As The Weepies say in “The World Spins Madly On,” – I always say goodbye.

Or I try to, anyway.

Ever since I was very young my mother had this habit of leaving the family room where we would’ve been watching a movie or a hockey game without a word and go off to bed. She’d even do this if it was her watching some TV show, leaving the TV on loudly filling the empty room and leaving the rest of us wondering if she’d gone to bed and we could reclaim ownership of the remote.

We’d peer up the banister and if her door was closed, she had.

This is how she said goodnight to us – or didn’t – for most my entire life. As a result I’ve always been annoyingly aware of if I’ve said goodnight or goodbye or hello to anybody I come into contact with throughout the day. For a long time I was that person trying to leave the party for half an hour because I hadn’t had a chance to catch everyone yet (it’s better then, if you’re this person, to be the one hosting the parties).

Some weeks ago I announced the end of the Jaimee Eat World project, but in typical annoying musician fashion, I then went ahead and released 2 more.

“I thought you were done?”

I was.

And I swear I still am.

But it turns out starting music projects, even cover band projects, are a lot like drugs.

When you first start them it’s really exciting and new. You’re filled with this incredible euphoria of the potential of what you’re about to experience and this incredible realization that you’re able to provide yourself with it – it’s powerful.

“Anyone can built what I have built, but better now”

I really can. And I started to.

The original premise for this project was simple; I wanted to cover a couple of my favourite Jimmy Eat World songs. But that quickly burst into a new idea: “What if I do them all?” Has anybody even done that before? Not to my knowledge although I admit my own knowledge in this space is wildly limited – I was halfway through my Death Cab for Cutie cover band project when I learned that Ben Gibbard had done one for Teenage Fanclub a few years ago.

But it couldn’t just be about completing all the covers for the sake of completing the covers, because while it’s an interesting goal to set your sights on and a fun music challenge for any independent one-woman-band, it would just be doing it for the sake of doing it, for the sake of saying, “Yeah, I’m the girl that did that,” and that wasn’t enough for me.

But in thinking through the project and realizing how intricately Jimmy Eat World had woven themselves into my entire life and psyche – well, now there’s the project, isn’t it? So that’s what it became. How remarkably involved this one band in particular had been in one girls life – a Canadian no less, far from where they got their start out in Mesa, Arizona if the legend is to be believed.

It’s kinda like how everyone knows at least 10 people who say The Beatles is their favourite band and they’re absolutely obsessed with the entire culture that surrounds the Beatles. To say anything that could be potentially be perceived as negative about them in their presence is asking for certain death.

But I always felt that bizarre because how can so many people on one planet be so committed and woven into the fabric of The Beatles who, by all accounts, had a pretty limited career run and were done before most of these people were ever born.

You never even saw their live show, how could you really feel the magic?

Because that’s a really important piece of the Jaimee Eat World story. Without that first Jimmy Eat World live show, there would be no Jaimee Eat World project.

Or perhaps any Jaimee Jakobczak led projects.

I was very young when I first began to be carried away by music. It wasn’t by artists you’d necessarily expect a young girl to be drawn towards. It was The Rolling Stones, Billy Idol, B.B King, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, The Clash, The Ramones… and then later, Green Day, Blink 182, Treble Charger, Pennywise, Bad Religion, and the absolute avalanche of artists that would follow in rapid succession including of course – Jimmy Eat World.

I’d stay up late watching the music television channels and illegally downloading any new music I could get my hands on, YouTubeing live concert footage from festivals the world over and re-watching music videos. Somewhere in the midst of all that I got the urge to learn how to play drums and guitar.

I sort of started both the same year.

I had saved up all my chores allowance for a few years and had saved just about the exact amount of money you needed then for a guitar-starter pack that included a gig bag and practice amplifier. Mom had said when I asked for a guitar that if I wanted one, I’d have to buy it myself. So I did – I was 13. Dad took me to the store.

