Photo Credit: Jimi Giannatti
Jimmy Eat World
Going by singles and album charts and sales, it’s easy to assume that the high point in the career of Jimmy Eat World came with the band’s third album, 2001’s “Bleed American” and its hit single, “The Middle.”
But singer/guitarist Jim Adkins notes that album sales and chart positions don’t tell the whole story of a band’s career journey. At least that’s the case for Jimmy Eat World, as this year marks 30 years since Adkins, guitarist Tom Linton, bassist Rick Burch and drummer Zach Lind formed the band in Mesa, Arizona.
“Bleed American gave us a start. It definitely changed things for us,” Adkins observed in a late-June phone interview. “But we’re playing bigger shows now to more people than we ever have. Like we’re playing at Red Rocks. We’re playing Central Park. We’re playing at the Greek in Los Angeles. We couldn’t do any of those, even at the time when ‘The Middle’ was like the top song in the country and we were on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ It’s just started something for us that we’ve been fortunate enough to sort of nurture along and then build from there. It definitely gave us a big jump. It was the nitro for our race car. Now we’re just cruising along.”
This summer sees Jimmy Eat World co-headlining the Amplified Echoes tour with Manchester Orchestra, and that outing indeed includes the aforementioned venues in Colorado, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as other outdoor amphitheaters nationwide with dates in several theaters and large clubs mixed in along the way.
Covering the Bases
Adkins noted that his band had wanted to tour with Manchester Orchestra for some time, only to see scheduling or some other issue prevent it from happening. The co-headlining format will also let Jimmy Eat World to cover a good number of musical bases.
“I think we can spread out and play some of the material that we might do on our normal headlining club gig, where it’s just our fans there,” he said. “We do take into consideration our ideas of who’s going to show up at these things. Well, we’ve got to put in things that we think are fun just purely for our own sake to stay sane. Sometimes the Venn diagram of what people want to hear and what we’re really excited to play is far off. But I think we can dig a little deeper in the catalog and play some songs that we haven’t in awhile. That won’t be like because we’re neglecting the songs that we know everybody would be stoked on. It’s just going to be in that extra time that we have to go a little deeper in the catalog.”
Adkins and his bandmates have plenty of song choices at this point. Their catalog includes 10 studio albums, the most recent of which was 2019’s Surviving. But the band has since released a pair of stand-alone singles, “Something Loud” and “Place Your Debts,” the latter of which reached No. 21 on Billboard magazine’s Alternative Airplay chart.
“We put out the singles because we’d never done that before and we wanted to see if we could meet listeners where they’re at when it seems like so much is consumed track by track instead of by album, on playlists rather than full-lengths,” Adkins said.
There have certainly been times when Jimmy Eat World’s albums have connected as well. That’s especially true of Bleed American, which became a platinum-selling hit and gave the band their first No. 1 single, “The Middle,” which topped Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart and peaked at No. 5 on the magazine’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart. The next Jimmy Eat World” album, Futures, gave the band another Alternative Airplay chart topper with the song “Pain.” Subsequent albums, if not as popular, have generally peaked in the top 20 of the Billboard chart and several later singles have been top 10 Alternative Airplay hits.
Bleed American and Futures (along with the band’s third album, 1999’s Clarity) also got Jimmy Eat World recognized as one of the founding fathers of the musical genre known as emo. The band members never really embraced that label, feeling it didn’t describe Jimmy Eat World’s catchy and rocking brand of guitar pop, but have come to terms with their relationship with the label.
“I don’t think we can escape it now. We crossed the event horizon some time ago,” he said. “Now it’s just like I could try to argue with people why where I grew up and what scene I came up in exactly, why I feel like that describes something other than what we do. But it’s just wasted breath. At this point, if somebody finds something we do that they can connect with, however that comes to be, is a huge compliment. It’s the only validation that really matters in music and art. So if that comes with emo being a part of that whole equation, then I am grateful.”
Jimmy Eat World perform Aug. 15 at The Rave/Eagles Club.
