| 'Invented'-talk with JIMMY EAT WORLD... |
| Written by Sarah Mudgway | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 26 April 2011 00:47 | ||||||||
 When TOM LINTON and ZACH LIND of JIMMY EAT WORLD were asked to each draw a self-portrait of themselves to accompany this interview, they both began to laugh quietly. Turns out, we had accidentally stumbled upon a weakness the two men share - they can’t draw. Obliging to draw a self-portrait nonetheless, their lack of ego and the ability to take themselves and the situation lightly is one of many traits which I’m sure helped send these four men from playing their now signature brand of rock to a few people in bars, to headlining sold-out concerts around the world and being listed as inspirations for many other bands. Jimmy Eat World are just normal everyday guys, living out their dream whilst remaining down-to-earth, humble and obliging. This same down-to-earth nature and genuine appreciation for their fans led the band to set up - just hours before they were due to headline their sold-out show at The Powerstation - a soundcheck party for a lucky few of their underage fans who were unable to make the show due to age restrictions. "Ultimately we always we like to do all ages shows but sometimes in some cities, or for whatever reason, it’s not possible. That is usually what we hope for, but something like [a soundcheck party] can maybe make up for it a little, I guess."  COUP DE MAIN: Welcome to New Zealand! This is your first time here, how does it feel to have finally made it? JIMMY EAT WORLD - ZACH LIND: It feels good! But it is sort of like on one hand we’re excited to be here but on the other hand we’re disappointed we haven’t come here before. It just never really seemed to work out but now that we’re here, we’re really happy about it. CDM: With this 'Invented' tour, you were also able to play in Indonesia which is another country you’d never played before. Since the band has been around for a number of years, is it often you get these first time experiences anymore? JIMMY EAT WORLD - TOM LINTON: Yeah, there’s still a lot of places that we haven’t been to [yet]. It seems like every couple of years we’ll go to a new country... CDM: Is there one place you really want to tour, but that you haven’t yet? TOM: We still haven’t been to Mexico, South America, Russia... there are a lot of places we haven’t been able to play. CDM: On this tour you brought COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS out with you, who also sang on your latest album 'Invented'. How has it been touring with her and adding someone extra into the live performance mix? ZACH: It’s been great. Courtney has done a really great job and I think for us - we’ve been around for a while like you said, and anytime we can throw in something new live it kind of makes things more fresh. Courtney sings on a lot of the songs on the new record, but live she also helps up out with some of our older songs and some of our older songs that we play with her sound better than they ever have, so it's really cool. I think it's like, if you’ve seen us a bunch of times before, having someone like Courtney come out [with us] gives the show a little bit of a new... not a new feel entirely, but it adds some stuff you haven’t seen before. CDM: Your album 'Invented' has been out for seven or so months - now that it’s been out in the world and you’re playing it live, what are your thoughts towards the album? ZACH: I think we feel really proud of the album. We worked really hard on it and we feel like it has got a good reception from the fans. Sometimes it is hard for the newer songs to break through with fans and it takes a little bit of time. I think with us, we have fans that have been with us for so long that they attach themselves with songs they’ve known for awhile and they have longer relationships with those songs which allow them to become more important to them. Whereas with newer songs, they tend to have a hard time breaking through until they get that chance. We’re seeing that now with 'Chase This Light' songs; they’re getting a huge reception now but when we came out with the record it was measured, because it was new and [fans] didn’t have that history with the songs. CDM: Tom, on this album you took over on vocal and lyrical duties for ‘Action Needs An Audience’. Was that something you had anticipated doing? TOM: Not really. Jim was bogged down and was writing lyrics for three or four other songs and Zach came up with the idea. The music was there and the guys just thought like: "Why don’t you give it a shot and see if you can come up with anything?" I was able to write lyrics for it and everyone was happy with it and it made the record. CDM: Is it something you might look at doing again in the future? TOM: Maybe...
