A week late, $300 bucks short.
Today’s episode features “Pain”.
Listen to the episode now on Spotify or read on for the official transcript below:
Official Transcript:
This episode’s a little delayed after I was having some trouble with my Pro Tools software out of the blue last week where it locked me out entirely.
Fortunately it all got resolved because I haven’t actually gotten around to exporting a lot of the earlier cover song files and it would have been a little ridiculous to have to pay Avid like $300 just to be able to re-access the software for a year for that reason, but anyways. It all got resolved so we won’t dwell on it, but I’m otherwise starting to learn Universal Audio’s Luna so that if this happens again I can just quickly muscle my work over there.
On that note I can’t help but feel like we’re fast approaching some terrible ceiling where everything we use and do is getting so much more expensive, everything that was once a quick easy single-time purchase is now a subscription service with hefty fees, and wages still remain stagnant with a lot of roles not getting any raises in decades. I’d say it keeps me up at night but the reality is that things have reached a level of absolute hopelessness that I sleep like a baby now and can only hope to die in it so that I don’t have to spend another waking day thinking about it all.
That’s only partly true – my dog Dakota seems to have developed some sort of night terrors and wakes me up regularly in the night – just for a few minutes for him to do a lap outside which I’ve come to think of as his security patrol and then to let him back in. Sometimes I think he just wants to make sure I’m still in the house, which would be cute if it wasn’t something he does literally every single night regardless of if I have to be up early in the morning or not and usually more than once.
Anyways, I’m just going to quickly level with you guys on this that because of the stuff I just talked about plus recently starting a new job that I’m still tailoring my recording schedule around, I’ve been getting that thought again that I’ll have to slow this project down or at least spread out releases. I’ll try to keep this season of Static running weekly til it culminates at its 10th episode but I otherwise have no real timeline for new covers.
One of my main concerns is that I continue to prioritize this project over so many of my other original projects and I feel like I’m doing myself a disservice by doing that. It’s not that I don’t enjoy doing these but that I really only have so much time in the day and while I hope that people have been enjoying them and maybe it’ll even turn some heads over to lesser-talked about Jimmy songs, the reality is that this whole thing was born out of a bit of a falsehood.
When I was in my teens the one thing that would come up frequently is that Jimmy Eat World wasn’t really a big band over here in Canada. Sure, everyone knows The Middle and songs like Work or Chase This Light had some good runs on radio and TV here, but they didn’t even come close to having the same popularity as their peers in bands like Blink 182 or Green Day. It wasn’t uncommon to hear that people just didn’t know who they were until you played The Middle, but those other bands were household names. Hell, I had a whole Blink 182 wall in my bedroom at one point and I never saw a single Jimmy Eat World poster in my local record stores.
As I got older this only became more common and I’d grow to consider Jimmy Eat World a highly underrated band – one of the biggest underrated bands in their scene. But that’s not true at all, is it? They’re one of the biggest names in emo/rock and have sustained a 30 year career so it can’t possibly be true – but it wasn’t until I started traveling more that I noticed the difference. If here in Canada you’re lucky to even spot their record in a store, in Chicago they’re playing on the loudspeakers in the middle of the city. Even in Canada it’s sort of unfair to me to think of them as underrated. The only band I hear as often as our own beloved Arkells when I’m at a Blue Jays game is Jimmy Eat World – so they’re doing something right there, too. I have to guess it’s some form of targeted marketing which has allowed them to sustain themselves as long as they have in a country they otherwise just don’t tour very much at all, at least not outside of our major cities.
In thinking about this over the last few years I’ve come to recognize how wrong I am about a lot of things because of my own little bubble here north of Toronto and whenever I come to this type of realization it helps remind me to pause and take a look at what’s really around.
And what I notice is that what’s around me is not much of anything at all and since that’s a huge can of worms I’ll focus on this project specifically; Despite this bands massive popularity I have had a near impossible time getting any attention to what I’m doing and why; Despite my own belief that it’s important and was a fun idea to shed light on the much more pressing challenges of maintaining positive mental health, I find my own to have deteriorated along with the loss of many of my closest relationships. In the earliest stages of this project I was even banned from the only Jimmy Eat World fan group I could find on Facebook and I still don’t know what heinous reasons there are for the level of isolation that’s been bestowed unto me over the last couple of years. None of that would matter if so many other things in my life hadn’t dissolved all at the same time but since it did it’s just left this terrible black mark on everything I try to do.
All of that is to say obviously I haven’t been doing something right and because I don’t know what it is yet I’m torn between continuing and stopping every day I reach for a new song to try and cover.
I’ll probably slowly keep shuffling them out because at the end of the day I’m still just a fan doing this to enjoy these records in a new way, but I’ve lost any sense of direction for this whole thing at this point so, it’s safe to assume there’s no longer any real schedule or purpose beyond that.
Today’s episode feature is “Pain” which as always I’ll follow up with Jimmy Eat World’s original recording of the same.
Crooked Forest 