves was involved in the creative process for the first time, as he had joined the band late into their sessions for the first album.[3] However, in retrospect, Jenkins painted a much more grim picture, citing time constraints, label pressure from Elektra Records, and isolation between members, stating:

"We did the last album in six months, we just whipped it out, and there's some things on that album, on the second album, that I'm so proud of...but the second album suffered from a kind of coldness almost. That's done in part because we were never in the studio at the same time, never rehearsed the songs together, never played them together. I did my best to, to produce that record and it was very hard to do. Then we succumbed to the time pressures from Elektra to get the album out in six months which we did."[4]

A major issue of the recording sessions was internal strife between band members, namely between Jenkins, and lead guitarist and co-founding band-member Kevin Cadogan.[5] The two actively fought for ownership of the band; Cadogan, under the impression that the band was made as an equal partnership, was outraged to find that Jenkins had made legal changes to make Jenkins the sole owner of the band.[5] Cadogan was further frustrated by Salazar's and Hargreaves' lack of understanding and indifference to the arrangement.[5] The album was almost not made at all, as the band manager informed Cadogan that Jenkins was attempting to remove Cadogan from the band prior to even starting work on the album.[5] Cadogan did everything he could to stay in the band, including trying to push issues aside in order to just work on the album, having the band and sound engineer over to his home in order to record rough album ideas for two weeks.[5] The sessions worked, but were very difficult, and ended up being the only period where the band worked together with one another.[5] The rest of the album was recorded in solitude, with each member coming into the studio to record their parts of the album alone.[4] The recording process spread itself across multiple other studios over time, one of which being one of the studios where Fleetwood Mac's Rumours had been recorded.[6]

The tension and isolation in the recording process led to complications in the song selection, which would, in turn create further tensions within the band. Firstly was the song "Slow Motion", a controversial ballad written by Jenkins about a student shooting a teacher's son.[7] While Jenkins insisted that the song was satirical parody,[8] and actually anti-violence, Elektra disapproved of the track being on the album, feeling it could cause controversy due to the proximity of the Columbine High School massacre, which had just happened in April of that year.[9] The band and the label fought over the song's inclusion for four months, with the label proposing a compromise that would allow only the instrumental to be on the album, and in return, the label would finance an EP to be released after the album, where the band could release the song in its entirety and have complete creative freedom, without restriction.[9] Cadogan, already unhappy with his lack of ownership over the band, was the sole member of the band to object to the deal, knowing he would not have any control over the deal's terms of a cash advance and imprint label creation for the EP.[10]

With the members of the band not working together at the same time in the studio, the band's manager Eric Godtland set up a voting system for each member of the band to vote for the rest of the songs they wanted included on the album.[5][11][12] A list of twenty songs were recorded during Blue's sessions, with Godtland instructing each member of the band to vote for their top fifteen.[11] In addition to the twelve tracks that made the final track list of Blue (The thirteenth track, "Slow Motion" was not voted upon, as they had already come to a conclusion on what to do with the song.), were an additional eight songs, "Walk with the Devil", "Alright Caroline", "Lipstick", "Light That Hits the Room/Separation", "Sorry", "Gorgeous", "No One Home", and "Pack a Halo".[11] Adding to the tension between Cadogan and the rest of the band was the fact that many of the songs Cadogan had written, such as "Light That Hits the Room", received no votes for inclusion beside his own, and "Gorgeous" received only the support of himself and Hargreaves, ultimately leading to the songs being left off the album.[11][5] Conversely, Cadogan was the sole objector to the tracks "Never Let You Go" and "Deep Inside of You", which were not only included on the album, but eventually made singles.[11] Elektra spokesman Joel Amsterdam revealed that "Horror Show", a track the band had recorded and released originally on the "How's It Going to Be" single and for the Varsity Blues soundtrack, was also in contention for the album, but ultimately left off.[13]