Jimmy Eat World
Until this week, I hadn't really thought about Jimmy Eat World in a long time. Man, me and JEW had some good times in high school, cruising around to the sounds of Bleed American and Clarity. But since then, well, they've fallen off the radar a bit.
But the other day I was jogging on my grandma's treadmill because it has a nice 10% incline (also known as the "wheeze and die" setting) and I dragged out this videotape to watch while on the 'mill that Katie, bless her soul, made me once of 6 pure, sweet hours of music videos from MTV2. In 2001. Oh, it's champion.
And who should be on there but Jimmy Eat World - in their video for The Middle.
That's the one where the kid walks into the party and everyone's all dancing around in their underwear and he's all wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, and he wanders around sadly through all the crazy people and at the very end he's about to give up and strip down to join the masses but then he sees a girl who's about to do the same and then they walk out together, happily clothed. It's wonderful. But anyway. It was nice to be reminded of good ol' JEW, and I promptly went home and listened to a few of their songs and returned to my regular summer rotation of Beirut and Of Montreal.
Imagine my surprise, then, to coincidentally find a few acoustic/rare JEW tracks on a music blog today. For y'all who like me have some nostalgic Jimmy love, check 'em out - man, it'll take you back. If you get a knee-jerk hate reaction to anything remotely resembling what may or may not be something like emo, don't click below.
By the way, the reason that CPMU posted these is that she discovered JEW frontman Jim's side project, Go Big Casino. They pretty much sound like Jimmy Eat World gone acoustic and mellow. Not quite awesome, but So Proud of You has a nice alt.country flavor.