Anatomy of an Album: Enema of the State

The band that walked into the studio at the start of 1999 was, for the first time, the lineup that would define Blink-182 for the rest of its career — and it had come together almost by accident less than a year earlier. Original drummer Scott Raynor left the band in February 1998, mid-tour, and with dates already booked, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge needed a replacement immediately. They borrowed Travis Barker, then playing in the ska-punk opening act The Aquabats. The story, repeated by Barker himself, is that he learned the band's entire twenty-song set from a cassette tape in around forty-five minutes before his first show — and played it without a mistake. Adam Deibert, his bandmate in The Aquabats, watched it happen and knew immediately what it meant: “We should have looked for a new drummer right then, because it was obvious what band he belonged in.” The temporary fill-in became permanent within weeks.

Hiring the man who made Dookie

The single most consequential decision the band made for this record wasn't a song — it was a producer. Jerry Finn had engineered and mixed Green Day's Dookie, the album that had more or less invented the commercial pop-punk sound Blink was chasing, and had gone on to work with Rancid, Pennywise, and Morrissey. He understood exactly how to make fast, simple, melodic punk sound enormous on the radio without sanding off what made it punk in the first place. By every account from the sessions, he became something close to a fourth band member. Mark Hoppus has credited him specifically with making the grind of studio work bearable: “Recording can get pretty monotonous, but at least we could laugh with Jerry.” Finn, for his part, was quietly irritated at how the press was filing the band: “It's kind of funny that they've been lumped in with Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, who play up that kind of pimp lifestyle, because Blink is so not that.”

Recording ran January through March 1999, spread across a string of California studios rather than one home base — Mad Hatter, the Bomb Factory and Conway in Los Angeles, Signature Sound, Big Fish and Studio West around San Diego. The bulk of Barker's drums were cut at Mad Hatter, a Los Angeles room owned, unexpectedly, by jazz-fusion pianist Chick Corea. Barker reportedly tracked the majority of his parts in around eight hours, playing live without headphones and, unlike every later Blink album, without a click track. The whole record was cut to analogue tape rather than Pro Tools — a technical choice that's a large part of why it still sounds like a band playing in a room rather than a grid of edited parts.

The songs, in their words

“What's My Age Again?” was originally titled “Peter Pan Complex” — MCA changed it over the band's objections, worried the reference was too obscure for radio. Its instantly recognizable arpeggiated guitar intro has a genuinely accidental origin: Hoppus was trying to play Green Day's “J.A.R.” on guitar, fluffed the part, and decided he liked the mistake better than the song he was actually attempting. Hoppus has declined to call the song strictly autobiographical, while admitting he genuinely spent his twenties acting exactly as immature as the lyrics suggest.

“All the Small Things” started as DeLonge's deliberate tribute to the Ramones, built around a run of "na na na" hooks so direct the early demo tapes were simply labeled the "Ramones-style song." Its verse about roses left on a staircase is a real detail, a gesture from DeLonge's girlfriend (and later wife) Jennifer after he came home late from a recording session. DeLonge has said the band didn't fully register what they had until they heard the finished take back: “Once we recorded this song and heard it, it gave us the chills. We just looked at each other and knew we had this little piece of magic.” It became the band's biggest single, and the song most responsible for turning them from a successful punk band into a genuinely mainstream one.

“Adam's Song” is the record's emotional center of gravity, and its origin is more serious than almost anything else in the band's catalog. Written largely by Hoppus, it was shaped in part by a teenager's letter he'd read in a magazine, and takes the structure of a suicide note that pulls back toward hope in its final verse. Hoppus has talked about the song more than any other he's written, and his own framing of it has shifted over the years toward something closer to gratitude than despair: “It's almost a celebration of hardships gone through and friends lost.” The song's afterlife carries real weight: in May 2000, a Columbine High School survivor took his own life reportedly with the song playing on repeat. Hoppus, who'd written it as an explicit anti-suicide message, was devastated when he found out: “I was actually out shopping, and management called me up and told me the story of what happened, and I was like, ‘But that's an anti-suicide song.’”

“Mutt” is the album's oldest song by some distance — it carries a writing credit for former drummer Scott Raynor because an earlier version had already been recorded for a 1998 independent film before Barker ever joined. “Wendy Clear” takes its name from Hoppus's boat, written about an unexpected crush during a tour with MxPx. “Anthem” closes the record in the exact suburban setting the whole album lives in, inspired by a real high-school house party the police shut down. Keyboards throughout the record — including the piano break that gives "Adam's Song" its weight — came from an unlikely contributor: Roger Joseph Manning Jr., formerly of the cult power-pop band Jellyfish, who's said the band gave him total creative freedom: “They welcomed all my ideas, and they were super supportive, and that's why it was so much fun working with them.”

What it did

Enema of the State debuted at a modest No. 9 on the Billboard 200, selling around 109,000 copies its first week — a strong start, but nothing that predicted what followed. What happened next was a genuine slow burn: driven by relentless MTV rotation and radio airplay, the album refused to leave the chart, going platinum by October 1999, triple platinum by January 2000, and five-times platinum by February 2001, on its way to an estimated 15 million copies sold worldwide. Critical reaction in 1999 was warmer than the band's reputation for onstage nudity might have predicted — the New York Times made it an Album of the Week, and outlets that came in ready to mock frequently left admitting the songwriting was better than they'd expected.

The record's influence is difficult to overstate. Within a few years, a whole generation of bands — Sum 41, Simple Plan, New Found Glory, and eventually the emo-pop wave of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco — were working directly from the template it set. Music writer Ian Cohen put it plainly in a 2014 Pitchfork piece: “Many indie bands evolved not from Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, but Smash, Dookie, or Enema of the State, records that served as beginner's manuals.” Looking back on it himself, years and several more ambitious albums later, Hoppus has located the band's whole identity in this specific record rather than anything more experimental that came after: “It's the heart of Blink-182's musical sensibilities, its simplicity, its purity, its singularity of purpose between the three of us.”

Jerry Finn would go on to produce three more Blink-182 records, including 2003's self-titled album, before dying in 2008 at just 39 following a brain hemorrhage. The cleanest, biggest, most enduring version of pop-punk that ever reached a stadium stage owes an enormous and often under-credited debt to a producer who spent three months in 1999 teaching three guys from Poway how to sound as big as the songs they'd already written.

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