Jimmy Eat World reflect on the past and 'Futures' ahead of arena tour with Fall Out Boy

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Photo by Jimi Giannatti

‘Middle’ management: Their 2001 hit single gave Jimmy Eat World a big boost

Going by singles and album charts and sales, it's easy to assume that the high point of 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 and guitarist Jim Adkins notes that album sales and chart positions don't tell the whole tale 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 says during a chat with Orlando Weekly. "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. 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."

Jimmy Eat World are currently out on the road opening for Fall Out Boy, but last summer's co-headlining tour with Manchester Orchestra took the band into the venues Adkins mentioned.

This current big-time opening slot means Jimmy Eat World have to be judicious in choosing what songs to play — probably sticking mainly to the best-known songs.

But Adkins and his bandmates have plenty of song choices at this point. Their discography 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'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 by track instead of by album, on playlists rather than full-lengths," Adkins says.

There have certainly been times when Jimmy Eat World's full 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 Future (along with the band's third album, 1999's Clarity) also got Jimmy Eat World recognized as one of the leading lights of the musical subgenre 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.

Adkins will even allow that there have been benefits to being called emo, even if he's never felt the term described Jimmy Eat World's catchy and rocking brand of guitar pop.

"It's a mixed bag, for sure," Adkins says of the emo label. "I think people want to categorize bands in music, and if you don't have any category, it's a little tougher for the elevator pitch, why your friends should check out this thing that you like. So I think in that regard, it's helped because it's been like a shorthand to describe a scene that we sort of came up in, I guess. As far as helping you out musically with what that might actually sound like, it's not very helpful. But for better or worse, it describes the period of time and the scene we were involved with."

Despite it being two decades or so since emo peaked as a "thing" within the overall rock landscape, Adkins has accepted the idea that Jimmy Eat World will always be considered emo.

"I don't think we can escape it now. We crossed the event horizon some time ago," he muses.

"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."