DC - June 2011
1,425 words
“If you’re listening, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,
Sing it back, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh”
(Opening lines of Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World, from the album Bleed American)
Scene 1:
In the late summer of 2001, I was feeling extremely carsick. I was trying to hang my head out of the window of the rented Buick Regal that my family and I were travelling in, because the cooling sensation of wind rushing past always made me feel less nauseous. Unfortunately this already complicated operation, which was making me consider whether it would be preferable to throw up into a paper bag or be beheaded by a passing Winnebago, was only made more difficult by the fact that my mother was shouting at me to close the window before the rain started coming in. We were in the middle of the desert in Arizona, and about to be treated to the mother of all storms.
The reason why I was enduring sickness, shouting and soaking was that I had spent the previous twenty minutes reading a Rolling Stone magazine review of a record called Bleed American by a ridiculously-named band called Jimmy Eat World. I hadn’t intended to browse through it, as I was fully aware that reading anything at all in the back of a moving car would only result in illness. The review intrigued me, though, with its mentions of spiky guitars and soaring melodies and a song called “Sweetness”. It sounded like something I needed to hear.
A very short time later my dad had to pull the car over to the side of the road, I regretfully closed the window, and we sat for forty minutes as the car was buffeted by winds, bombarded by raindrops that sounded like shotgun buckshot, and shaken by thunderclaps rolling across the plain. While lightening crackled around us, I resolved that I would track down Bleed American when we got to Las Vegas or Los Angeles at the end of our desert drive, and if it wasn’t out there then I would order it when we got back to London. It might not be great – Rolling Stone reviews are always hit-and-miss – but I was willing to take a risk on it.
Scene 2:
A year or so later my brother and I were lounging in the upstairs ‘study’ room of the farmhouse that our family lived in. I say ‘study’ in inverted commas because what had started out as my dad’s office and computer room had slowly been converted into a den for two grumpy, argumentative teenagers who had been drawn there by the appeal of playing video games on the clunky desktop computer and listening to music through the huge speakers that my Mum had owned since the seventies. In fact, just about the only things that stopped Adam and I arguing and fighting were video games and music. The games made us shut up and concentrate on something other than how annoying the other person was, and the music... well, one of the few things that we agreed on was that guitars were awesome, and the louder the better.
While we bought new music as fast as we could save up money for it, we had a rotation of favourite CDs that were never far from the player. Americana by The Offspring. The Blue Album by Weezer. The self-titled album by American Hi-Fi. So Much For The Afterglow by Everclear. And Bleed American, which I had found on our return from Arizona and rapidly and completely fallen in love with. Every song on the record was great but Sweetness, the song namechecked in the review, was the one. We put it on all of our mixtapes, we knew most of the words, and when we were at our most energetic we would listen to it while climbing the worn green corduroy sofas in the study, brandishing our air guitars. And you know what? Every time we did that, it made us wonder whether the other person wasn’t quite as much of a jackass as we thought, that maybe we did have something in common after all.
Scene 3:
2002, 2003, 2004, in fact pretty much every year between Arizona and now. The Scala, the Islington Academy, The Astoria and Brixton Academy and Reading and Leeds and Give It A Name festivals. A revolving combination of our friends Dusty and Shirley and Robyn and Nini and Mike and Johnny. But always Adam and I down at the front, right in the centre until we got too tall and worried about blocking people’s views and stood off to the side, by the front right stage speaker stacks. We loved pretty much the entire catalogue of the band, from the early scratch of Static Prevails to the spacey majesty of Clarity to the dark pop of Futures and the pop gloss of Chase This Light. But still, standing just above all else was Bleed American, and Sweetness was the crown jewel.
We knew every drum hit, every scratchy and discordant guitar part, just how much echo Jim Adkins put on his voice to make the opening “woah-ohs” seem skyscraping. And when the song kicked in, we and the rest of the faithful knew exactly what to do. You sing the first two lines as loud as you can, fingers pointing in the air and ecstatic looks on your faces. Then you brace, and when the guitars kick in you mosh and jostle and dance. Repeat that throughout the first verse, then bend the knees, and when the “I was spinning free” line heralds the start of the chorus you leap into the air, bouncing along. More singing and moshing through the second verse, more jumping in the second chorus, with just a touch of air drumming thrown in, and a yell of the “stumble ‘til you crawl” line. Then heads back and wail like wolves for the “woo-oooh-ooohs” of the bridge, some air keyboard. And finally, the key moment. Everything cuts out except for some twinkling guitars and a quiet drum fill, and that signals preparation time. You have about five seconds to take a deep breath and tense yourself up before absolutely exploding into the repeated “if you’re listening” line, singing it with absolutely everything you’ve got. The most wonderful thing about all of this was that repetition never dulled its impact – it was still as much fun the fifth or tenth or twentieth time as it was the first.
Scene 4:
The lounge of the new apartment that I’ll be living in with my wife now that we’re back from our honeymoon still looks too empty, like it ate all of our furniture and is still hungry. Still, we have a sofa and a TV and, crucially, a record player and some speakers. I say crucially because I have just unwrapped a four-disc vinyl release of Bleed American released to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and it needs to be played. All of the songs still sound magnificent, with the pop perfection of The Middle set against the low-slung violence of Get It Faster and the sheer beauty of Hear You Me. Still though, ten years in, Sweetness remains the most majestic of all, be it the studio version on Side A or the blistering live version on Side [x].
I’m digging into the album again, listening to Sweetness for what must be the thousandth time, for two reasons. On the one hand, the song has been popping into my head with increasing frequency since we played it at our wedding a month ago, when it held its own as one of the few wild card songs in a playlist that was otherwise all wedding singalong classics. And on the other, for what must be the 25th or 30th time, I’m getting ready to see a Jimmy Eat World live show in a few days time. This time around Adam is on holiday and Dusty is busy so I’m going with the lady, for what will be her second of their shows, to hear the band other things play Bleed American in its entirety. While I’m sure that the show will be outstanding and that I’ll fall in love with some new songs and be reminded of how good the old ones are, I’d put money on Sweetness being the highlight of the night once again. I still get shivers from hearing it, even after I have been listening to the song and singing it back for then years – and I have a feeling that I will do for many years to come.
