It’s been 21 years since the band Hoobastank hit the scene with its self-titled debut album.
When asked if it has felt like it’s been 21 years since the release, lead singer and guitar player Doug Robb says yes and no.
It wasn’t until just recently when a docuseries on YouTube about the band made Robb realize how long ago it was when the band released its first album.
“It depends on what I think about,” Robb said in a phone interview. “It’s hard to sometimes think about how it’s been 21 years now. It feels like such a blur to me now. We’ve been releasing these documentary mini series on YouTube and I’m watching them and when I watch them, it feels like a different life ago. That’s when I realized how long ago it was and how things have changed. It’s interesting. It depends on what memory I’m drawing from.”
Hoobastank will be performing in Odessa this weekend, alongside Lit as part of the Tried-N-True Tour.
The show will take place at 7 p.m. Sunday at Ector Theatre.
The tour began last month in Nashville, Tenn. and before then, there was a little bit of a break in the performing schedule for the band.
“I’m pretty excited,” Robb said. “You get back into home mode and now it’s time to slowly flip the switch back to tour mode a little bit. Besides worrying about what I’m going to pack for a month, you start to think about the shows and set lists and stuff like that. I’ve definitely had a few conversations with the guys about what songs to play on this tour and what ones to switch up and new things to try. The excitement is building for sure.”
Lit is considered one of the preeminent bands to have come out of the post-grunge era of the late 90s and helped define an entire generations of Southern California power punk including No Doubt, Blink 182 and The Offspring.
“The Lit guys, we’ve known for a long time,” Robb said. “They’re from Southern California. We’ve been playing shows with them off and on since 2003. It’s been a long time. We’ve kept in touch with them. We just thought it was a good fit. We wanted to put together a tour with bands of similar genres. Fans will recognize a lot of big singles from the performance. It felt like an easy fit.”
It was on Nov. 20, 2001 when Hoobastank released its debut album which launched the career of the band into mainstream success which included singles such as “Crawling in the Dark,” “Running Away” and “Remember Me.”
The band still continues to have success to this day with over six million monthly listeners on Spotify.
“Crawling in the Dark” reached No. 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the Modern Rock Chart as well as No. 1 on an MP3.com download chart in early 2002.
The song also featured in the 2002 inline skating game called Aggressive Inline which appeared on Xbox, Playstation, Playstation 2 and GameCube consoles.
Another song from the album was “Hello Again” which Robb said was written before the band’s record deal.
“That one was written before we had our record deal,” Robb said. “There’s a bunch of songs like that. In 1999, we got a demo deal. We recorded a handful of songs and the company didn’t like it and they turned us down. In between ’99 and late 2000, we started writing some new songs and ‘Hello Again,’ ‘Up and Gone,’ ‘Pieces,’ were three of the new batch of songs that we did.”
Robb also said “Hello Again” was written during a relationship breakup.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly the writing process of it,” Robb said. “It was around the time when I was ending a relationship and it ended pretty well and I thought we would get back together. The song is kind of that in an emotional vain of ‘bye for now.’ It was a crowd favorite after that first record. It’s a jump around song.”
The band’s success continued in late 2003 with the release of their second album The Reason which featured “Out of Control.”
However, when talking about “Out of Control,” Robb says the song wasn’t even originally in the album.
“Ironically, we had already written and recorded that entire album without that song,” Robb said. “I remember being in Hawaii for a show we had when our manager called. The record label liked that album but didn’t see a first single on it. In the mold of the first record, we wanted something to sound a little aggressive and up-tempo.”
Putting together “Out of Control,” Robb said he remembers guitarist Dan Estrin messing around with a riff during a sound check while they were still in Hawaii.
“We just started jamming on it,” Robb said. “We got back to L.A. and made a demo and showed our producer and he thought it was cool. We threw it together pretty quickly.”
The single would become one of the group’s best-known songs.
While the band has had plenty of success since, Robb talked about the driving force of the group’s early success.
Hoobastank had songs featured in movies such as The Scorpion King which starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in 2002 which featured “Losing My Grip” and DareDevil in 2003 which featured “Right Before Your Eyes.”
“A lot of it, if not all of it, obviously has to do with the songs we write but then it’s also the times we were in and places we were,” Robb said. “Some of it is just out of your control. It’s this wave that you ride. You don’t control the wave. If you can get on it, you ride it while you can until it’s over and be ready for the next one.”
Staying together for this long, Robb says there is an appreciation of how lucky they are to continue to do this.
“There’s a humbling effect,” Robb said. “When you’re young and putting out stuff and doing great, there’s a cockiness that comes along with it. It’s deserved. You feel like you’re a badass. I would hope that with time you can take time and step back and say to yourself, that you’ve done some good stuff but you’re not in control of the wave. When you’re young, you think you are the wave but there’s a greater appreciation of what we have accomplished and how many times we’ve been able to ride big waves and small waves and manage our egos and friendships and personalities to make it last long and not hate each other. At this age, we have a better and more honest relationship with each other. We’ve grown together.”
If you go
- What: Hoobastank and Lit Tried and True Tour.
- When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
- Where: Ector Theatre.
- Where to purchase tickets: tinyurl.com/4u9ndpny