At the same time, being in 8th grade I had one more year of mandatory music classes to get through. I’d spent the last 2 years learning alto saxophone and while I enjoyed it (feeling like a proper Lisa Simpson) I found the teacher didn’t give enough time or attention to anyone in the class who wasn’t also part of the school band, so I wasn’t learning much in class and we had a drum set. I asked to switch to drums that year and she reluctantly put me on the snare.

Just the snare.

I meant like the whole kit, but whatever, sure.

I didn’t learn much that year either.

But I really took to guitar. Or at least I really wanted to be good at it. My biggest guitar-influences back then were Tom Delonge, Greig Nori, Billie Joe Armstrong and Jim Adkins.

Like anybody my first guitar riff was The Rolling Stones “Satisfaction” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” – but my first guitar solo was “The Middle.” It was the first time I really was trying to challenge myself on guitar and it took a long time to get it down – that first bit up the fretboard is a killer when you’re used to playing stuff like “Anthem Pt II.”

But what I learned about myself early on is that I don’t really have the interest or attention-span for learning how to copy somebody else’s playing style. It sucks all the fun out of learning how to play an instrument.

By then I was already writing original songs – stuff that when I look back now gives me great pause to whatever was going on in my little head back then.

I thought the stuff I was writing back then was pretty good for a teenager. Didn’t seem terrible out of scope with a lot of the stuff I listened to back then, even the weird way I’d mix metaphors seemed to be commonplace in the emo community.

But I have a distinct memory of sitting on my floor listening to Clarity and wanting to write a song as good as Blister.

I actually have another song I haven’t released anywhere yet that was inspired entirely by that song specifically. It’s the closest thing to this day I’ve ever written that is “like a Jimmy Eat World song” and I was about 17 when I wrote it. It has potential, but I haven’t been able to give it any time.

Speaking of 17, that’s how old I was when I first starting playing live with my then-band, a 4-piece called A Big Dumb Rocketship for how quickly I was being hurtled into space towards whatever grand plan the universe had for me as a Canadian songwriter – and a reference to an Our Lady Peace song about the dangers of playing with guns.

The first song we ever performed live at some dink-ass bar in a neighbouring town was “Futures”. I carried with me a casual optimism back then that I struggle these days to hold on to, but back then that album and those songs were major driving forces to the kind of life I wanted to live and inspire others to as well. I wasn’t nervous until we actually got on stage and had to begin playing – my left leg shook the entire time, but I made it through the song and the 5 or so that followed without forgetting anything and that’s all I was hoping for that night. We even had a tiny little mosh pit during our rendition of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” and that was a major highlight for me.

At 17 I was also beginning my career as an audio engineer. I landed a co-op placement at a local recording studio called Whirlwind Sound. The original owner of that space is producer Bob Ezrin who I didn’t know at the time, but has ties to Arizona. I wasn’t working for Bob, though, I was working for Brian Moncarz and it would be years before I met Bob in person. But I have a funny memory of being in the studio one day with Zubin Thakkur who you might recognize these days as Shawn Mendez’ lead guitar player – he was getting a song of his mixed by Brian and David Bottrill and we had some time to kill while we waited.

Brian happened to have a session file that we opened up for some casual production comparisons. Low and behold it was “The Middle”.

What was cool about this was it was the first time as a budding engineer that I got to hear a song I was familiar with dissected in such a way that I could hear each part independently. When you’re trying to learn how to produce music, there is no better way than to hear a song you know in this way. It just makes it all way easier to understand as opposed to sitting in your room trying to hear the notes from that riff you like poking out of your grainy Sony headphones.

And so with that Jimmy Eat World embedded themselves into the early learning of my engineering just as they’d done with my guitar playing and songwriting and my first live performance experience.

