Jimmy Eat World – Futures

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It’s a sliding doors moment, the first time you hear a song that stops your heart. If you really think about it, any number of songs, at any number of moments in time, could be the one to change your life. For whatever reason, though, every music fan ends up with one: one song that, under the right mix of timing, circumstance, emotional clarity, and dumb luck, clicks onto your frequency and blows your whole fucking life apart. There will be other songs, after that one – many, many songs, if you’re lucky. But that one song – and that one band, and that one album – will always have a special place in your heart for what it did to kickstart something new inside of you.

I still remember the week that I heard Jimmy Eat World’s “Kill” for the first time. It was a rainy, gloomy October in northern Michigan, and I was an eighth-grade student slowly finding his way toward a deepening interest in music. In the preceding year, I’d even started finding songs that scratched some deep emotional itch in me – even if my not-so-evolved 13-year-old self couldn’t have expressed what it was about Snow Patrol’s “Run” or Nada Surf’s “Inside of Love” or Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated” that was making him ache. In other words, I liked music a whole lot, but I hadn’t yet opened myself up to the idea that it could take everything I was feeling deep down inside and set it to words and soundwaves.

The first time I heard “Kill” was on an episode of One Tree Hill, a not-so-well-written teenage soap that, at the time, was in its second season. Right away, I knew the song was special. It was one of those “stop what you’re doing, pay close attention and write down the lyrics so you can Google this later” kind of songs. (We didn’t have Shazam back then.) I just didn’t know how special it would prove to be.

The next day, I downloaded “Kill” from Limewire, on the family computer in the office room of my parents’ house. (Don’t worry; I’ve legally bought many copies of Futures since then.) I didn’t have an iPod at the time, or any means of listening to music beyond blaring it out of the computer speakers or burning it to a CD and spinning it ad nauseum on the boombox up in my room. So, for the rest of that afternoon, until my parents got home from work, I played “Kill” over and over and over again on Winamp, quickly memorizing every word and every melodic shape. I remember taking a short break to go for a run a little later, but still having the words rattling around in my brain as I jogged down the road: “Well you’re just across the street/Looks a mile to my feet/I wanna go to you…”

Hormones don’t do you a lot of favors when you’re an awkward 13-year-old boy, but they did me a solid that fall. It just so happened that, when I was starting to listen to “Kill” 20 or 30 times a day, I was crushing big time on a girl from my class. I’d known her for years, and had never seen her as anything other than a friend. Until suddenly I did. But that “suddenly” corresponded pretty well with that week in late October, and the words to “Kill” quickly became the soundtrack to feelings that seemed impossible. Surely, I thought, she didn’t feel the same way. But Jimmy Eat World had a good answer for that kind of unrequited affection: “I can’t help it baby, this is who I am/Sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel/You kill me, you build me up, but just to watch me break/I know what I should do, but I just can’t walk away.”

20 years later, it feels a little absurd looking back and relating profoundly sad breakup song lyrics to an adolescent crush that never went anywhere. But that’s the magic of music, right? That it can find you where you are, and show you something about yourself and your emotions that you didn’t understand right up until the song started playing. For me, “Kill” was an open window to a brand-new world of feeling. It seemed to unlock all these little emotions that I probably would have felt embarrassed to feel just a few months prior. Sometimes, I’ve wondered if that song kick-started my puberty. Whatever it did, there was no going back. The me that existed before “Kill” was gone, replaced by a curious boy who wanted to find out more about life than what he’d been getting from video games and shallow friendships with classmates. There was a world out there, full of meaning and heart and soul and euphoria and pain, and I wanted to experience all of it.

