Makeup For The Silence

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

Ten years ago, I was two months out of college.   I was living in my first apartment, albeit one a stone’s throw from the Brandeis campus on which I’d spent the last four years.  I was, for the first time, responsible for such things as paying rent and the electric bill.  (I may have had a little help in that department — thanks Mom and Dad! — but at the very least, I was the one in charge of sending a check in before they kicked my ass out on the street).  I had landed my first real job, at the Boston Bar Association.  I was doing things like buying shirts with collars and taking commuter trains to work and subsisting on Burger King Rodeo Cheeseburgers ($1 special!) and supermarket angel hair pasta with Thai peanut sauce (god, I need to do that more often) to make the $50 bucks left in my bank account stretch two weeks til my next paycheck and, you know, all that crap the newly-graduated do.  

And the soundtrack to my summer, the CD that stayed lodged in my discman on my commute each way from work for those first couple months, was Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American.  I can’t believe it’s been a decade; I don’t think I’d have realized except for this retro review/thread that popped up on AP.net today.  (Funny, I seem to remember some other website running a Jimmy Eat World classic album review not too long ago…;).

A lot has changed, both in the world and in my life, since that summer.  Then again, a lot hasn’t, maybe less than I think has sometimes.  Regardless, the album absolutely holds up; the first blast of the titular opening track is as jet-fueled and jarring after a thousand spins as it was the very first time.