Welcome to My Music Mondays. Each week I will be delving into my music collection and looking at a new artist going somewhat randomly currently but eventually from A to Z. I’ll examine why I first started listening to them, my favorite album and my top 10 songs for the artist. As my music collection is pretty extensive and I have a lot of one offs, I have set a qualification to be featured here. That is that I have to have at least two albums of the artist’s music before they can be considered. This week I look at the band Hoobastank.

The funny thing about Hoobastank making it into this feature is that I am not a very big fan of their music. I first heard of the band when I caught the video for either “Crawling in the Dark” or “Running Away” one day in passing. It was an artist spotlight before the band had really hit it big. I bought their major label debut shortly thereafter and found I liked a good bit of it, even if a good majority of it was rather repetitive. For me, at the time it was a nice change of pace from the standard pop-punk bands that were permeating the airwaves. Hoobastank was a little bit harder and seemed to have a little more substance.

Then came their follow-up and the edge I thought the band had was gone. It’s not that their follow-up album was bad but it was more generic than their debut. You can tell a lot from a band’s sophomore album and what “The Reason” told me was Hoobastank was less about the rock and more about radio airplay hits. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with popular music but the shift just threw me off, enough for me to ignore their third album completely, which by all accounts was just a more polished version of “The Reason” with even less rock. At that point I thought I was done with the band but early this year I was given their new album around the time of its release and was impressed that, at least in some respects, had returned to the form that started me in on them. For(n)ever was not enough to get me to really care about them anymore but it did put them back on my (sometimes limited) musical radar.

Favorite Album: Hoobastank

Their major label debut. Re-listening to it made me question why I once thought they were so hard (because they aren’t) but the songs I remember liking are still pretty damn good and fun to listen to. The rest of their catalog, not quite as impressive.

10 Favorite Songs

10. Escape
9. Out of Control
8. All About You
7. Pieces
6. Remember Me
5. The Reason
4. Ready For You
3. Same Direction
2. Running Away
1. Crawling in the Dark

So what do you think of Hoobastank?