20130207

Jimmy Eat World's "Best Song Never Released"

From the blog of Jimmy Eat World drummer Zach Lind:

"In my mind, even though we never released this tune ("Jen"), I think it’s one of my favorite Jimmy Eat World songs of all time. We recorded this song during the Futures session but took it off the album because it just didn’t really fit the vibe with the other tunes and after that, the timing never really felt that good to release it. Maybe because the song had already leaked and we never felt that motivated to officially release the tune.



But looking back on this song, we busted our ass getting it to the point of where it ended up. It sounds like a simple song but we recorded it many different times with several different arrangements, tempos, keys, etc… It was nuts. Gil Norton was the producer and we were having the album mixed by Rich Costey at Cello Studios in Hollywood. While Rich was mixing, we were tracking Jen in studio 3 at Cello which was famous for recording Pet Sounds and some Mammas and Pappas albums. We didn’t have any of our gear in town so I rented a kit and ended up using a ludwig acrolite that Chris Testa (grammy winning engineer who ended up engineering Chase This Light) had in studio A when he was tracking the band Gratitude (who coincidentally were friends of ours and ended up opening up for us on tour). While we were tracking Jen, Brian Wilson was in studio 2 working on a project and at one point, poked his head into the door of the control room of studio 3. “Holy shit!! Brian Wilson just walked into our control room!” That was incredible."

Anyway, that’s the basic story of Jen. We nearly killed ourselves recording a song we never released.


I couldn't agree with him more. I was able to find and download Futures a few months before it was  released in 2004 (and yes I later bought it on CD and vinyl), and the original track-listing had 12 songs (official release has 11), with "Jen" being number 6.

The song and album were released the year I got married. My then fiance and I listened to this album A TON on our many road trips, and this was our favorite song from it. "Jen" also ended up being on our wedding mix CD.

Jimmy Eat World's new album has been completed, and now we are just waiting on a title and release date. I am guessing Summer.