CDM: One of the lyrics in ‘Heart Is Hard To Find’ is: "How many years has it been? It’s day one in my mind..." - having done years of touring and released numerous albums, for you personally, when you approach every tour or album do you take things back to a "day one" mindset to keep things fresh? A clean slate of sorts? ZACH: Yeah I think so to a certain degree. Especially when you’re touring with a group of people, if you constantly let things bug you or annoy you it can be a really long tour for you, so I think when being part of a team and working with a group of people it's good to sort of treat every day like it’s a new experience, which it is. It’s not hard to do because every day on tour is new, as we’re constantly moving and seeing new places, but I think in a general sense it’s a good way of looking at it. Not getting too caught up in the things that can lead you astray, when if you just approach it as a fresh thing every day then it helps. CDM: You guys are great at utilizing Twitter - posting pictures of the crowd from each show and updates on band-life. Having been a band pre-Twitter and then experiencing the rise of social networking, how has it changed the way you deal with fans? Is there more pressure to interact? ZACH: Yeah, I think it’s great. When we first started out we were playing shows and not many people would come out, so we’d have an opportunity to interact with a larger percentage of our fans. Then when we started actually selling records and more people started coming out to shows, it becomes impossible to interact with them, so I feel like Twitter in a way has given us the opportunity to interact with fans on a more personal level - even though it’s not really personal, but it is better than nothing. I think for us too, we get a really good glimpse into our fan's reactions to the show - if they like it, if they don’t, and what songs they want to hear. We also hear things like: "I brought a shirt and I washed it once and it faded." So we hear problems that we like to know about! We like to know if we’re not selling good quality shirts. Or sometimes we’ll do a show and we’ll hear: "The band was great but the club sucked." So we get to hear things like that, and we are more in tune with what the fans want and what the fan's experience of coming to our shows is. I think it’s a good tool because you can help make the experience better for fans when you know what they want. CDM: The music business is rapidly changing with the Internet and download-culture - has that made Jimmy Eat World approach things differently compared to what you may have done in the past? ZACH: For a band like us, I don’t think we necessarily approach things differently. The changes that are happening in the music business aren’t really anything we can do anything about, so at the end of the day there isn’t anything we can do to make things different. So for us, the shift kind of comes from like: "Well what can we control and what can we do to make things better?" And that always starts with just making records that we’re proud of. From there it’s kind of like, well on the business side of things it puts more emphasis on your touring. We are selling less records because over time we sell less, but our live shows are still the same. We still have the same amount of people coming to see us play, but we sell less records, so there is something going on to where at least the live show is something you can’t download. The experience of coming to a live show isn’t something you can just get on some website, so I think for us it's: "Well how can we make the live show as good as it can be? How can we find new places to play?" Which is one of the reasons we try to come to places like New Zealand and Singapore and Jakarta, because they’re new.  CDM: Before 'Invented' was released, there were rumours circulating that Jimmy Eat World were perhaps going to move away from your record label and do everything D.I.Y. - is that something you’re still considering? ZACH: Possibly. At the moment, after this record is over, we’re pretty much free to do what we want so I think it kind of remains to be seen. To some degree we operate on a D.I.Y. basis now, even though we work with a big label. We try to have that mentality where as much as we can do on our own we try to do. That’s why we’ve been producing our own records - [on] 'Invented' and 'Chase This Light' we were primarily the producers - so I think that is definitely a big thing. CDM: I love the line in ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ that mentions "as simple as it gets..." and in 'Invented' when Jim sings: "I met her the old-fashioned way..." Do you think that perhaps underneath all the hustle of the modern world, people are maybe just craving simple things? ZACH: Maybe. I think that people will always crave the simplicity. That song ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ is about relationships, and for me what is cool about that song is it reminds you about the little cool moments in relationships that you are fond of. I think everyone looks back on that - whether it’s a good friend or a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or a wife, or just you’re hanging with your friends late at night. That song is cool as it reminds us of those times that we really enjoy. I think simple pleasures are something that people will always treasure.  |
