In the age of the Great Resignation, everyone is having doubts about their career paths, even million album-selling musicians. Take Jim Adkins. His band, Jimmy Eat World, are nearing 30 years together and the emo godfathers are still touring relentlessly. But Adkins, 46, only conceded that his band might be a going concern around a decade ago – “I thought: ‘Huh, I guess this is what I do’” – and remains dubious about their long-term prospects. “I still don’t take this seriously as what I’m going to do in my life,” he says.
That scepticism may have something to do with Jimmy Eat World’s strange trajectory, which saw the Mesa, Arizona band whisked from the DIY emo scene of the mid-90s, where they’d be playing in “the craziest of places” – basements, friends’ houses, the back rooms of churches – and on to major label Capitol, a place where, in Adkins’s words, they had “no business being”. He remembers visiting Capitol’s New York offices – “back when labels had actual buildings in really expensive cities” – and being greeted with giant double-door-sized posters for P, a short-lived alt-rock band fronted by Johnny Depp, the sort of superstar Capitol were more accustomed to dealing with. Adkins mimics the baffled faces of the employees. “They were like: “Err, can we help you guys?’”
“I mean it was just silly,” Adkins recalls, speaking from the somewhat less plush setting of the backstage area at London’s Brixton Academy. “It was just hilarious that we were crashing that party.”
Jimmy Eat World wouldn’t last long at the party, releasing two low-selling albums – including their 1999 classic Clarity, now regarded as something of a set text of the emo genre – before being dropped.
No sooner had they left the major label than they delivered an album that was major-label massive. Bleed American (temporarily retitled Jimmy Eat World after the 11 September attacks), in 2001, took their twinkling, lovelorn sound from Clarity and reinforced it with powerpop hooks. The album’s second single, The Middle, a propulsive pep talk encouraging the band to carry on following their label woes (“Hey, don’t write yourself off yet … ”), would become their biggest hit, a US radio mainstay that even Prince and Taylor Swift saw fit to cover.
Bleed American went platinum in the US and, with that success, Jimmy Eat World suddenly found themselves as leading figures in the ascendant emo scene. Emotional hardcore, as it was initially termed, had been quietly growing since the mid-80s, but by the early 00s it had become an actual scene, attracting label interest, big crowds and press attention. It didn’t seem to matter that the media roped together bands who shared little in common: no one could really mistake Jimmy Eat World’s heartfelt sound with the tortured histrionics of, say, My Chemical Romance.
Naturally, says Adkins, the band were resistant to the emo tag: “We worked too hard to be branded part of a trend, because when that’s not cool any more, you’re not either. We didn’t want to end up in that Valhalla.” But in the years since they’ve learned to make their peace with it. “I get it. You need to call this world of ‘young person’s rock bands’ something,” Adkins says.
Of course, those young persons aren’t so young any more. Emo may even be entering its nostalgia phase: later this year Jimmy Eat World will be appearing on the bill at the aptly named When We Were Young, a Las Vegas festival bringing together just about every notable emo act of the past two decades. (The fact that the event features acts as polar-opposite as Avril Lavigne and throat-shredding post-hardcore band Glassjaw indicates just how nebulous the term is.) The festival had to add two extra dates due to demand, and has now sold out entirely, suggesting there’s a buoyant market for getting the over-30s to revisit their angsty adolescence.
Still, it has all stirred warm memories in Adkins, reminding him of Jimmy Eat World’s early days, when they found themselves on endless touring cycles of the States with scrappy, like-minded bands such as the Get Up Kids. “None of it was cool, and none of it was financially a winner, to say the least.” Those toilet-circuit reminiscences inspired recent single Something Loud, arguably Jimmy Eat World’s best track in years. Musically it’s riffy and euphoric, but lyrically there’s something more complex going on, with Adkins both toasting the band’s formative years, and also recognising the importance of leaving them behind. (“Friends at the show in 95, miss every one of them / But there’s a moment that you die or you move on to live.”)
Something Loud speaks to a wider shift in Adkins’s songwriting. His lyrics used to be preoccupied with the teenage thrill of chasing something indeterminate, of leaping into the unknown. Now, though, he feels that that way of thinking is bound up with some more toxic traits: he stopped drinking at 36 after seeking treatment for alcohol abuse, and sees parallels in the way that both revolve round a never-ending search for something more.
“I think I have a healthier relationship with that [way of thinking] now,” he says. “There’s definitely a part of that that’s still around, the addict/alcoholic mindset: ‘I have to be somewhere else, with someone else doing anything else right now.’ That constant feeling of being unsatisfied with what you’ve just achieved, spending a lot of energy on the wrong target … I was living in that as a person, and now I’m more fascinated by it as an observer. As much work as you do on yourself, it’s still there, just at a lower volume, and I don’t have to listen to it.”
They may be older, wiser and healthier, but Adkins and Jimmy Eat World are still possessed by the same energy they had in their early days. They’ve briefly abandoned the album format, instead dropping new tracks whenever they fancy; in September they will follow up Something Loud with Place Your Debts, a moody slow-burner that demonstrates the band’s more introspective side. And they’ll be back looping round the US this autumn, just like the old days.
“There’s still a part of all of us that identifies as the 19-year-old kid sleeping wherever, showing up to who knows what kind of gig,” says Adkins. “We still think of ourselves as those kids on some level. And I think that keeps us going.” Packing it in will have to wait.
Something Loud is out now.
