Jimmy Eat World Bleed American 25th Anniversary Tour Dates Revealed

Jimmy Eat World will put fans in the middle of a big celebration this summer as the group tours to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its breakthrough and top-selling album, Bleed American.

The Mesa, Arizona-formed alt-rock quartet hits the road June 9 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado for a lengthy trek celebrating its fourth album, Bleed American (full dates below). The 11-song set was the band’s first top 40 effort on the Billboard 200, launching the Billboard Hot 100 top 5 hit “The Middle” and giving Jimmy Eat World headliner status. Bleed American has sold 1.7 million copies to date, according to Luminate.

“It changed our lives,” frontman Jim Adkins, who co-founded the band in 1993, tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Phoenix. “It put us on a map. It gave us a new, broad audience of people that found something in it that they connected with. People have grown up with this record, right alongside us growing up, and I feel like it’s important to celebrate it. It’s important to acknowledge to people that we appreciate that, despite the obvious commerce involved.”

Adkins and his bandmates — guitarist Tom Linton, drummer Zach Lind and bassist Rick Burch — plan to play Bleed American in its entirety, but probably not sequentially, during the tour. Support acts on the outing include Sunny Day Real Estate, Rise Against, the Get Up Kids, Thrice, Girls Against Boys, Hey Mercedes, Motion City Soundtrack, Illuminati Hotties, Mom Jeans, Jay Som and Pup. The itinerary includes four Vans Warped Tour stops, three performances in the U.K. (its already sold-out Aug. 15 show in Cardiff Wales will be the band’s biggest U.K. concert ever) and one in Mexico City. Jimmy Eat World will also perform at the Hello Summer Music Festival in Alberta, Canada, the Louder Than Life Festival in Kentucky and Shaky Knees in Atlanta, where it will not be performing Bleed American.

The summer shows will rekindle plenty of memories for fans, and with the tour’s announcement we drew on a few of Adkins’ own remembrances from what was a dramatic time for the group.

The Band Was Without a Label

After two albums Capitol Records dropped Jimmy Eat World following 1999’s Clarity. But Adkins maintains that the move, not entirely unexpected, did not level his band.

“I could see how people would think, ‘Oh, their record label dropped them. What are they gonna do now?!’” he says. “That’s not how it was, at all. Everything with the record label was happening in the background, and we were just focused on the next gig we were gonna do that night. And what we saw was every time we’d come back to a city we’d be playing a slightly bigger venue, or we’d be opening for a slightly bigger headlining act. We were building opportunities and we were getting to go to new places. We felt momentum. So all that stuff happening with the record label is just noise.”

Capitol would, interestingly, try to re-sign the band after Bleed American was completed, but it inked instead with DreamWorks.

It Had To Pay For Bleed American Itself

Without the support of a label, Jimmy Eat World supported itself and funded the album with an independently released Singles compilation, by touring and by taking day jobs. “Tom and Rick worked at a temp agency,” Adkins recalls, “which is really convenient when you’re going on tour all the time. So they would always have wacky stories about where they’d show up, sorting postal things or light industrial, bagel bakery things.” Lind worked for an auto dealership, while Adkins was at an art supply store.

“I would give ’em plenty of notice when we had a tour coming up, and when we came back they would rehire me because I had so many skews memorized,” he says. “Those things are so scorched in my memory I can’t get rid of them.”

Mark Trombino, who produced Clarity and 1996’s Static Prevails, also cut Jimmy Eat World a break to help make ends meet. “We were very fortunate that (Trombino) agreed to basically do it for free up front and just figure it out later,” Adkins says. “He believed in us and believed in the record we wanted to make, so he put his time and energy into building it with us.

“To be honest, it didn’t seem like a freaky or scary thing to do. It didn’t seem like, ‘We’re putting it all on this, and if it doesn’t happen, oh well.’ It wasn’t like that. Whatever happened with it, we felt like we were just gonna keep (making music), no matter what.”

The Plan

Though the songs on Bleed American, which was recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles and Harddrive in North Hollywood, were notably tighter and more focused than on preceding albums, Adkins says that Jimmy Eat World “didn’t have an album in mind. There wasn’t, like, a concept or goal we were trying to achieve.” Instead, he explains, the band and Trombino took “a song-by-song approach,” even using digital technologies “to make the best versions of those songs that we could.”

“We made Bleed American to the best of our ability with what we knew about making records, with what we knew about writing songs, with our ability as physical players,” Adkins adds. “I feel like we did the absolute best we possibly could, given our knowledge and our ability. And we were proud of it, ’cause that’s what you have to achieve as a musician, I feel. Is this rewarding? Are you proud of this? If so, put your name on it and send it forth and see what happens.”

“The Middle”

After Bleed American’s title track reached No. 18 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, its successor, “The Middle,” put the album and Jimmy Eat World on the map, hitting No. 1 on the same chart and No. 5 on the Hot 100. It was not the band’s pick as the song most likely to succeed, however.

