Hoobastank has ‘The Reason’ to celebrate

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — When Hoobastank vocalist Doug Robb thinks about “The Reason” turning 20, he feels old.

“It all depends on what specific moment I think about,” Robb told CNN. “Sometimes it feels like it was a blink of an eye, but sometimes it feels like it’s another lifetime ago.”

The band is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the album with a special show at The Echo in Los Angeles this month.

Both the album (the band’s second) and the hit single of the same title remains beloved by fans two decades later.

As a matter of fact, the single “The Reason” is so popular that the music video for the tune has more than 1 billion streams on YouTube and the song is poised to hit that same number on Spotify.

Robb said he and his fellow band members never anticipated such popularity.

“I don’t think anybody did, to be honest with you, because when we were done recording the songs that we thought were going to be on the album, obviously it was one of them,” he said. “But it was, in our eyes, the kind of the token mellower or softer song that we had put on a previous album and we had always done even in stuff prior to our record deal.”

Now both an official oldie and earworm, Robb laughed at the many theories about the song’s inspiration.

“I used to get asked all the time ‘Who’s it about?’ because everybody would think it’s about a specific person that I’m talking to,” he said. “But lyrically it was written by piecing together a bunch of old lyrics that I had not used and other stream-of-conscious-type writings. And so after 20 years of being asked that question and thinking about it, the song is really about me, I guess.”

There’s been a recent resurgence in the song due in part to its inclusion as part of the soundtrack of Netflix limited series, “Beef.”

It’s also popular on TikTok, which Robb said he’s on so he can know what his teenage children are into these days.

And how do his kids feel about their old man being a rock star?

“They don’t care at all,” he said, laughing. “They think I’m an idiot, which is partly true. They don’t see me that way. My daughter specifically, she’s 13, so she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

Cue Robb singing the opening line from “The Reason.”

“I’m not a perfect person,” the lyrics goes.

Fortunately, fans of Hoobastank feel the opposite about their music.

The-CNN-Wire
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