For me this is heaven

25 years of Jimmy Eat World's album, Clarity

Howdy, and welcome to Good And Good For You, a newsletter about music and feelings. I try to write a few times a month with stories about the music that matters most to me, and when I have time, I occasionally do new music roundups & reviews. In the meantime, I’m working on a book about Paramore. But this one isn’t about them—it’s about one of my other favorite bands, Jimmy Eat World, and their album Clarity, which just turned 25.

When Jimmy Eat World released Clarity—on February 23, 1999—I was in first grade. I didn’t listen to it until about a decade later. 

From a macro perspective, Clarity occupies an odd space in Emo as a genre—there’s something open-ended about its sound and feel. Oldhead journalists will say it’s pop; the average mainstream millennial at an “emo nite” has probably never heard of it. Perhaps that’s why the album has always felt like home to me; so much of the music that matters most to me falls under the Emo umbrella, and yet I have never felt like I belonged wholly with emo purists, nor with mainstream pop-punkers. The albums that imprinted on me as a teen, and that I still love the most today, are the ones that creatively bridged the gap and, in doing so, established themselves as cultural landmarks in their own right.

I started listening to Jimmy Eat World because I started listening to Paramore. Since I was 15 years old, Paramore have been my favorite band, and since the members of Paramore were around 13 years old, Jimmy Eat World has been their favorite band. Well, one of them, at least. In 2007, there were only two Paramore albums, and I was desperate for more music that sounded like them, instrumentally. Jimmy Eat World does because, of course, Paramore’s founding members were students of the band’s ringing seventh chords, thoughtfully-employed distortion, and—for lack of a better word—twinkling guitars. The butterfly that Clarity, in particular, so carefully captures in a jar. That ephemeral meeting place where second-wave emo and pop punk brushed shoulders. It’s a mystery I could live in. Have lived in, for almost two decades now.

It surprised me to learn, as a teenager reading up on Clarity, that it was Jimmy Eat World’s second album on a major label. In my mind, at the time, it didn’t quite add up that a major label would have been interested in the meandering bass lines and reflective guitar melodies of songs like “12.23.95” or “Just Watch The Fireworks.” I would have expected their mainstream-breakout 2003 album Bleed American, which had multiple radio hits, to be the one on a label like Capitol. And in retrospect, despite having next-to-zero knowledge of the music biz, my instinct wasn’t too far off, because Capitol did drop them after Clarity. As journalist Ian Cohen explained in a 2019 Stereogum article:

Jimmy Eat World were arguably the first emo band on a major label when they released Static Prevails in 1996, and three years later, Capitol still had no idea what to do with them in a market dominated by teen-pop and nu-metal. Other than dropping them, that is … “Capitol didn’t give a shit about us,” Adkins joked later on, and it cut both ways — Jimmy Eat World were free to make this spacey and experimental album while knowing Capitol wouldn’t give it the time of day.

Free of commercial constraint, Jimmy Eat World carved out a liminal space where rock meets pop meets the crystalline corners of an orchestra. Clarity is a portal into a spacious sideways dimension where time slows down. Where incongruous sounds, feelings, and stories can coexist, can bounce off each other without collapsing.

The album starts slow, with the understated “Table For Glasses.” I’ve never really understood what this song is about, lyrically. There are actually quite a few songs on this album of which I could say the same. The repetitive drum hit for the first minute and a half of the song feels almost hesitant, and when the strings and bass roll in, all at once, and then double down around minute 3, you sort of understand why: this is holy ground. Approach with reverence. 

Clarity’s signature bells kick in toward the end of “Table For Glasses,” showing up again in “A Sunday,” and, of course, the 16-minute album closer, “Goodbye Sky Harbor.” Critics at the time bemoaned the bells, calling them saccharine. Perhaps the most scathing was Pitchfork, in a now-defunct review that rated Clarity a 3.5/10 for being, essentially, too soft and sweet. To my teenage ears, however, the bells revealed that rock music could have orchestral depth, could have light, frosty textures, could have emotional subtlety. The bells sounded like the sparkles looked, on the water on the album cover. 

The second track on the album, “Lucky Denver Mint,” picks up the tempo, alongside lyrics that set the stage for the album’s emotional theme of feeling small. It may be the most musically-profound song I know about a small night out in Vegas: “Somewhere I made a wish / with lucky Denver mint / you’re not bigger than this, not better, why can’t you learn?” Jimmy Eat World are no strangers to betting metaphors—although “Big Casino,” one of my favorite tracks from their 2007 album Chase This Light, has a slightly sunnier demeanor.

