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Untitled's Popularity


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On 5/31/2018 at 6:25 PM, daveyjones said:

and this is precisely where i differ with most people. i love that.

I know how you feel. Some of my favorite bands changed for the worse and I wish they stuck to what they were good at. 

I just don't understand you liking Neighborhoods. Production stinks, none of the instruments sound good, sounds nothing like old blink, and half the songs are forgettable. The rehash thing makes no sense to me either regarding those 2 albums. 

Id rather listen to Obvious, Violence, Go, Asthenia, Easy Target etc over the secondary tracks on Neighborhoods (which to me is anything besides Ghosts on the Dancefloor, Wishing Well, Kaleidoscope, Hearts all Gone). 

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3 hours ago, Champ182 said:

I think you got me mixed up with somebody else, I haven't read it!

Oh haha sorry!

2 hours ago, Reginald said:

No i dont think so. Its mostly about him and his wife. Expected more blink stuff but there was little, most of it i already knew. 

Cool cool.

55 minutes ago, boxelder said:

a fair bit as i remember, ill have to quote it when i get home. he said it was his favorite time ever in the band 

Thanks man!

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@theedge00, here's some various quotes from travis's book about untitled and that era:

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"It was a weird time in the band. Everyone was getting older: Blink-182 was no longer just three inseparable guys who were touring together. Mark had married Skye, who he had met at MTV, and Tom had married Jen, who was the girl of his dreams from high school. Both of their wives were super cool, but once we all had significant others, it added a whole different element. And once I split up with Melissa and met Shanna, that changed the dynamic again. Shanna and I couldn’t go anywhere without being photographed. That was weird attention I never asked for, and it added to the awkwardness in the band.

When we started recording the next album, I felt inspired by what had happened with the Transplants record. I told Mark and Tom, “Let’s pretend it’s our first album. Forget about what people expect from us or what they heard us do in the past. Let’s do what we’re feeling right now. Personally, I’m feeling all these crazy beats.” So Mark and Tom told me to record them, and that became “Feeling This,” the first song we did for the record.

First, I got down the beat that ended up being the verse. And then I recorded the crazy cowbell part. Mark and Tom were saying, “This is funky, this is crazy—how are we going to write to this?” And then the song came together. That’s still one of our favorite songs: it has these big John Bonhamesque drums and lots of cool drum parts. There’s a cool intro. It’s got huge verses and smaller choruses. And there’s a middle part where the drums are blown out. I used five different drum kits on that song—every part of the song had a different kit. It was very innovative. There was a lot of smoking and pills going on during the recording of that song. For me, anyway.


We were trying stuff we had never done before. On “I Miss You,” Mark played stand-up bass. We wanted a minimal drum sound, so I played with brushes—the only Blink song where I did that. Brushes are a totally different style of drumming that you have to learn; I knew the basics from pieces I played in jazz band in high school. The song was heavily influenced by the Cure’s “Love Cats.” It’s one of very few Blink songs where I helped out with lyrics. We put in the Jack-and-Sally reference* because Shanna and I were super into The Nightmare Before Christmas.†


The band rented a house in San Diego and kept working on the album. I recorded most of my drum parts at the beginning, and then I went and did other things. Mark and Tom have their own pace in the studio, which is more relaxed than mine, and they wanted to experiment with different sounds, so everything took a long time. I would go do other projects, and then go down to San Diego to hang out with Mark and Tom.

Quote

“That was a good time in my life. I was smoking just enough weed and taking just enough pills. I was playing just enough drums and working out—just enough. Things were cool with Shanna and me. That whole time period was really dope, even though the album took a whole year to make—we had come a long way since recording Enema of the State in three days. But it was worth every minute.”

Quote

“After a year of work, Blink-182 finally finished the album in 2003. Some people think it’s a self-titled album, called Blink-182, but Mark has always insisted it was actually untitled. Either way, by the time we wrapped it up, we really liked it a lot. It had a little bit of everything: we ventured far enough outside our genre to make ourselves happy, but not so far that we offended our fan base. It was a perfect happy medium, and it’s the Blink album that Mark, Tom, and I are most proud of."

