Happy Jimmy Eat World Day, to all those who celebrate! Yes, today (10/17) is Jimmy Eat World Day in Phoenix. Last year Mayor Kate Gallego presented the band with a proclamation thanking them for what they've done representing the capitol city and being "a force in the music industry for three decades over the course of 10 albums."
The Phoenix-based quartet recently played a historic set at Best Friends Forever Fest in Las Vegas, and new music is also in the works, though the group has not yet announced a release date.
Defying the odds, the band has consisted of Jim Adkins on lead vocals, guitar, and keyboards; Tom Linton on rhythm guitar and backing vocals; Rick Burch on bass and backing vocals; and Zach Lind on drums and percussion since 1995 and remains one of the longest-running stable rosters in popular music.
Recently they stopped by the Setlist offices to chat with Bree Wilde about a wide variety of topics that sprouted from the 1,700 setlists of theirs we have in our database.
"Beautiful People"
Jimmy Eat World have played 13 songs just once in concert. A few are covers by Cyndi Lauper, Rihanna and... Marilyn Manson?
Jim Adkins: According to the stats here, there’s one documented performance of us playing Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People.” Tom used to teach guitar lessons, and is that how you learned that riff?
Tom Linton: Yeah, I think so.
Jim: Kids would come in and ask, “Hey, how do I play this?” So, he learned “The Beautiful People” riff and then that became… if it’s taking too long tuning between songs, Tom would just launch into that and then—or no, Zach would start playing the drum part.
Zach Lind: Yeah, so basically “The Beautiful People” thing is explained by this. Jim would be thanking the crowd and saying, “Oh, you guys are so amazing,” and I don’t know, I kind of got on this kick of doing the “Beautiful People” drum beat, and then Tom would join in.
It was just a stupid thing we would do. And I could see how someone would be like, “Oh yeah, they played ‘The Beautiful People’ for ten seconds.”
Jim: I mean, it could have been a joke that went on long enough that it counted as a spin.
Taylor Swift covering "The Middle" six times
Bree: Did you know “The Middle” has been covered by 189 other artists?
Tom: That’s crazy.
Jim: Whoa.
Bree: Do you have a favorite cover of yours that you’ve seen?
Tom: Oh, man, Shinedown’s my favorite.
Jim: Oh, that’s right. They were doing an acoustic-ish kind of Shinedown version. I remember getting a lot of messages from people seeing that tour, like, “Hey, check it out.”
That’s always funny. I always get random text messages from friends, “Hey, I’m at an afternoon thing for my kid, and check this out.” And it’s a younger person that wasn’t even alive when that song came out, just shredding on “The Middle.”
It’s really cool. I mean, this is definitely something you don’t expect ever when you’re making music, that it’s going to have the effect that someone was going to take the time to learn it and play it themselves.
Bree Wilde: Taylor Swift, six times.
Tom: Thank you, T Swift, we appreciate that. Congratulations on your engagement.
Jim: She played it six times?
Tom: One of those times, she played it with Jim.
Jim: Oh, that’s right. She wanted to play “The Middle” and invited me to come sit in.
Tom: Is that the first time and only time you’ve entered the stage coming up underneath the stage?
Jim: Yeah.
Tom: I’ve always wanted to do that.
Jim: Yeah, no, it was funny. I did soundcheck with her, and she’s like, “Are you okay with”—there’s some term for it—“Are you okay with the elevator?”
I’m like, “Huh?”
She goes, “Okay, so here’s what you—you’re going to come out, you’re going to be here, and then I’m going to announce you, and then you’re going to rise from the floor.”
I’m like, “Sure.”
And she says, “And direct your attention to the middle of the arena for some guy.”
She’s just a billion times more popular than us. But no, it was pretty funny. The twelve-year-old kid in me who got into music watching Headbanger’s Ball in the ’80s was really stoked to rise through the floor with smoke.
Tom: It was sick. I was there. I saw it. It was sick.
Did someone say strings?
Bree Wilde: Is there a Jimmy Eat World orchestral tour in your future?
Jim: Yeah. I mean, sometimes, like “Your House” on Bleed American, that’s a really heavy production song. And we didn’t play it out for a really long time, and I think, what, we just decided one day, “Okay, well, forget trying to”—basically approaching it like a cover of our own song.
"How are we going to perform this live? What if we didn’t use any of this stuff that we can’t do?”
And made it into... took the spirit of the song and tried to rework it into a way that we could play it live, and we figured that out and did.
Click the video at the top of the page to watch the whole convo.
Did you know: Jimmy Eat World opens for My Chemical Romance next year at their hometown Chase Field?
