The 1990s File Feature
How's It Going To Be
How's It Going To Be: Third Eye Blind's Ache of the Ending The Band That Arrived Fully Formed The fall and winter of 1997 belonged to Third Eye Blind in ways…
01 The Story
How's It Going To Be: Third Eye Blind's Ache of the Ending
The Band That Arrived Fully Formed
The fall and winter of 1997 belonged to Third Eye Blind in ways that few debut acts have ever experienced. Their self-titled first album had arrived in April of that year with the kind of immediate commercial momentum that record labels dream about, driven by Semi-Charmed Life's addictive energy and the growing sense that San Francisco's Stephan Jenkins had found a way to make post-grunge rock feel emotionally substantive rather than just sonically massive. By the time the third single from the album began its climb, the band's trajectory was confirmed: this was not a one-song wonder but a record with genuine depth and staying power.
The Sound of a Relationship Ending
Where Semi-Charmed Life had velocity and ambiguity and Jumper had compassionate gravitas, How's It Going to Be had something simpler and more devastating: the specific texture of the silence that follows a breakup, the moment when two people who have shared a life begin calculating who gets which parts of it. Written by Stephan Jenkins, the song captures that transitional state with uncomfortable precision. The production is full of space and breath, guitars that swell rather than attack, a production approach that mirrors the emotional content of something present but fading. Jenkins's vocal delivery carries a quality of unresolved grief, asking questions the song knows cannot be answered.
A Long, Sustained Chart Run
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 6, 1997, at number 36, and began one of the most sustained climbs of the 1997-1998 chart year. It moved through the thirties and twenties with the patient momentum of a song that radio programmers found themselves returning to week after week. By February 14, 1998, it peaked at number 9, a Valentine's Day arrival that felt almost symbolically perfect for a song about the end of love. The song spent 52 weeks on the Hot 100, matching the remarkable chart endurance of Savage Garden's Truly Madly Deeply, which was ascending the chart at exactly the same time. That both songs stayed for a full year speaks to a particular moment when pop radio had the patience for emotional complexity.
Third Eye Blind's Lyrical Ambition
Jenkins had been writing songs for years before the band's major label debut, and that accumulation of craft showed in the quality of How's It Going to Be. The song builds its emotional case through specific, grounded detail rather than generic romantic language. The questions it asks about the aftermath of a relationship, about what happens to the shared routines and the physical spaces and the mutual friends, are the questions that people actually ask themselves in those circumstances rather than the tidier, more literary questions that less honest songwriting produces. Kevin Cadogan's guitar work throughout the recording gave the melody both its hook and its ache, finding a descending line that sounds like something being let go.
The Song in the Band's Legacy
Third Eye Blind's debut album has aged into something of a late-1990s touchstone, one of those records that people who were teenagers in 1997 return to with the particular emotion of things heard at formative moments. How's It Going to Be occupies a specific place within that emotional map: it is the song for the specific kind of heartbreak that arrives not in the moment of rupture but in its aftermath, when the drama has resolved and what remains is the quieter, duller work of rebuilding a life. That is a less cinematic kind of pain, and Jenkins wrote it honestly. Put the headphones on and let the guitars ask questions you already know the answer to.
"How's It Going To Be" — Third Eye Blind's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Silence After: The Meaning of Third Eye Blind's "How's It Going To Be"
The Question That Cannot Be Answered
The title is not a statement but a question, and the song never resolves it. That formal choice is the key to the whole emotional project. By asking how things are going to be after a relationship ends rather than declaring how they will be, the song positions itself inside the period of genuine uncertainty that follows breakup, the days and weeks when nothing is settled and everything that was shared is suddenly up for renegotiation. This is not the moment of passionate conflict or even the moment of clear decision. It is the moment after, when both people are standing in the wreckage trying to figure out the practical and emotional terms of separation. Stephan Jenkins wrote the song from inside that moment rather than looking back on it from safety, and that decision gives it its unresolved, searching quality.
Shared Life, Divided Property
The lyrics concern themselves with the material and routine aspects of a shared life more than with the abstract emotional content of love and loss. This is unusual in romantic songwriting, which tends toward the grand and the general. Jenkins asked specifically about who would perform the ordinary tasks, who would tend to the ordinary needs, how the domestic infrastructure of couplehood gets redistributed when the couple dissolves. By grounding the breakup in these domestic details, the song locates grief in the places where it actually lives: in the absence of someone's voice in the morning, in the sudden redundancy of habits formed for two.
Post-Grunge and the Permission for Sadness
The alternative rock movement that had dominated the early 1990s had permission for anger, for existential disorientation, for the performance of alienation, but it was sometimes less comfortable with the simpler admission of sadness. By 1997, that was shifting. Third Eye Blind's debut was part of a wave of records, alongside work by artists like Matchbox Twenty and the Goo Goo Dolls, that treated ordinary emotional pain with the same sonic seriousness that earlier alternative rock had reserved for darker, more dramatic content. How's It Going to Be fit perfectly within that shift, offering a kind of emotional permission that male rock listeners in particular often found difficult to access through other channels.
The Melody as Emotional Argument
The song's melody does some of the heaviest lifting in its emotional argument. The descending quality of the main guitar figure and the way the chorus climbs toward the question rather than arriving at an answer create a sonic shape that mirrors the psychological experience of trying to imagine a future that does not yet exist. The production gives everything room to breathe, resisting the tendency toward sonic density that characterized much of the alternative rock of the era. The restraint in the arrangement is itself a form of meaning: the spaces and silences in the music sound like the spaces that a person's absence creates in a shared life.
Heartbreak as Universal Language
The song's remarkable chart longevity, spending fifty-two weeks on the Hot 100, speaks to how broadly its emotional content resonated across different listener demographics. Breakups are not the province of any particular age, genre preference, or cultural background, and a song that captures their specific texture with honesty and craft will find its audience wherever people are going through them. The 1997-1998 chart run of this song coincided with its maximum radio exposure, but the emotional relevance has outlasted that particular moment considerably. Anyone who has ever stood in an emptied apartment wondering what comes next will understand immediately what the song is asking.
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