 

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1 hour ago, boxelder said:

@theedge00, here's some various quotes from travis's book about untitled and that era:

 

I hope you didn't actually hand type that out, I'm 99% sure I have the pdf version somewhere... 

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16 hours ago, Feeling_This_1 said:

I just don't understand you liking Neighborhoods.

i don't get it either. i think the lyrics connected with me, where i was in my life when it came out.

it's bizarre. sometimes there is no adequate explanation for why we like (or don't like) a certain thing.

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14 hours ago, theedge00 said:

@boxelder You're the real MVP for typing that out!

That's so cool to read about Feeling This having 5 different kits!

Mark and Tom writing at their own pace, exploring and experimenting.... Man, amazing times

12 hours ago, Kay said:

I hope you didn't actually hand type that out, I'm 99% sure I have the pdf version somewhere... 

nawwww, y'all, i have the .epub version, i'm no peasant! haha

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It's so annoying how Mark has insisted its untitled. That's so stupid/pretentious. Especially since even Travis has called it the self-titled album over the years and publications have done the same by referring to the album as "blink-182". Pretty much every band does self titled albums, sometimes with nicknames that catch on (Beatles White album, Metallica Black Album, Weezer colored albums).

Its basically the same damn thing, they don't give it a name, so its just named after the band. But, no Mark has to point out that its not self titled, it's untitled....Give me a break

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2 hours ago, Feeling_This_1 said:

It's so annoying how Mark has insisted its untitled. That's so stupid/pretentious. Especially since even Travis has called it the self-titled album over the years and publications have done the same by referring to the album as "blink-182". Pretty much every band does self titled albums, sometimes with nicknames that catch on (Beatles White album, Metallica Black Album, Weezer colored albums).

Its basically the same damn thing, they don't give it a name, so its just named after the band. But, no Mark has to point out that its not self titled, it's untitled....Give me a break

If you self title an album, you're basically saying it's the best or the overall feel of the band as a whole. I've always hated the practise because it undermines the other records.

I love that he demands it be 'untitled', like they just couldn't fit a name to this great record. nothing was good enough. I like that. 

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20 hours ago, Kay said:

If you self title an album, you're basically saying it's the best or the overall feel of the band as a whole. I've always hated the practise because it undermines the other records.

Yeah I've never liked it either. The reasoning is usually "this record really encapsulates who we are as a band more than any other." But then they make more and more albums that they probably also think that about and they can't just keep self-titling their albums (unless they're Weezer, who gets a pass as it's simply tradition at this point).

One of the few bands who I thought had an actual good reason for self-titling their album was Yellowcard, who self-titled their final album, knowing that it was going to be their final album.

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It’s the first album I ever fell genuinely in love with. And to this day it still takes me back to a great point in my life. It carries so much nostalgia for me. I also agree that it should’ve gotten the acclaim American Idiot did. It just did so much more to show how much depth you could give to an under respected genre without getting too self indulgent and pandering.

Also (unexpectedly) lost my virginity on a shitty cot in a dampy basement while my friend’s older brother was playing the album upstairs, so maybe that’s also why it holds such a special place in my heart. :lol: 

I was truly blown away by how much I loved it and how different it was from how I previously perceived blink. I already liked them, but I full out fell in love with them from there on. I thought it was just the beginning. They seemed so cohesive, so on the same page, so focused and artistically centered. I couldn’t wait for what they would put out next. And imagine my surprise when a little over a year later, they announced the breakup. And unfortunately, we all know the rest.

 

I was of course sad, yes, but more utterly shocked. How could a band deliver such a banger like that, seem so together at the top of their game, and just fall apart like they did? It puzzled the hell out of me then, and even though we know the story now in retrospect, it still confuses me to no end regardless.

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