Of course, being an eighth-grade boy isn’t exactly conducive to having big technicolor life experiences. I was 13: too young to drive, too young to go see R-rated movies, not necessarily too young to date but definitely too young to be left unsupervised with a member of the opposite sex. And I’d never dated anyone before, anyway: never kissed a girl…never even held a girl’s hand. My list of “nevers” went far beyond romance, too: I’d never held a job; I’d never been to a rock concert; I’d never traveled outside of my hometown without my parents; I’d certainly never tried alcohol. Here I was, suddenly with this deep thirst for life and everything it might hold, but I was a sheltered kid with no idea how to get outside of his box and start experiencing…anything.

So, I experienced it via music and movies and television and books. Eighth grade was my crash course. I’d go to school and go through the motions of my classes. But at home, the real work began. I bought so many albums that year, and downloaded even more. I was suddenly fascinated by the history of music and the opinions of music critics and historians much more knowledgeable than I was. That was the fall I started digging into Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time list. I’d browse through the list, jot down names of albums that intrigued me, and then dig through my parents’ CD collection to find entries from the list that were already there in my house, waiting for me to discover. That’s how I fell in love Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and U2’s The Joshua Tree and Billy Joel’s The Stranger, among many others. And at the same time, I was reacquainting myself with artists I’d loved as a kid but lost track of since – ‘90s rock staples like Third Eye Blind, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Fastball, and Oasis, who’d gone through entire eras of their careers since I last checked in.

I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but my suddenly voracious appetite for music was totally because of Futures. I’d never felt a song as deeply as I felt “Kill,” and when I got around to hearing the whole album, I was shocked to discover that nearly every song hit me in the feels in a similar way. I felt this dizzying mix of exhilaration and trepidation listening to the title track and fretting about my own unwritten future. I heard that line in “Work,” about the best DJs saving their slowest song for last, and made up fantasies in my head about swaying with the girl I liked at the end of the upcoming school dance. I yearned for the kind of tight-knit friendships described in “The World You Love,” and used that yearning as encouragement to develop deeper bonds with classmates I’d known for years. And when I heard songs like “Polaris” or “Night Drive” or “23,” I dreamed about what it might be like to be a little older and to experience the things they were talking about – love, and heartache, and heartbreak, and sex, and the anticipation of moving on from something big toward something even bigger.

I guess it’s no surprise, in retrospect, that 2004 ended up being my favorite year of music, ever. The albums I fell in love with that fall and in the opening months of 2005 – American Idiot, Hopes & Fears, Letters, Hot Fuss, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Franz Ferdinand, Under My Skin, Autobiography, Funeral, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Around the Sun, Our Endless Numbered Days – all ended up being enormously formative. I’d assume every music listener has a year like this one, where everything clicks and every album suddenly sounds like gold. Not all the albums on that list are even held up as being particularly good; just ask the average R.E.M. fan what they think about Around the Sun. But it all sounded like magic to me then, and it still does now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if music could still feel the way it did during that initial spark of obsession? One of the sad things about being a music lover is that, the more music you experience, the less common those hit-me-like-a-brick moments become. Recently, with the half-decade mark approaching, I’ve been asking myself what my “favorite albums of the 2020s” list would look like. And going through that exercise, I had to recognize that even the albums I love most from the past five years don’t get my heart racing like every single one of those 2004 albums did. I still find so much magic in new music, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will never feel quite the way it did in the beginning. As with anything, there’s an irreplicable magic to the first time. And once its gone, its gone forever.

If I never again get to hear a new album that hits quite like Futures, though, I guess I’m lucky that I still have Futures itself, and can still listen to it and feel every bit of the magic I felt on that October day in 2004. Some things change with time – most things, in fact. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop getting chills when the bridge of “Futures” rolls around, or when Jim Adkins sings about the canals freezing in “The World You Love,” or when the final chorus kicks in on “23” and it feels like you’re fucking flying. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that our favorite albums are both finite and infinite – finite in that you only get so many of those records that truly stop your heart; infinite in that they’ll always feel the way they did when you first fell in love with them. And whether I’m 23 or 33 or 93, I think I’ll always love that all it takes is a needle dropping on Futures to make me feel 13 again.

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