I agree with Cohen that “Your New Aesthetic,” Clarity’s third track, is the only somewhat-skippable song on the album; it’s not bad, but it’s trying a little too hard to Say Something. The next one, “Believe In What You Want,” feels like a return to the initial mood. The guitars and drums pound behind Adkins’ thinly-veiled frustration toward Capitol. “What you ignore is priceless to me,” he nearly shouts, a line that, even detached from context, always grabbed my attention as a lonely teenager. Chugging bar chords weave in and out of bells and strings on the contemplative melodies of “A Sunday,” clearing a path for the emotional urgency of “Crush.” 

“Crush” was one of my favorite tracks right off the bat when I first began listening to Clarity. Unlike some other songs on the album, it requires no patience upon first listen, launching immediately into noisy drums and guitars. And as a serial crusher myself, how could I refute its subject material? It’s the first time on the album the band brings out the big guns—i.e., the electric guitar string bend on top of a drum breakdown. We hear it a few crucial times on the album, and it’s a sound that I could probably listen to again and again a hundred times and never get tired of. A sound that’s been used a hundred million times by a hundred thousand bands but, to me, is very Clarity-specific.

Fluttering static softens the mood as “12.23.95” descends into a song that, as a 16-year-old, I loved but didn’t understand. I followed its delicate edges, its softly-ringing guitar notes, its simple confession over and over again in my mind, feeling the sadness as familiar, but the experience as strange. I’d never left anyone hanging on, all alone. I’d never had a Christmas dyed blue with sorrow. Now, as someone whose marriage has ended—now I have; now I know. I etched out my own “Merry Christmas, baby” in my mind a hundred times this last December. But, of course, as the song explains, I didn’t know what to say.

So many sentiments in this album have taken root for me that way over the past fifteen-odd years of listening. I’d look up into the deep expanse of my inner sky as a teenager, feeling the gravity of songs like “Ten,” but unable to trace the patterns yet in my own experience. I loved the sound, the starry guitars. I loved the inscrutable quadrant on the album’s cover. I retreated into Clarity to feel a sense of depth, emotionally and musically, whether or not I even knew what the song was saying, which I often didn’t. The layered vocals washed over me and I’d catch phrases here and there, like “What giving up gives you, and where giving up takes you,” in “Just Watch The Fireworks.” My little narratives of unrequited love and loss, my high school life shrouded in loneliness; I picked up the songs’ bits and pieces that mattered to me then. Now, decades deep, they offer well-worn grooves for my mind to fall into in the midst of real loss. The through-line of feeling truly small, truly alone.

“For Me This Is Heaven,” the album’s most-played song on Spotify, is also, I sometimes think, its best. More than any other song on Clarity, it alchemizes older emo and newer emo in streaks of bright, layered resonance. “Can you still feel the butterflies?” the chorus asks, a phrase that made its way onto the back of the physical CD packaging. The guitar riffs, piano keys, bass line, and drums circle around each other, layering and looping asymmetrically until we’re wrapped up in sound. The crux of the song is a quote: “This is what she says gets her through it / If I can’t let myself be happy now, then when? If not now, when?” I have never really gotten who Adkins is quoting, and why it sounds so sad. Perhaps she’s trying to convince herself that the happiness will come once she allows it. Perhaps the happiness is at his expense. I’ve never understood the song’s narrative, and I kind of prefer it that way—it’s a microcosm of how this album has always felt for me: a place where emotions are safe to roil, to settle, to stratify, without needing to be solved.

With “Blister” and the title track, Jimmy Eat World remind us that they’re still a rock band. I saw the band perform “Blister” in 2008, when they were touring for Chase This Light. It was, and remains, my dream tour: Paramore opened for them. Imagine you discover your favorite band, you get really into their favorite band, and then almost immediately after, learn that the two will be touring together! I’ve considered the possibility that my music-enjoying career peaked then. Anyway, I was ecstatic that they played “Blister,” which I considered at the time to be my favorite song off Clarity. The aforementioned guitar bend reappears in the second-to-last chorus, accentuating a moment of softness amidst the song’s unsettled ruckus. “And how long would it take me to walk across the United States, all alone?” Adkins howls. I loved—still love—the song’s apocalyptic loneliness. 

Before the infamous “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” “Clarity,” ironically, paints uncertainty across a canvas of urgent drums and sharp guitars. In the version of the album I once listened to religiously—a burned copy without the two bonus tracks—it was a farewell missive to the strands of post-hardcore that wove in and out of the preceding eleven tracks. By the time Sky Harbor arrives, we’re ready to deconstruct, piece by piece, everything Clarity has built.

As a teen, I didn’t know that Sky Harbor is the name of the Phoenix airport. To me, it sounded—in the context of the sixteen-minute song’s deep sense of mystery—like a sci-fi reference, or a metaphor. The repetitive, ringing guitar notes and drums fade out, and another set fades in, like layers of the stratosphere you’re passing through on your way up, up, up, into the cool dark twinkling night. After all these years, there’s something in the stars I still can’t trace. But this album will always remind me that perhaps there’s a bit of heaven in the mystery.