25 Years of ‘Bleed American’ and ‘The Middle’: Jimmy Eat World Look Back

When Jimmy Eat World‘s Jim Adkins wrote one of the greatest-ever musical pep talks, “The Middle,” he might as well have been talking to himself. His Tempe, Arizona band had just been dropped from Capitol Records, and they recorded their fourth album with no new deal in sight. But the 11 lean, hook-packed songs that became 2001’s Bleed American were so strong that they sparked a major-label bidding war, and the band signed to the now-defunct Dreamworks Records.

The album, and the still-ubiquitous “The Middle” in particular, ended up defining Jimmy Eat World’s career. They’re out on tour now marking its 25th anniversary by playing it in full, including at all five dates of the revived Warped Tour. Frontman Jim Adkins jumped on a Zoom with Rolling Stone to talk about making the album, the underwear-party video for “The Middle,” the influence of Bruce Springsteen, and much more.

It’s so crazy to listen to the demo of “Sweetness” that you guys did in the Clarity sessions. You already had that song down. Why did you not put it on that album?Business affairs at Capitol just added it up and decided, “We can’t spend any more money on these guys.” We were the type of act not doing anywhere close to the kind of business that Capitol was in. The bigger labels in the mid to late Nineties, they knew exactly what to do with an act that was selling, like, 30,000 copies a week. They had no idea what to do with us, who maybe had 3,000 copies sold between all of our releases.

“Lucky Denver Mint” on that album was already pulling towards a tighter pop thing. And if your budget wasn’t cut off before you could record “Sweetness,” that could’ve been a hit for you guys, and maybe the whole course of things might’ve been different. Capitol might not have dropped you.Who knows, dude? Who knows?

Rock was in such a weird place. We were seeing the death of ’90s alt-rock and the birth of nu-metal, and the rise of whatever people were calling emo on a more underground level. Then in 2001, the cool stuff was the Strokes, which wasn’t you. How did all that affect your thinking?I was really glad when the Strokes got big, because all of a sudden people stopped asking us about emo [laughs]. Thank you, Strokes. I love the Strokes, but it is funny, after the wave of grunge, media and labels to some degree, everybody wants to take credit for breaking the next big thing. And so there’s a lot of people just trying to frame everything.

That all just happens in the background and it’s something we laugh at, but it doesn’t really affect anything that we do. We’re right alongside you and everybody else who’s consuming it, just watching the show. If you chase that, you’re just gonna turn people off. It’s like, “Oh, wait, this is cool now? Oh, we gotta do that.” There’s nothing more of a turnoff than trying to chase approval. Should we have a DJ in the band? Should we wear masks? Should we collab with Pharrell? What you choose to incorporate and your approach to that has gotta be based on just what is personally rewarding. 

“The Middle” is obviously the consensus mainstream winner, but what would be your pick as the actual greatest song on Bleed American?It’s tough to say ’cause every single song had a thing it was trying to do, and that thing is a very specific target. AC/DC does something really great that Drive Like Jehu doesn’t do. And Drive Like Jehu does something phenomenal that AC/DC could never do. They’re trying to achieve a thing that you don’t understand when you’re really in the flow of creation, but you know when you get there.

“Middle” is definitely something that I’m surprised with in a lot of ways as time has gone on. And I feel “Bleed American,” the song, is in a weird way a really dark version of what “Middle” is saying. This idea of what you’re placing your sense of fulfillment or purpose or self-worth in might be the wrong target, and that’s why it’s not doing the thing you were hoping it would do. In “Middle” you’re talking about comparing yourself to some other, purely wanting to chase approval and how empty that is. In “Bleed American,” you have a similar kind of thing. I’m doing what I think I should do, and none of it is filling that space inside of me that I was told it would. It’s like an angry version versus a “forget about it” version. Related Content Woody Guthrie, Nearly 60 Years After His Death, Keeps Speaking to New Generations Bruce Springsteen Says Clive Davis Was ‘Born to Run… Everything’ in Funeral Eulogy Alicia Keys Honors Clive Davis at Funeral: ‘You Didn’t Just Sign an Artist. You Recognized the Soul’ Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, and More to Attend Clive Davis Funeral

What song did for you as a young person what “The Middle” seems to have done for so many people?I don’t have anything that I can feel like directly spoke to me in that way. But I do feel like coming from being a metal guy and someone that was following a lot of guitar virtuoso players when I was learning how to play, and discovering something like Fugazi, and hearing how the guitar work happened there, and just the epiphany of how you can harness the feelings of angst or disillusionment in such a different way.

It’s just letting go of chasing the kind of player that I would never be. I can start right now and make something that is seven minutes of noise and feel like a complete whole person when I’m done making it. I don’t have to be good enough to do sweep arpeggios at fucking 200 BPM to do that. Just that experience of what punk rock in general showed me — what you’re feeling, and how you express it, no matter what that is, is completely OK as long as you are achieving a sense of reward from it.

The demo of “The Middle” was released a while back and it has a totally different vibe. It could be a Guided By Voices song. I know you were in a bedroom in Arizona. What did you actually record that on?I think for 50 bucks or something I bought an old drum set off of [Jimmy Eat World drummer] Zach [Lind], and it was just fun. Playing drums is fun. So I had a eight-track digital thing in my bedroom in Tempe, by the college there. And it was just purely chasing any idea I was excited about, regardless of where I thought it was gonna fit in our band or not. I’ve made a lot of music that was just so not supposed to be for our band, but later on elements of it would get cannibalized and put into other songs that the band was working on.

So you had gotten that email from a fan about being put down at school. How long had elapsed between getting that email and sitting down and writing this song with that in mind?I don’t really remember. We posted the band email at the Static Prevails time. And I don’t remember when that came in or how much time had elapsed for me to use that as a place to address, I don’t know. It just seemed like the music for “Middle” was just calling for something that felt simple, the truth. And trying to leave you with a sense of hope, in the way that really great, simple rock songs can. It was chasing that.

So you had the music first, and then you had to figure out a song around it?I might jot down ideas that might be cool to develop later on into lyrics, but I don’t write just lyrics. It’s always a musical idea. But usually most of the song has to be complete before I start going down the road of putting in actual words to that kinda scat, and the simpler a song is, the more important that is. ‘Cause I’m not gonna just sit there and play a G chord for 16 bars if there’s not another element that I’m excited about.

How is it that you had a promo standup for the Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love album in your bedroom?I think my seventh grade girlfriend gave it to me.

And you kept it all that time?It was cool!

And for the “little girl” lyric, you looked at that Bruce standup and said…Yeah, what would the Boss do? He’d probably say something like this. All right, I guess that’s the lyric now.