#11: Try Everything You Can
Bleed American turns 20 this weekend and I have been thinking for a while that I wanted to write about it, but I spent a lot of time last year working on a bigger thing about that album that didn't pan out. I thought that I might share a piece of what I was working on last year, which is more about "The Middle" than anything, but really it uses that song as a kind of key to understanding the record as a whole. I did a little light editing but I resisted changing too much. Here it is:
Try Everything You Can
Okay, so picture this: you’re a group of people in your mid 20s and you were signed to a major label in 1995 during those mad years when every big label was throwing buckets at money all over the place in a desperate attempt to weed out the next Green Day or Nirvana or honestly who knows what kind of rock band they were wildly guessing would hit it big next. You release two albums, one of which is a latent cult classic, a seminal piece of work for a very specific genre. But neither of these albums produce the big hits this major label was looking for, instead simmering quietly in the background of a roster of who knows how many other rock bands this label was pushing to become cash cows. After that second album, the undeniable classic, that label gives you all the boot. You’re down on your luck. You’re on your own.
So, what do you do?
If you’re Jimmy Eat World, you don’t miss a beat. You go into the studio on wages from side jobs and relentless touring. You crank out that hit record your old label desperately wanted you to make, but you do it all on your own. Without an ounce of spite and with all the heart you’ve ever had, you put your heads together and you make Bleed American.
There’s something warm and fuzzy about this story that keeps it from feeling like an episode of complete schadenfreude, a vindication alongside a fuck you or whatever a comeback story is supposed to actually feel like. I think it’s because Bleed American is so far from that kind of attitude it’s almost amazing. It’s a completely earnest affair that takes no unwarranted shots and makes no attempts at being larger than life. On Bleed American, Jimmy Eat World—composed of Jim Adkins, Rick Burch, Zach Lind, and Tom Linton—really sound like they mean every word.
Let’s take the crowning achievement of their “comeback” or whatever you want to call it, the very thing that took them from down-on-their-luck ex-major-label songwriters to lasting household names, consistent fodder for a million radio stations, commercials, movies, you name it. “The Middle” is the gold standard for “it gets better” pop anthems, a song explicitly about keeping your head above water and wading through the storm. Here, Jimmy Eat World don’t fear being too straightforward or too sentimental. They don’t shy away from being too broad. With “The Middle,” Jimmy Eat World dive straight into all those impulses, they make a song for everyone, that’s for you, the underdog, the loser, the insecure person that lives inside all of us.
This is a song that I hear again and again—I’ve heard it hundreds, if not thousands of times since I was seven years old—and I’ve come to wonder how a song that’s so unabashedly corny has never once felt cloying or pandering. “The Middle” basically has the same message from those early 2010s Tumblr posts that all say something along the lines of “you’re amazing just the way you are” or “you deserve love yes that’s right even you.” There's a dishonesty here—this post doesn’t know me. It doesn’t know who I am or what I deserve.
But “The Middle” is different. It’s not taking on a sincere affect—if anything, it’s jovial. It’s not inventing the fact that “everything will be alright” or whatever, instead, Jim Adkins sings these words as if they’re pre-determined, like somebody told them to him once and he’s just passing along the good news. He believes it, and he wants you to believe it too, even if it’s just for yourself. Just for the sake of keeping your head above water.
One of the reasons why Bleed American endures has to do with this persistent, miraculous belief. This isn’t an album full of half-hearted sentiments; it’s not an album that feels like it was made by a group that was chewed up and spit out by a major label machine. Jimmy Eat World really sound like they want you to be okay. They want you to dance (“A Praise Chorus”). They want you to feel gratitude (“Hear You Me”). They even want you to self-actualize and rise up against the forces of your disaffection (“Bleed American”). They’re feeling all of this and more, and Bleed American promises that you can too.
The whole history of this band is one of finding a language of earnestness—the mission of Jimmy Eat World lies in the way they have approached the question of how to put the whole feeling out there in the open, whether that feeling is a joy so sweet it barely feels right to consume or a heartache so bitter it’s disorienting, kicking the world off its axis. With each album, the band has pondered what the best medium will be for getting the feeling as close to reality as possible. In scrappy-but-ambitious alt rock (1996’s Static Prevails), in eclectic short stories (2010’s Invented), in blindingly bright power pop (2007’s Chase This Light), Jimmy Eat World have built a library of honesty in over 25 years of music.
Bleed American stands apart from the rest in a few key ways. This album’s approach to the career-spanning question of how can we most accurately reflect this feeling? takes the form of some of the poppiest and sharpest songs of their career. I’m not here to say whether it’s the best Jimmy Eat World album, but I know that it’s easily the most powerful in the sheer scope of its reach. There’s an argument to be made that Jimmy is a one-hit wonder band, their presence in anyone’s memory only obligated to the endurance of their biggest song. I can’t seem to blame those people—go to any Jimmy Eat World show and tell me that at least 50% of the people aren’t just waiting to lose their shit when they play “The Middle.” Even Taylor Swift identified them as a nostalgia act in a commercial when she declared “Oh my god I love this song, I used to listen to this in middle school!"
In a number of ways, Bleed American sounds like a soundtrack to an early-2000s high-school movie—indeed, the music video for “The Middle” has the band making that soundtrack in real time at a teenage house party. These are millennial coming-of-age songs, and for many of us they are only remnants of a memory, locked away maybe in fondness but not meant for enduring access. There’s nothing wrong with that, although I will insist that you crack open the vault every once in a while out of a love for your younger self. You might not need these songs anymore, but they certainly did.
For many of us, including myself, “The Middle” and the rest of Bleed American were just the beginning. There’s a reason why a band that might have the title of “one-hit wonder” has carried on without missing a beat (the band has released a new LP every three years like clockwork since that album came out, all of them on major labels). Bleed American is a prime point of entry for a scene that sprawls in all different directions over at least three decades of the fraught and surprising history of emo music. This is an album that, in its success, predicted even bigger, more potent successes from bands like Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, and Paramore, all of whom drew from Jimmy Eat World’s defiant act of pushing an ugly, unadorned, embarrassing emotion to the forefront of their pop music. And these songs continue to run through the veins of emo’s contemporary torch-bearers, from Oso Oso’s bewildered optimism to the sterling hooks of a band like I'm Glad It's You.
Whatever status Bleed American holds in our respective musical histories, whether we were scene originals watching the band become something massive before our eyes, whether we were high schoolers feeding off of anything that played on our favorite stations, whether we were just beginning a lifelong genre obsession, we’re all tied together by one thing. An act of grace in the form of a pop song—when a group of musicians in their 20s got shoved aside and instead of letting it get the best of them, they made their own advice: “try everything you can.” And they made Bleed American.
So tell me, can you picture it?
Love to gush about my favorite band. Hope that was fun for you. Got some new stuff coming soon, thanks for sticking around. Listen to a Bleed American B-side today:
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I write about music for The Alternative and Slant Magazine. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, writing, and probably a lot of vague emotions. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff and also a lot of pictures of my dog. Thanks for joining me.