The final chorus all but announces a soaring instrumental breakdown instead, the song just ends. And yet, it’s also his most understated single to date: no falsetto, no rapping, barely any percussion. It’s the sort of gracefully delivered moment that helped 3EB transcend the frat-rock scene, and it’s remarkable that these visions of reckless infatuation continue to rattle around his head. When the rapturous chorus finally arrives on “Box of Bones,” you want to pump your fist in triumph. With his eye for sticky imagery and nose for narrative climaxes, Jenkins strikes gold at a reliable rate. “New order, shit won’t stop/We’ll never sing about tits and ass again,” he deadpans on “Goodbye to the Days of Ladies and Gentlemen.” This is an artist who either fears obsolescence or is in on the joke-perhaps a bit of both. But Our Bande Apart’s sporadic cheekiness feels like a minor accomplishment. Their seventh full-length, Our Bande Apart, comes adorned with the usual trappings, and it often hinges on how much stomach you have for lyrics like “It’s just a demon road/But we have to go.” Jenkins is a man who sees constellations in the female anatomy he also remains weirdly obsessed with nautical expeditions. If Jenkins really believed his cock-rock to be the scion of Renaissance poetry, it at least made 3EB a far more interesting band than Marcy Playground. The triptych of 1997’s Third Eye Blind, 1999’s Blue, and 2003’s Out of the Vein is packed with such melodrama and so many gutsy melodies that all the coke and blowjobs sound downright Shakespearean. While their alt-rock peers hunched in the smirking self-deprecation of “ Sex and Candy,” he crafted arena-sized records that owed as much to glam rock as to the post-grunge canon. The same grandiosity that always made Jenkins an easy target, however, is also what set Third Eye Blind apart. Or was it ‘98? As weeks turn to months, he cycles through bandmates and session players, and the old howling question remains: How’s it gonna be when you don’t know me anymore? As tales of Stephan Jenkins’ overbearing demeanor, business chicanery, and outright creepiness have mounted, the Third Eye Blind mastermind has become something of a caricature: Who does this “ semi-charmed” guy think he is? It’s easy to imagine the 57-year-old songwriter walled away in a fortress like Phil Spector, tinkering with bridges and chord progressions, scrawling four-syllable adjectives on scratch paper and hastily striking them out, smiling in recollection of adoring crowds from the 2009 homecoming show at Skidmore.