{"id":69224,"date":"2026-07-24T18:24:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T18:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/24\/jimmy-eat-world-on-the-middle\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T18:24:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T18:24:28","slug":"jimmy-eat-world-on-the-middle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/24\/jimmy-eat-world-on-the-middle\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Eat World on ‘The Middle’"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tWhen Jimmy Eat World<\/a>\u2018s Jim Adkins<\/a> wrote one of the greatest-ever musical pep talks, \u201cThe Middle,\u201d 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\u2019s Bleed American<\/a><\/em> were so strong <\/a>that they sparked a major-label bidding war, and the band signed to the now-defunct Dreamworks Records.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe album, and the still-ubiquitous \u201cThe Middle\u201d in particular,\u00a0ended up defining Jimmy Eat World\u2019s career. They\u2019re out on tour now marking its 25th anniversary by playing it in full, including at all five dates of the revived Warped Tour<\/a>. Frontman Jim Adkins jumped on a Zoom with Rolling Stone <\/em>to talk about making the album, the underwear-party video for \u201cThe Middle,\u201d the influence of Bruce Springsteen<\/a>, and much more.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s so crazy to listen to the demo of \u201cSweetness\u201d that you guys did in the Clarity<\/em> sessions. You already had that song down. Why did you not put it on that album?
<\/strong>Business affairs at Capitol just added it up and decided, \u201cWe can\u2019t spend any more money on these guys.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLucky Denver Mint\u201d on that album was already pulling towards a tighter pop thing. And if your budget wasn\u2019t cut off before you could record \u201cSweetness,\u201d that could\u2019ve been a hit for you guys, and maybe the whole course of things might\u2019ve been different. Capitol might not have dropped you.
<\/strong>Who knows, dude? Who knows?<\/p>\n

\n\tRock was in such a weird place. We were seeing the death of \u201990s 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\u2019t you. How did all that affect your thinking?
<\/strong>I was really glad when the Strokes got big, because all of a sudden people stopped asking us about emo [laughs]<\/em>. 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\u2019s a lot of people just trying to frame everything.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tThat all just happens in the background and it\u2019s something we laugh at, but it doesn\u2019t really affect anything that we do. We\u2019re right alongside you and everybody else who\u2019s consuming it, just watching the show. If you chase that, you\u2019re just gonna turn people off. It\u2019s like, \u201cOh, wait, this is cool now? Oh, we gotta do that.\u201d There\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Middle\u201d is obviously the consensus mainstream winner, but what would be your pick as the actual greatest song on <\/strong>Bleed American<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong>
<\/strong>It\u2019s tough to say \u2019cause 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\u2019t do. And Drive Like Jehu does something phenomenal that AC\/DC could never do. They\u2019re trying to achieve a thing that you don\u2019t understand when you\u2019re really in the flow of creation, but you know when you get there.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMiddle\u201d is definitely something that I\u2019m surprised with in a lot of ways as time has gone on. And I feel \u201cBleed American,\u201d the song, is in a weird way a really dark version of what \u201cMiddle\u201d is saying. This idea of what you\u2019re placing your sense of fulfillment or purpose or self-worth in might be the wrong target, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s not doing the thing you were hoping it would do. In \u201cMiddle\u201d you\u2019re talking about comparing yourself to some other, purely wanting to chase approval and how empty that is. In \u201cBleed American,\u201d you have a similar kind of thing. I\u2019m 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\u2019s like an angry version versus a \u201cforget about it\u201d version.<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tWhat song did for you as a young person what \u201cThe Middle\u201d seems to have done for so many people?<\/strong>
<\/strong>I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s 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\u2019m done making it. I don\u2019t 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 \u2014 what you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe demo of \u201cThe Middle\u201d was released a while back and it has a totally different vibe. It could be a Guided By Voices<\/a> song. I know you were in a bedroom in Arizona. What did you actually record that on?
<\/strong>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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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