Francesca Tay
It wasn’t just the hot weather causing the roomful of reporters all hot and bothered at Resorts World Sentosa last Friday.
Jimmy Eat World, which is made up of four charming men from Arizona, sizzled up the ballroom when the American alternative rock band appeared.
Lead singer, Jim Adkins, greeted reporters while gulping down a bottle of cold water. Evidently, temperatures are rising in the room.
In support of their sixth full-length album, Invented, the band held their first-ever concert in Singapore at The Coliseum at Hard Rock Café Hotel . The band, consisting of vocalist/guitarist Jim Adkins, drummer Zach Lind, guitarist as well as back-up vocalist Tom Linton and bassist Rick Burch, were stoked to meet their fans and remained active on Twitter, updating followers on their adventures in Singapore. “I think it’s really cool that Singapore is sort of like the US, with a big melting pot of cultures. There are all these kinds of different Asian influences here. It’s really neat!” Zach declared.
The quartet had heard much about our local delicacies and went food hunting at the Maxwell Food Centre located near Chinatown, referring to our chicken rice dish separately as “chicken and rice”’ (and of course announced it was delicious), before heading back to the Hard Rock Café Hotel to prepare for their show later that night.
The UrbanWire chats with Zach and Rick.
The band has been together for about 17 years. How’s the development so far?
Z: We get along really well. We see eye-to-eye on a lot of things so if we disagree, it’s always really small stuff.
R: We all want the same things, especially in songwriting. We all want the songs to be the best that they can be, so if we have a disagreement it’s only because we are feeling passionate about making our songs.
Is it hard not to be cynical in the music industry since you all have been around for so long? How do you feel about most people downloading songs for free rather than buying the original record?
Z: I think that our policy is to only worry about what we can control, and whether or not people buy our records or download for free, we really can’t control that. I don’t think we are really cynical about that, we probably just want to keep making good music and we feel like we have built up a foundation to a standard where we can do that. It’s not necessary to depend on a big label to give us support because we can support ourselves, and very cheaply (laughs).
Were there any bands you looked up to musically that helped shaped your sound in the early years?
Z: Definitely, we all love listening to bands like Fugazi, and a band called Rocket From The Crypt, from San Diego.
R: I think our music is influenced by other bands as to whether to incorporate those styles, or to stay away from them. We try to focus on one band and do things the way they do, but kind of pick up little ‘jewels’ from here and there, and collect them all.
Were you guys ever under any kind of pressure to make ‘Chase this light’ as successful as ‘Bleed American’?
Z: No. Whatever pressure we have is pressure that comes from ourselves, to make the record that we want to make, to make a record that we’d be proud of. Every record’s different, so we try not to worry about outside influences when we’re making our records.
R: It’s kind of out of our control. We can’t control how people perceive our music. Hopefully, they felt it as much as we do, but I can’t make you like the music. I really want everyone to like it though, you can drive yourself crazy trying to do that, it’s kind of impossible, so we first make ourselves happy and proud, and we go on from there.
Jimmy Eat World is pretty known for writing long songs, such as ‘Goodbye Sky Harbour’, so why do you guys choose to write long songs rather than write a few more songs in the same amount of time?
Z: It kind of depends. Some songs we feel work better longer. We have the instinct towards makingour records like for Invented, we have a few longer songs on it. For us, it’s all about making the song the best that it can be, and later on, putting the best songs on the record. We just think ‘That song needs to be one the record’ so that’s how we make our decisions. Some people might not like it, but for us it’s about what interests us, what excites us. Doing a longer song and not being restrained by a 3-minuter is fun!
You guys will be touring for the next one year or so so what do you guys do to keep up the energy?
Z: That’s a good question. I think we’d like to take a little bit of time off from touring so we go on tour for like 3 weeks, and come back and we take a break, so we try to keep our energy up that way. But for us it’s always exciting to travel, just to experience being in different places every night. It’s not hard to be energetic about playing because every night it’s different, it’s exciting. We do the best we can for our fans.
R: Yeah, we’re really excited about tonight as it’s our first time here, and we’re anticipating. We don’t know what to expect from the audience, how their reactions will be. So we’re kind of nervous and excited, it’s going to be a really good night.
So we heard that you guys brought Courtney Marie Andrews on tour with you guys, how was it having a girl along with you guys?
Z: It’s great! She does a really good job, and she’s a really talented artiste on her own so she has added something really cool to our shows.
What do you guys think about Paramore since they listed Jimmy Eat World as one of their music influences?
Z: We did a tour with them a few years ago, so they are really good people, and they are really talented and they perform really good live, I’m sure they’ll all go on to do great things.
Which song in your discography grasps you the most whenever you feel uninspired?
Z: I’m not sure, it changes, at least for me, I think the one thing for us is that it’s really easy to forget the songs that we’ve put out. We’ve made a lot of songs so it’s really easy to forget. I don’t know how to point out one song.
R: That’s a really tough one. I think maybe the song “Mixtape” in Invented, because we knew that song had potential to be a great song and we definitely wanted it to be on the album, but we never really felt like it was complete for the whole recording process, it just didn’t feel right yet, and at the last moments of finishing it, it all came together and now it’s one of my favourite songs. It’s totally different than anything else on the album.
Photo courtesy of: Ling Tay, Klix Photography, m:idea.
Acknowledgements to Universal Music Singapore