In the years that would follow this I’d do a few things – like try recording my own music using a digital recorder that I had difficulty understanding how to bounce tracks down the way I was already getting acquainted with seeing it visually in Pro Tools; I’d go to college at 18 for music production and engineering to really hone in on those fundamentals; my band would break up when my friends chose their respective university paths that did not align with the commitment required to be in a Toronto-based band and I would dabble briefly in folk music as a solo musician who didn’t yet believe I could hack it as a solo musician and then I’d commit to the idea just engineering other bands records instead of pursuing any of my own.

And then the Canadian music industry, massively unfriendly at best to the women who dare to try and be a part of it would continue to crush my soul and spirit until I opted to take a break entirely.

I’d find myself staring at my guitars collecting dust in my room, wanting to play but not having the energy or will to pick them up. I’d mess around with hip-hop beats on my Pro Tools system but never finish a track. I was no longer sure, for the first time ever in my life, if I belonged in this space at all.

The big dumb rocketship had hurled me so far outside of the atmosphere I knew and recognized until I was just floating in a mass of black.

And my hometown was killing me.

I’d had a series of bad experiences that made me not want to be there anymore – well, if I’m honest, I’d fantasized about ditching the town since before I even got my first guitar, but it was much more pressing now. I’d always felt life was short and you ought to spend it doing things that matter to you at any cost but I wasn’t always great about giving myself the push I needed to make things happen – there are so many obstacles when you want to leave your home.

When I was 15 I saw my first Jimmy Eat World concert. They were co-headlining with Taking Back Sunday and it was insane. I ran up to the stage so fast when their opening music starting playing, pushing myself as close as I could get and completely abandoning all my friends in the process. It was the first concert I jumped and danced and sang along with the kind of reckless abandon you only have at that age without any drugs or alcohol to help get you there. It’s one of those shows that makes you want to start a band.

So I’d go see them again and again wanting to relive that feeling of pure bliss, but just like drugs it never quite hits the same way. That’s not to say it still isn’t fun, it’s just different.

When I was 23 I’d meet Jim and Tom for the first time just a short time after bawling my eyes out at Hear You Me – the first time I’d ever cried at a concert.

That meeting was significant because it was the first time I was really excited to meet anyone. Like where you actually get those funny jitters when you see them nearby and you know it’s finally your shot to say something and you realize you have no idea really what you want to say and even if you did it would come out stupidly anyway.

I felt like an imposter when I explained to Jim that I was an audio engineer because I was in that throw of my life where I’d all but given up on it. But I was so excited to talk to them about how important their music was to me and how they made me want to make great records like theirs that somehow within the short time we spoke I had convinced myself to give it another shot.

As I drove home that night I thought about all the things I needed to do to make it happen and what compromises I was willing to make with myself to rejoin the music community.

I decided I didn’t mind if I didn’t front my own band again, I’d be happy playing in someone else’s – even a cover band. So I ended up playing bass in two other bands for a short time in the years that’d follow that. I also told myself I did want to stick with engineering even if I wasn’t sure the right way to go about it, so I made sure to get jobs in audio-related fields and doing a lot of audio-visual work like live broadcasting and I’d stage-hand at music venues when I wasn’t doing that.

I also finally gave myself the push to move out of my parents house even though I had next to no money to my name – just enough to put down the deposit on our basement apartment and enough to tide me over until the next paycheck while I interviewed for full-time work. I was still working part-time when I made that move and it absolutely was not enough to keep rent afloat and food on the table – but I needed to get out of Woodbridge.

For some reason meeting Jim and Tom that night in Toronto had convinced me Toronto was where I needed to be to make my music dreams a true reality – I’m still not sure that’s true, but hey, it was a start.

My fresh start in the city meant I could focus on me for once, but I didn’t really know how to do that yet. So I hung all my guitars up on the walls (the freedom of your own space is truly liberating) and didn’t play them much. I was still working freelance gigs a bit and working with a local up and coming band on another one of their records; we’d had a good relationship going and I imagined I might be their Mark Trombino since we did a few records together and they were starting to make waves.

