On December 9, 2003, Hoobastank altered the course of their career with their sophomore album, The Reason. The Los Angeles-based band of Doug Robb, Dan Estrin, Chris Hesse, and Markku Lappalainen formed in 1994 after Robb and Estrin met in high school. After achieving success with their debut single “Crawling in the Dark,” which reached the Top 10 on both the Billboard Mainstream Rock and Alternative Airplay charts, Hoobastank capitalized on that success with their signature hit, “The Reason.” While hardcore fans know the band for their alt-rock sound, “The Reason” led Hoobastank into crossover markets, reaching No. 2 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Pop Airplay and Alternative Airplay charts.
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In honor of the album’s 20th anniversary, the band will perform it live, in its entirety, at a sold-out show at The Echo in L.A. on Monday (December 11). Below, Estrin talks with American Songwriter about the live show, the legacy of The Reason, why the title track doesn’t fully reflect the band’s sound, and more.
American Songwriter (AS): You’re doing the 20th-anniversary show at The Echo in Los Angeles. What insight can you give into that show?
Dan Estrin (DE): We’re from Los Angeles and this is where we came up playing. It’s home. There’s a lot of fans out here that are old-school fans that we have a lot of respect for because they were there so early on and are still around. The way that we feel is that a lot of the people that will be in the building are going to be fans not just for “The Reason,” they’re gonna know most of our catalog. We’re gonna play the 12 songs off of The Reason, plus a couple big songs off of the first record, and then we’re trying to figure out what other songs we wanna play. We’re talking about it going, “What are some that we don’t play all the time?” I don’t want to get up on stage and look out and see these familiar faces that are fans, but that I know who they are because they’ve been to so many shows and play all the same songs that they’ve always seen. We are talking about throwing in some slightly more obscure stuff that we don’t typically play. That’s the stuff that gets fans excited. We’re all really excited about the show.
AS: “The Reason” is the biggest song on the album. How do you see it fitting in with the other songs?
DE: I’ve always felt that if you are listening to the radio and you hear “The Reason” and that’s the first time you’ve heard us and [say] ‘That’s a lovely song,’ we’ve had a ton of people that get exposed to us simply because of that song. A lot of those people would come to a concert later and we might meet them after the show and they’re very surprised how much heavier we are live than we come across. But I don’t necessarily feel that way. I feel like if you just know us from “The Reason,” then you’re gonna feel that way. But I feel like if you hear “The Reason” and you go buy The Reason album, there’s heavy songs, there’s softer songs, there’s melodic sh**.
[RELATED: Hoobastank’s “The Reason” Joins YouTube’s Billion Views Club]
AS: Is there another song on that album that you wish had been as big as “The Reason” or as meaningful?
DE: Coming out as a rock band in the early 2000s, our first single was “Crawling in the Dark,” which did really well for us. It was a heavy, aggressive rock song. That’s the lane and the avenue we always saw ourselves in. However, we were writing these songs that happened to have really hooky, poppy elements to it. The next song after that would’ve been “Running Away” and was a big single for us as well, but it was leaning more towards crossing over. It wasn’t just on the modern rock, alternative rock radio stations, it was dipping its toe into the pop world. We got a little bit of backlash for that. I remember some of our hardcore fans were like, ‘What the fu**? I hear you on this station,’ and that station to them was like, ‘No, no,’ and I understand that mentality because growing up in Los Angeles, it’s the same thing for me. You have the rock stations, you have the pop stations. I happen to surf through all of them, but I understand how the business works and how the perspective of it all works, especially at that time.
Would I have preferred that another song on the album that was leaning more towards what we also did, which was heavy, take off and be massive? Absolutely. Would I have loved for our first single “Out of Control”to have performed better and charted better? Of course. But I wish that would’ve happened with every song that we put out as a single. “Out of Control” was the first single off The Reason album and we wanted to lead with that because we felt it represented what we were doing at that time really well. It was doing its thing and we felt it was doing well for us, but our record label was so interested in “The Reason.” They really wanted “The Reason” quick because I think that they knew, or they felt that they could hit a grand slam with that one. Although we were really happy to hear that and looked at each other like, ‘Hell yeah, they’re stoked on what we’re doing and what we wrote,’ we still wanted to stick with “Out of Control” as the single for a while… We wanted to go with “The Reason,” we just wanted it to be six months later. It’s done nothing but positive things for us and provided for all of us, as well as a lot of other people that work with us.
AS: When did the magnitude of “The Reason” hit you? When did you realize you had written this huge hit?
DE: I realized it more over the last five years than previously. But I knew it was a big song and I knew that it made a lot of people happy and it was performing well when it was out and current. I remember at that time, we were this band that we started here first record, and everything that we were doing was going like this [hand moves in upward incline motion]. I don’t wanna say it was expected as much as it was, “This is cool.” Every day, there was something new happening that was so exciting and so cool and so beyond anything that we ever really thought could possibly happen to us.
I knew it at that time and over the last 20 years, I’d hear things, whether it was positive or negative. There’s been a lot of time where no one’s paying attention and no one gives a sh** and then something happens on TikTok and people are reminded. Or someone does a cover of it in Spanish and they’re reminded of it. I feel like as I’ve gotten older in the last five years, I’ve realized more we might have a song that never goes away.
There’s a song on the next album called “Look Where We Are” and it’s about our journey, all we’ve been through and all we’ve done, the battles won. It’s pretty cool. The sentiment is about our journey up until “The Reason” like, “Look what the hell we just did. We didn’t even know that this was possible.”
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