“‘The Middle’ came together really fast and felt at the time like a solid song,” Adkins remembers. “There was nothing wrong with it; I think when something arrives quickly and just feels right, that’s that. Cool. There’s something that feels maybe not as important as (a song) that’s a creative puzzle that you spend a lot of time to solve. But when someone’s listening to an album, they don’t care about that. I don’t know if we just underestimated (‘The Middle’) or what. It’s a solid song.”

A Mellencamp Moment

Bleed American‘s “The Authority Song” makes direct reference to (then) John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” from his 1983 album Uh-Huh — as well as to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1989 album Automatic. “That’s another one that came together pretty quickly, maybe around the same time as ‘The Middle,’ actually,” according to Adkins. “It really is a journal entry of being a kid in the Tempe area in the late ‘90s and trying to figure out life in the social circle and the insecurities that come with your early twenties and all that.”

Adkins says Mellencamp has never acknowledged the shoutout, nor has Jimmy Eat World ever crossed paths with him.

Haden Help

Rachel Haden from That Dog, which was on hiatus while Jimmy Eat World was recording Bleed American, provided backing vocals on five of the album’s tracks. “I had met her through some mutual friends in the L.A. area,” Adkins recalls. “There were some vocal harmonies I really wanted to have a different character than just me or Tom cutting them; the That Dog material led me to her. She came in and it was like, ‘Oh wow, this really works. Do you have another hour you can hang out? I have this other thing I want you to try.’ We wound up with her doing backups for most of the record, which was great.”

By Any Other Name…

Bleed American was already a success when the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., took place, which led to copies issued from December 2001 on being titled simply Jimmy Eat World, while the title track was changed to “Salt Sweat Sugar.”

“The whole word was shaken, and we had no idea what was going to happen,” Adkins says. “We were very proud of our album. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we felt like people should make their mind up about our music based on just that. We worked too hard on this to have something (like the title) get in the way of people having that experience for themselves. And the solution we came to was turning the album into self-titled.

“It was sort of a punk rock thing to do back then. Album titles? Whatever…We felt like it might be slightly subversive, just calling it what it is. It’s our name.”

The Bleed American title was reinstated for a deluxe edition of the album in 2008, which featured a second disc of unreleased live and studio material, demos and covers of songs by Wham!, Guided By Voices and the Wedding Present.

For the North America dates, tickets are available starting with an artist, CITI and American Express presale beginning Wednesday (Feb. 11). Additional presales will run throughout the week ahead of the general on-sale on Friday (Feb. 13) at 10 a.m. local time. Citi cardmembers will have access to presale tickets in the U.S. beginning Wednesday (Feb.) 11 at 10 a.m. local time until Thursday (Feb. 12) at 10 p.m. local time through the Citi Entertainment program. For complete presale details visit citientertainment.com. For the Canada shows, American Express card members can purchase tickets before the general public beginning Wednesday (Feb. 11) at 10 a.m. local time through Thursday (Feb. 12) at 10 p.m. local time. Updates and additional information can be found at jimmyeatworld.com.

The full itinerary for Jimmy Eat World’s 25 Years of Bleed American Tour includes:

June 9 –– Denver, CO –– Red Rocks Amphitheatre
June 11 –– Chicago, IL –– Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island
June 12 –– Sterling Heights, MI –– Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill
June 13-14 –– Washington, D.C. –– Vans Warped Tour
June 16 –– Brooklyn, NY –– Brooklyn Paramount
June 17 –– New York, NY –– The Rooftop at Pier 17
June 19 –– Philadelphia, PA –– Highmark Skyline Stage at Mann
June 20 –– Boston, MA –– MGM Music Hall at Fenway
July 3 –– Calgary, AB –– Spruce Meadows
July 4 –– Fort McMurray, AB –– Hello Summer Festival
July 17 –– Bend, OR –– Hayden Homes Amphitheater
July 18 –– Seattle WA –– WAMU Theater @ Lumen Field
July 19 –– Vancouver, BC –– Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre
July 22 –– Sandy, UT –– Sandy Amphitheater
July 24 –– Concord, CA –– Toyota Pavilion at Concord
July 25-26 –– Long Beach, CA –– Vans Warped Tour
August 14 –– Halifax, UK –– The Piece Hall
August 15 –– Cardiff, UK –– Cardiff Castle
August 16 –– London, UK –– Gunnersbury Park
August 22 –– Montreal, QC –– Vans Warped Tour
August 23 –– Toronto, ON –– RBC Amphitheatre
September 6 –– Phoenix, AZ –– Chase Field (supporting My Chemical Romance) September 9 –– Austin, TX –– Moody Amphitheater
September 10 –– Dallas, TX –– The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory
September 12-13 –– Mexico City, MX –– Vans Warped Tour
November 12 –– Nashville, TN –– Venue info TBA
November 14 –– Tampa, FL –– MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre
November 14-15 –– Orlando, FL –– Vans Warped Tour