How Third Eye Blind ended up at Stagecoach

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Stephan Jenkins agrees to bookings for music festivals only if his band Third Eye Blind can perform at a certain time.“It’s gotta be around 6 p.m.when the sun’s going down,” he says, which indeed is when he’ll play Sunday at this weekend’s Stagecoach festival in Indio.

“The light is in transition, and there’s a kind of energy that happens at that moment.”He wouldn’t prefer to headline?“Closing isn’t great.It’s great for your ego — looks big.

But everybody’s gotta go home after.The molly’s wearing off, and everybody’s spent.“This,” he adds, meaning the magic hour, “is where you really come alive: ‘The night’s ahead of us — this is gonna be amazing.’ And then we catch that.“How we get to do that is a mystery to me.”It shouldn’t be: Nearly 30 years after Third Eye Blind topped Billboard’s alternative rock chart with “Semi-Charmed Life” — a deceptively cheerful ditty about drugs and sex — Jenkins’ music is still huge on TikTok and Spotify, where four of his songs have more than 100 million streams each.

(For the record, those are “Semi-Charmed Life,” “How’s It Going to Be,” “Jumper” and “Never Let You Go.”)Thanks to the embrace of Gen Z and to nostalgia among those who were there, ’90s rock is in the middle of a major moment, not least at Stagecoach.In addition to Third Eye Blind, this year’s edition of the annual country festival will feature Counting Crows, Bush, the Wallflowers and Hootie & the Blowfish.To hear what Jenkins makes of this, I met up with the singer on a recent afternoon at EastWest Studios, where Third Eye Blind was recording a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” as part of an Amazon Music promotion related to Stagecoach.

Jenkins, who’s 61 and lives in San Francisco, had been traveling nonstop, he said, and had picked up a cold; as we sat down in the studio’s lounge,...