CORRECTION APPENDED

This year, Harvard students can count on a platinum-selling band to get them through this “semi-charmed kind of life.”

(Baby.)

(Baby.)

Noted pop ensemble Third Eye Blind will anchor the college’s second annual Yardfest celebration a few weeks from now, the College Events Board (CEB) announced yesterday afternoon.

The band will perform from the steps of Memorial Church on April 28 as the centerpiece of an evening of food and entertainment that the CEB has billed as “the year’s biggest campus-wide event.”

The concert will be free to undergraduates with Harvard IDs, but VIP tickets guaranteeing proximity to the band can be won at a series of themed, CEB-co-sponsored Stein Clubs this month.

According to CEB Chair S. Adam Goldenberg ’08, the student planners for this year’s Yardfest had been pursuing Third Eye Blind all semester.

“We were looking for a group that would fit the atmosphere of 7,000 people having a barbecue on a sunny day in late April,” Goldenberg said. “Third Eye Blind fit the bill.”

The band made its name with a self-titled 1997 debut album that included the hit tracks “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Losing a Whole Year,” “Graduate,” and “How’s It Going to Be.” They followed up in 1999 with “Never Let You Go,” a single off of the band’s “Blue” album. The group’s most recent collection, “Out of the Vein,” was released in 2003.

The apparent universality of the band’s appeal strengthened the case for its selection, according to D. Zachary Tanjeloff ’08, the director of the Harvard Concert Commission, which helped plan the event.

“Everyone grew up with it, everyone’s listened to it, they’re really popular, their music can cut across all sorts of boundaries,” Tanjeloff said. “We’re not going to isolate anyone with this pick.”

This month’s celebration will look to build on the success of last spring’s inaugural Yardfest, which featured piano-pop virtuoso Ben Folds and drew about 7,000 undergraduates to Tercentary Theater.

Following that success, Goldenberg said the board has remained focused on improvement. The detailed list of logistics included items as minute as the proportion of finger-food to food eaten with forks. CEB’s Yardfest Coordinator Neesha Rao ’08 also recounted deliberations concerning the decision to move the food from the Widener steps to the front of Sever Hall in an attempt to improve efficiency.

Many students expressed their excitement at the news last night on House open e-mail lists, but not everybody was entirely on board.

“I know personally I haven’t listened to them at all in the past few years,” said Isaac Ravishankara ’07.

Ravishankara added that he would prefer that student organizational efforts would be directed towards more frequent, smaller concerts, rather than events that involve “standing hundreds of feet away from an artist that we used to listen to years ago who we probably paid way too much money for.”

According to Rao, however, the success of Yardfest is not solely predicated on how individuals react to the band.

“I think if people go and they eat dinner and have fun and then they leave and they say that they’ve had a few hours of fun that they wouldn’t have had otherwise—I think that’s a success,” Rao said.

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The April 5 news article "Third Eye Blind To Headline Yardfest" wrongly stated that 7,000 undergraduates attended last year's Yardfest. In fact, the College said the event had a total attendance of 7,000.