They ended up ditching me in the final mix stage of the last record I engineered for the guy who worked at the studio I got us all a good rate to record it at. That’s a fun thing engineers do to other engineers in the music industry – they try to poach their clients.

It was a tough pill to swallow. Felt like real betrayal, both by the engineer at the studio who I’d met in my college days and by the band I’d been working my ass of for for years.

We stopped all work together after that happened and I didn’t see them for a long time.

And I sort of quit music again. Needed to focus on making some money and getting some sort of stable work since the music industry was just slapping me around all over the place.

Of course I kept coming back to it all here and there. It was really difficult to avoid. You don’t just leave behind the one thing you’re really passionate about – it’s not easy.

But really for a few years I didn’t do much – just worked and tried a couple other ventures for myself. I definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit with absolutely none of the required capital or well-thought out direction to make anything stick.

Jimmy Eat World would return to me in a funny way sometime around 2016, about 3 years after the meeting. My then-partner (if you can call it that) was a big sports guy – there is nothing he cared about more than sports and betting on games, so I’d find myself watching more than even I was used to and I consider myself pretty well vested in a lot of teams myself. We’d started going to a lot of Blue Jays games which was fun at first – I had only been to 1 prior to meeting him and then one year he bought one of those packages that gets you something stupid like 16 games.

16 baseball games is a lot of baseball games when it’s crammed into like 3 months and you’re working full-time.

So I’d find myself getting bored at the games and realizing that this wasn’t exactly how I’d like to spend my free time.

I missed the famous Jose Bautista bat-flip game only because I skipped it in favour of band practice that fell on the same day, something the lead-singer of that band would remind me of every week for… entirely too many weeks which really just showed me that I seemed to be more commited to his band than he was and I was just a bass player.

But anyway – they play Jimmy Eat World often at the SkyDome. Almost as often as they play The Arkells (which is a lot, but they’re Canadian so it makes more sense). So during those brief few minutes where something like I Will Steal You Back comes on the loudspeaker, I’d breathe a sigh of relief and feel like I was among friends again.

And then the feeling fades and you’re back watching a bunch of guys get paid a lot of money to mostly stand around looking at each other while you nurse your $16 bud light.

I’d started doing freelance copywriting in my spare time to make some extra money and was working on completing my first novels because I wasn’t finding any sort of real joy in anything else going on in my life. For a long time I thought maybe I’d be a writer because it was my first real creative love before music took hold, so getting a book published was always a big dream. In retrospect I think I was focusing so heavily on that aspiration during those years because I was avoiding the reality that I was about to marry this person who I was starting to realize was not a great fit for me – it kept me distracted long enough to actually go through with it all.

I hired a live band for my wedding because what’s the point of a big fancy party without a live band and it included a DJ to close out the night.

The best DJ’s might choose to slowest song for last but I’m not DJ and I was in charge of that decision that night.

I asked them for the last song to play “Sweetness” because I wanted to end the night on a high note.

And I’ll tell you one thing about my wedding night.

It was a shitty wedding for me, it really never should have happened at all. We had the tables set up in such a way that my husband and I would be sat at our own table – I did not account for how often he would leave me alone at that table.

It’s miserable realizing your wedding is a sham while you’re still at it.

Sometime late into the night after missing the opportunity to get a grilled cheese from my requested late-night snack station I was on the dance floor with a couple friends who were still kickin’.

And then “Sweetness” came on.

And for a few short minutes I had a really fun time dancing and singing along to one of my favourite songs the same way I did when I was 15. My bridesmaid and I (also a big fan) no doubt looked absolutely ridiculous.

My husband was nowhere to be found and if we’re honest he would have ruined the vibe. It was the best part of the entire day.

And so the band firmly embedded themselves into my wedding day. I couldn’t tell you a single other song that was played that night.

