Jim Adkins thought 'The Middle' was a throwaway. He nearly left it off the album. The song took a few hours to write, felt too easy to be worth much, and sat in the pile with everything else Jimmy Eat World had built during the worst stretch of their career. That instinct was wrong in the most instructive way possible: the song that almost didn't make the cut became number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and peaked at number five on the Hot 100 in 2002, pulling an underground emo band from Mesa, Arizona into late-night television and MTV rotation. The reason it hit that hard is inseparable from the circumstances that produced it.
Capitol Records dropped Jimmy Eat World in late 1999 after Clarity failed to generate commercial traction. The label had signed them straight out of high school in 1995, watched Static Prevails sell around 10,000 copies, and decided the math didn't work. Adkins later described the situation plainly: 'We were just about invisible there and it wasn't going to get any better.' So the four of them, Adkins, guitarist Tom Linton, bassist Rick Burch, and drummer Zach Lind, went back to Arizona and started over from zero. Adkins sold art supplies. Linton did construction work. Burch sold auto parts. Lind worked at a car dealership. They toured when they could and saved what they made, because they were going to record the next album themselves whether anyone wanted it or not.
The recording sessions for what would become Bleed American began in October 2000 in Los Angeles. The drums went down at Cherokee Studios. Overdubs followed at Harddrive in North Hollywood over the course of about six weeks. Mixing happened at South Ecstasy Recording Studio in January 2001. Their producer was Mark Trombino, the Drive Like Jehu drummer who had also produced Static Prevails and Clarity, and who agreed to work for free because he believed in the new material that much. The budget was so tight that when Lind wrote the check to cover mixing costs, he was genuinely worried it would bounce. Trombino had also produced Blink-182's Dude Ranch, which matters because it places him at the exact intersection where punk credibility and pop hooks were being negotiated in real time. He understood both sides of that equation, and so did Jimmy Eat World.
The band had made a deliberate choice going into the sessions: stop experimenting, go simpler. Drummer Zach Lind told Rock Sound that they had been getting into Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, 'guys who wrote really great, big American rock songs.' That influence is all over Bleed American, and it is especially audible in 'The Middle,' where Lind's drumming consciously mimics the straight-ahead feel of a Petty track. The guitar solo, which wasn't even in the original demo, was developed in the studio by Adkins and draws on the hammer-on and pull-off style of Doug Gillard of Guided by Voices, specifically his playing on 'I Am a Tree.' A band that had spent years building elaborate, layered arrangements on Clarity was now stripping things down to what worked, because elaborate arrangements cost money they didn't have and because simplicity, done right, hits harder anyway.
The lyric came from a fan email. Sometime around 1996, when the band was on Static Prevails and had listed an AOL address in the liner notes, a girl wrote in about feeling excluded by the punk kids at her school. She wasn't punk enough for them. Adkins told Louder that the situation struck him as genuinely strange: 'It was really weird, because punk is supposed to be inclusive.' That contradiction lodged somewhere and eventually became the song. The message of 'The Middle' is direct because the situation it describes is direct: someone is being told they don't belong, and the song pushes back on that with the kind of conviction that only comes from a band that had recently been told the same thing by a major label. When Adkins sings about not writing yourself off, he means it from experience. The song was released in October 2001 as the second single from Bleed American, which DreamWorks had put out on July 24, 2001, and which had already been retitled Jimmy Eat World in the wake of September 11 after the original title became untenable for radio. The first single, 'Bleed American,' rechristened 'Salt Sweat Sugar,' had fallen off after the attacks. 'The Middle' was what they had left.
By early 2002, the song had topped the Modern Rock chart and crossed over to pop radio in a way that nobody, including the band, had predicted. Adkins told Alternative Press he wasn't even sure it would make the album. Trombino, who had engineered and mixed the record and had worked with the band across three albums, told anyone who asked that he wasn't a hitmaker. The video, directed by Paul Fedor and built around the concept of showing up to a party fully clothed when everyone else is in their underwear, got heavy rotation on MTV's Total Request Live. In the summer of 2002, Jimmy Eat World opened the Pop Disaster Tour for Green Day and Blink-182. The band that had been invisible at Capitol was now playing arenas. The song that Adkins thought was too easy to be good had become the thing that changed everything. That is the actual argument inside 'The Middle': the things that feel effortless sometimes feel that way because they're true.
