EAT, PLAY, ROCK

Jimmy Eat World has every right to be arrogant. They have been in the business for about 17 years, had numerous top ten singles, sold million of records yet they remain grounded, living in Arizona where they got their start. There was none of that rockstar’s air when we interview Rick Burch, the band’s bassist for a tête-à-tête.

How is Singapore?

Incredible. We’re having a great time. We arrived early yesterday morning so we had all day to look around. We took a trip to, I think, Chinatown, and tried the chicken rice dish. I like it. I found it really good.

The songs in Invented are personal vignettes for certain characters, which is different from your previous albums. What’s the process like this time round?

Usually, we do have a lot of song ideas say… 25 that we list out and we choose maybe, 15, to focus on and then, we’ll further cut the list down to 13 that we really feel would have the most potential to be part of the album. And that’s just the music, so a lot of times they don’t have lyrics yet but as they are developing, we’re realising which song we want to focus on. Jim [Adkins] is constantly writing and he’ll be thinking of which melodies and lyrics he wants to go with each song. In one of his writing exercises he was looking at this collection of images by Cindy Sherman and Hannah Starkey that started his creative thinking; just about a subject or situation could start him off and he’ll take it from there..

But that’s Adkins’ process for writing the lyrics. What about the melody?

We focused on is creating a song we all like and are fans of ourselves [laughs]. Then the lyrics are incorporated later.

Could you tell us about the equipment for recording?

In the past, we recorded in big studios in Los Angeles, which have all the toys and everything like nice microphones and mixing boards, but over the last eight years we’ve collected more and more pieces of equipment for our rehearsal studio which we’ve recorded our last two albums in. It was a really liberating experience knowing we can do that ourselves and not need to go into a big fancy studio to record a good sounding song.

Mark Trombino [producer] was in L.A. while you guys were in Arizona –-

Yeah.

–- was it challenging as in the whole back-and-forth-thing?

Well, we were worried if it was going to be weird or awkward but it turned out to be a great experience. We would work and record ideas and send them to him and he would, either call us up or e-mail us notes. The back-and-forth was really easy because whenever we were focused on listening or changing things we were always in the right frame of mind to do that. Whereas it’s not always easy for everyone to be on the same wavelength, you know what I mean? It was always left up to each party to decide when they were feeling the most energised about working on the project. Sometimes people worked better at 2am other times maybe at 10 am. It was really convenient for us, and for him, to do it that way.

Jimmy Eat World’s Invented is out now at all good music stores.

Live photos by Ryan Chang for LAMC Productions.

Promotional photos and interview courtesy of Universal Music Singapore.