Just over a year or so later we’d move out of Toronto and into King City which despite what its name might imply is a very small town full of farmland. One of those “two-intersection” towns that has your basic needs but that’s about it. I love small towns. Here I’d start taking the Go-Train into work every day which was a much longer commute than the 20-minute bike ride I had gotten used to in the city but it meant I had time to sit and give my full attention to music again, so I listened to a lot of it every day.

And with the release on Surviving I put that one on often until it became a bit of an addiction in itself. Songs like Delivery really suck me in but I like to listen to records front to back, so I’d put the whole thing on every day for weeks at one point; it was about as long as I’d be sitting on that train.

The Surviving record is not necessarily my all-time favourite Jimmy Eat World record but it’s unequivocally the one that has had the single greatest impact on my life. It’s a big part of the reason I ultimately made a lot of necessary changes that I am forever thankful for; I was able to quit drinking and I was able to quit my marriage.

There is value in knowing when it’s time to quit.

And I was able to start writing music again once I’d tackled those other things. In the way that I’d always wanted to but didn’t have the confidence to work towards it in a real way. Instead of telling myself I couldn’t do something because I didn’t have a band, I just said fuck it and became the whole band. Life doesn’t always provide you with everything you need so you have to figure out a way to make it work for you even if it doesn’t make any sense when you start.

When I’d be at home by myself in King City with the house to myself (which is way different than having the house to yourself when you live in a giant apartment building), I’d sing along to that record and that’s when for the first time I realized I could actually sing because I was matching the same notes as Jim was hitting. I wasn’t great at first but it was starting to click and I could hear the potential.

I became almost a completely different person in 2020 while reacquainting myself with writing original music, singing along to Surviving and all the other Jimmy Eat World records, and by that I mean I think I became the person my 17-year old self always was but this time with some sort of confidence and ability to actually believe I could make something of myself. I did all of this alone with no external feedback, so of course I still didn’t really know what I was doing but I wanted to keep doing it.

And a few short months later I was able to realize a different dream of mine – the one that seemed to matter a lot more than finishing that shitty novel I was trying to write.

I released my first 3-song original EP A Quiet Place to Scream, my first of what would be many solo-efforts.

When I settled in on the 3-songs that made up that EP, they were made with a particular intention.

Without getting too deep into it again here because I’ve already sort of talked about this in more detail than I probably should have, that summer I was certain I was dying.

The beautiful part about being certain you’re dying is it makes you think about what are the last things you want to accomplish before you die – what really moves you.

Obviously I’m still here so I was wrong about dying, but nonetheless, in thinking back to my young-self and all the dreams and aspirations I had for myself as a young girl and what musicians or producers I wanted to work with if ever given the opportunity or if I only had one shot at making a full record.

So I chose those 3-songs from AQP2S with Jim Adkins in mind, thinking his own songwriting and guitar style would lend itself well to the type of album I wanted to write at the time. He seemed to like a variety of music and I wanted to showcase a little of it all; a little punk, a little rock n roll, a little blues.

And I reached out a couple times but of course never heard back, which was sort of foreign to me because given my own life trajectory I’d never felt it particularly hard to get in touch with certain musicians or producers and Jim as it turns out is damn near impossible to reach.

So I did what any sensible person would do and I finished a bunch more songs, many of them inspired in part by the revelations brought on by my deep deep intensive dive into the Jimmy Eat World discography and some inspired just by paying more careful attention to his own social media channels and then silly YouTube show.

And a fucked up thing happens when you’re as deeply invested in an idea or person as I suddenly was – you start to see and think things that are completely delusional and have no real basis in reality.

You catch yourself saying things like, “did he just do that thing because I do that thing? Is he watching me like I’m watching him? Not all the time obviously but on some level? Are these messages actually getting through and he’s just literally ignoring them and doing psychotic responses through social media?”

No no, because that would be insane, right?

