my favourite band

TW: this post mentions thoughts of suicide. 

I believe that there are certain bands that don’t just soundtrack your life; they shape it. As many of you will already know, Jimmy Eat World is that band for me. There’s no definitive beginning or end to this love - it just is. But if I had to trace it back, I would find myself in 2008, at 14, just starting to carve out my own world of music, stumbling into digital spaces, and trying to fill my iPod Nano with something that helped make sense of my weird and awkward teenage years.

At the time, I had just started riding at a new yard. One of the girls who worked there - who I thought was kinda cool - always wore a hoodie that said Jimmy Eat World across it in a varsity font. I had no idea who they were, but the name really did stick with me. It was a weird band name, wasn’t it? Why did it resonate so much before I had even heard a note? Maybe it felt like something I needed to know. 

A few weeks later, my cousin - who had played in metal bands for years - was burning me some CDs, and I asked if he had any Jimmy Eat World. He gave me Bleed American without hesitation. He seemed almost impressed by the request, a kind of unspoken respect. 

When I got home, I studied the cover before pressing play. Having my iTunes library properly updated and organised with correct artwork and titles was really important to me at the time. The image caught my attention - rows of trophies, gleaming under light, lined up on what I thought at the time was a jukebox, but later learned was a cigarette dispensing machine. Years later, when I started studying photography, I realised it was a William Eggleston photograph. He wasn’t necessarily a direct influence on me, but I understood how important he was to the medium, how his work had shaped photography as an art form. That realisation made something click - that this album, which would become so pivotal in my life, was already connected to the world I would later immerse myself in. Like a thread that had always been there, waiting for me to follow it.

That evening, I pressed play on Bleed American for the first time. I don’t remember every detail of that listen, but I do remember the exact moment "If You Don’t, Don’t" came on. I was brushing my teeth when it happened - I stood frozen, toothbrush in hand, completely wrecked in the way only a 14-year-old with an unrequited crush could be. "On my life I’ll try today, there’s so much I felt I should say, but even if your heart would listen, I doubt I could explain". It felt devastating. It felt like it had been written just for me. And to this day, it remains my favourite Jimmy Eat World song.

That really was the start of something huge. I scoured Limewire and bought CDs to consume as much of their music as possible. I was gutted to realise I had just missed the chance to see them in Dublin, as they had toured Chase This Light that year. But I made up for it in complete and utter obsession. I became one of their top 'scrobblers' on Last.fm (remember that!), and to this day, I proudly land in the top 0.001% of their listeners every year on Spotify Wrapped.

At the same time, I was finding my voice in photography, using DeviantArt and Flickr to share my work, often titling my images with Jimmy Eat World lyrics. Their words gave form to feelings I didn’t know how to express yet. That link - between music, words, and visuals - was forming even then, before I fully understood it.

In 2010, Invented came out, and for the first time, I got to live through a Jimmy Eat World album release. I went to HMV on Grafton Street (back when it was up the top end) and bought the CD. That year, I also saw them live for the first time at Tripod in Dublin. I was only 17 and had to borrow a friend’s ID to get in. I went with a boy I sort of had a crush on, hoping they’d play "Authority Song" (they didn't). Our tickets had an issue, so we weren’t allowed into the general admission area and had to stand on the balcony. I was devastated - until Jim Adkins himself walked out onto the balcony to watch the support act.

I have a photo of this moment buried deep in the archives, but I’ll never show it to anyone because I look so extremely 17 in it. Grey hoodie, green Snoopy t-shirt, denim cutoffs, and black smooth 1460s. I nervously asked Jim if there was any chance they’d play my favourite song, and he laughed, saying they hadn’t practiced it in years. A small heartbreak. But the set was unbelievable, and I left feeling like I had chosen the right band to love.

It was years later that I realised Invented wasn’t just any album - it was an album rooted in photography. Jim Adkins had written it in response to the works of Cindy Sherman and Hannah Starkey, creating stories from images, much like I was doing myself. That connection felt profound. The music that had shaped my emotional world was once again directly linked to my visual one.  First, Bleed American had unknowingly introduced me to Eggleston. Then Invented reinforced that link even further, its songs weaving narratives from photographs in the same way I would end up exploring in my own work. The album artwork, the aesthetics, the themes - it all made so much sense in that context.

