Third Eye Blind’s song “God of Wine” began a musical addiction that, for a period of time, consumed my entire life. The 1997 self-titled album, which the song was released on, was their best. Since they haven’t made as great an album since then, their most recent announcement was no surprise: Everybody’s favorite ’90s band will no longer be making new music.

I was 12 when I first heard Third Eye Blind’s song “Jumper” from the band’s self-titled album, stealing my brother’s iPod to listen to at the Drive-In. Sprawled out in the summer heat, I wanted to drown in loud punk and prepubescent angst. Instead, “Jumper” led me to the God himself. I played the album religiously and with fervor throughout my musical education. It’s a perfect album. And that’s the problem.

Very few artists actually achieve a perfect album. It’s difficult to do because it’s not necessarily about the individual songs themselves, but the experience they create. A perfect album is not just 12 great songs, but 12 great songs that create a sensation like art or poetry. It should leave something behind. You are changed by listening to a perfect album.

Artists like Demi Lovato or Taylor Swift create music, and sometimes it’s enjoyable to listen to their auto-tuned tracks. But it sounds like it’s been through a team of writers. It sounds fake and prepackaged. Listening to the full thing is sort of like eating an entire tub of ice cream — it feels great while you’re doing it, but by the end you feel sort of nauseous.

But the perfect album is also a curse. It sets a standard of impossibility. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, listeners know you can produce something amazing, and they demand it greedily regardless of the consequences of vising somebody’s creativity.

Everything after 1997 for Third Eye Blind seemingly echoed their first album. It was the same sound, rehashed on endless loop. There was no change, but because it was not the same as “God of Wine,” the band fell into relative obscurity. They played in small clubs filled with people reliving their nineties, and “Jumper” became their chokehold.

In their time together as a band, Third Eye Blind has been through more musicians than sound changes. With two different guitarists and bassists in the course of about ten years, it was like they had lost their way.

The new music video for the band’s 2015 album, “Dopamine,” features frontman Stephan Jenkins intimately singing into a much a younger woman’s mouth. Instead of a ’90s-era heartbreaker, Jenkins looks old. The video is tired and creepy. The band has aged, and the sound has not.

Other artists have escaped the death kiss of the perfect album. Johnny Cash produced great albums until the day he died. My personal favorite was one of the last he released, a series of covers collectively called “The Man Comes Around.” Covers like “Hurt,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “I Hung My Head” have reduced me to tears. It’s an album that sticks with you.

Cash, like many other great artists, escaped the endless repetition by simply ignoring the hunger of his fans. While Third Eye Blind chased their ’90s sound, Cash aged gracefully and continued to make music as he did so. It’s not about attempting to create something that people want to listen to, it’s about making something so consumed by the artist that a piece of them sticks with you. Great music often has nothing to do with the listeners, but everything to do with the sound.

For me, the end of Third Eye Blind came much before their announcement. It started when they stopped making new music and began the endless chase for something that “God of Wine” achieved effortlessly.

Emera Riley is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. You can email her at elril100@syr.edu or follow her on Twitter @emerariley.

Published on March 1, 2016 at 10:00 pm