“Losing a Whole Year” by Third Eye Blind, Thursday, August 24, 2023 (repost)

Opening Third Eye Blind's debut record and becoming the fourth single from the record, "Losing a Whole Year" is quintessential late-'90s rock. The song chronicles the ending of a relationship between the speaker and a "rich girl." When the relationship starts to cool and as the sex stops being so great, the speaker begins to think that the whole relationship was a waste of time. Lead singer Stephan Jenkins penned the lyrics after hearing the riff that guitarist Kevin Cadogan played. 

RICH DADDY LEFT YOU WITH A PARACHUTE. Stephan Jenkins is one of the most interesting rock stars I've read about. Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor's Degree in English and then going on to forming a Shakespeare-inspired rap duo called Puck and Natty, Jenkins brought a variety of new experiences into the alternative rock scene when his new band Third Eye Blind debuted in 1997. Alternative Rock is a hard to define genre, but it is best described as rock that has been influenced by another genre. For Third Eye Blind, being from San Francisco and their temerity in embracing their San Francisco influences--the drug culture, hip hop, and queer culture--set a liberal tone for the latter years of the Clinton Administration on rock and pop radio. Third Eye Blind was, in a way, several apparent contradictions. Jenkins writes intimately about drug use, and not just casual drug use. The band's first single, "Semi-Charmed Life" details a relationship between two people constantly getting high on Crystal Meth. But Jenkins was college-educated, something not usually associated with hard drug use. Furthermore, for the late '90s no rock bands were queer-affirming, but Jenkins claimed queer culture as his San Francisco heritage, even penning the song "Jumper" about a gay kid who committed suicide. People questioned if Jenkins was himself gay.

I REMEMBER YOU AND ME SPENDING THE WHOLE GODDAMN DAY IN BED. But Stephan Jenkins has only had public relationships with women, starting with a high-profile romance with South African actress Charlize Theron and later a relationship with singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton. Whether "Losing a Whole Year" was based on a real relationship or not, Jenkins claims, "the words were how the riff makes me feel." The specific details about a rich girl from Bernal Heights who grows bored with her lover to experiment online with the "pierced queer teens in cyberspace" remind us not only of our breakups--the seemingly wasted days and nights learning someone else's desires, preferences, and anatomy: knowledge that is not easily transferred into other subjects, thus is, as Ted deems breaking up with Robin on How I Met Your Mother, "The emotional equivalent to earning an English major"--but it reminds us of time passing and how else we may have lost a whole year. Today's song often strikes me in August. I listened to this song a lot around the time when I broke up with my first serious boyfriend, which was in August. And while that was many years ago, there's something about August that reminds us that the year is rapidly approaching completion. It's a kind of check in: have you done something worthy of calling it a year yet? The next year is around the corner. Don't waste anymore time. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.