Then came Damage - what the band describes as an "adult breakup album." It arrived just as I was experiencing my first actual heartbreak, my adult breakup. Once again, their music seemed to align perfectly with my life. I started to believe that whenever I needed it most, Jimmy Eat World would write a song for me. Even retrospectively - after all, they have a song literally called "Claire" on their 1996 album Static Prevails. And they formed in 1993, the year I was born. I find meaning everywhere, I look for it and I find it every time. I love that about myself. 

No song seemed to prove that more than "23". As a teenager, I was bullied so badly that I genuinely couldn’t imagine making it to 23. Later, around my 21st birthday, my mental health deteriorated again, to the point of needing psychiatric help, and I was sure I wouldn’t live to see that age. I had constant thoughts about it, made plans of how I would do it, convinced myself that I wouldn’t make it to this age made important by this band. But every time I listened to "23," it kept me "holding on tight". The way it ached, the way it understood me - and hold on tight I did. One of the most profound moments of my life was waking up on my 23rd birthday, lying in bed, putting my earphones in and pressing play. "Amazing still it seems, I’ll be 23". I had made it. And I have never stopped being grateful for that. Seeing the band play it live still makes me break down every single time.

And then, as if the universe really was on my side, Jimmy Eat World played in Dublin just four days after my 23rd birthday, on the Integrity Blues tour. I had spent months tweeting them every single day, begging them to play "If You Don’t, Don’t" that night. Maybe it was coincidence, maybe it worked, but they played it. And they played "23" too. 

I stood in the crowd, right at the front, overwhelmed, feeling like everything had somehow come full circle. Like this band was meant to be my band, meant to help me through this life. And when the frantic opening guitar riff of "If You Don’t, Don’t" rang out, I felt that same rush of emotion I had felt nearly a decade earlier, standing frozen in my bathroom, toothbrush in hand, hearing it for the first time. Except now, I wasn’t alone with my headphones - I was surrounded by hundreds of people, all singing it back, all feeling something too. What once felt like my own little secret, a song that had cracked me open as a teenager, was now something I could stand in the middle of and be completely consumed by. And when they also played "23" that night, it wasn’t a song anymore - it was proof. Proof that I had made it, that I was still here, still listening. (whoaaa-ohhh-ohhohohoh)

From here, my love for them only deepened, and over the years came more milestones linked with them. They became the first band I ever went to see on my own - an enormous victory for someone with anxiety as crippling as mine. I began travelling to different cities to see them play, deciding that spending my money on something that makes me so truly happy will always be worth it. During COVID lockdowns, I even had a digital meet-and-greet with them. I have three Jimmy Eat World-inspired tattoos. They are an inseparable part of my life, bound to me in ways that go beyond words.

I love being known as The Jimmy Eat World fan. If I ever went on Mastermind, they would be my specialist subject, and I genuinely believe I would get every question right. I love loving things this much. I love letting my passions become the foundations of who I am. And I love that Jimmy Eat World has, in turn, influenced the way I create - how I tell stories, how I connect narratives, how I find ways to be open, direct, and honest in my work. 

I do wonder what my teenage self would think if she knew just how much this band with the weird name would come to mean to her. That years later, she’d still be pressing play, still finding pieces of herself in their songs. That the music that once tethered her to the world would continue to shape the way she moves through it. Because Jimmy Eat World didn’t just save me in those moments of darkness, they helped give me a language for joy, heartbreak, growth, and Surviving. They taught me to lean into obsession, to embrace the things I love wholeheartedly, to find meaning in the details. They shaped how I tell stories, how I create, how I "try to find some peace along the way".

And perhaps! in some strange little way, this connection was always meant to be. Way back at the very start of all of this, I was using their lyrics to title my photography. Now, a dream of mine - the kind that feels so dumb and ridiculous to say out loud, but is always in the back of my mind - is to create album artwork for them. Maybe it will never happen, but I like to hope for it. Because Jimmy Eat World has always been the band that made me "believe in what I want" - in love, in survival, in the idea that some things really are meant to be.

TLDR; you all already know it, but I love this fuckin band.