While I carried on writing my silly songs and learning how to produce myself as a one-woman-band I’d fall in and out of this idea where Jim and I in some other dimension that doesn’t exist on Earth would’ve actually been great friends if we’d ever had the time to get to know each other in person and I’d start to focus on the other thing that was irking my brain – the Jaimee Eat World discography series.

It wasn’t a major driving factor but if nothing else as I began to put the framework together for this huge endeavour I imagined it must be cool to be in a successful band that inspires so many other people to pick up instruments and learn to write songs. That, coupled with the way it was managing to help keep me maintain some semblance of sanity as I worked through the separation and divorce proceedings with my now-ex and focused on my sobriety (which for all its own reasons was a critically important part of all of these projects and a true test of willpower and internal strength – a personal feat that has taught me more about myself than anything else I’ve managed to accomplish in the last few years) increased the desire not just to finish the project but to get it out to as many eyes and ears as possible.

I thought it could become a very cool global-community event where the focus is on the music, making it, recreating it, sampling it, sharing stories about experiences it inspired or didn’t and all the different places everybody who had found themselves in some way part of the Jimmy Eat World fandom was from and how they found them. I’ve always found it incredible how music has such a way of connecting people from different backgrounds and cultures and whatever other attribute you want to filter in here and I was curious if anyone’s story might be in any way like my own.

Who else’s lives has this band so intricately woven themselves into the fabric of? Perhaps I might like to know them the same way I would’ve liked to know the band.

I also thought it was a great way to encourage people to explore themselves creatively in some way in an effort to reduce how many of us are driven towards drugs and alcohol and other addictive or dangerous substances because it was while I was working through my own addiction issues that I was able to clearly see how negatively it had impacted me for so much of my life and so many people around me.

That, I suppose, was the true purpose of the entire project. It simply couldn’t just be about completion or just about me.

The irony in that cause is that it led me to spiral in a different way. I became at bare minimum mildly obsessed with getting this message out to the detriment of a lot of other things in my life. While I was trying to make things better for other people (or so I thought), I was making things worse for myself.

I started to feel pressure to complete things “for the sake of the project” even when I had no interest in doing them.

And I was still trying to reach out to the band for some input or some sort of conversation for things I wanted to talk about even though it was becoming increasingly clear that they did not want to speak to me.

And that made me sad. And then depressed. And I started to hate myself for trying.

And I really started to lose all that confidence that they had helped me build.

All the hard work I was doing seemed to be for no reason at all. It wasn’t going the way I had planned it in my head.

There was this part of me, and I suppose it’s still there, that believed so strongly that someone like me who was so massively impacted by these songs by this band in particular that if anyone were to understand what I was doing or why I was doing it, it would be them and I needed them to validate it in some way. I have never yearned so deeply for validation for anything in my life.

When I continued to not receive it, I felt stupid. I had been wrong about so many things in my life but I was so, so sure of this one.

This sure-ity took me places I’d always wanted to go.

It took me all the way to Poland (I’m Polish) to reclaim the calendar date I had chosen to get married on. I thought June 23rd was such a pretty date to celebrate a wedding anniversary and now, post-divorce I was whiting out the permanent ink with a bunch of local Poles I didn’t know at a tiny campus bar in Warsaw. The band that night said they’d never played Poland before and I found that hard to believe, after all hadn’t they been touring Germany since they were like 20 years old? How do you just skip Poland?

And it took me to Chicago, the “Toronto of Illinois” where I learned a lot about how I should conduct myself when I’m travelling by myself.

In both trips I’d find myself a lonely wreck. There were a lot of great moments and I don’t regret the trips but I regret what drove me to them. I was still just seeking some sort of validity from this band and I don’t know why it was so important that I get it.

But they weren’t going to give it. And that was really hard to come to terms with.

I can’t help it, this is just who I am.

At the risk of embarrassing myself ever further and estranging myself even more from the cool kids table that I was trying so hard to be a part of during this strange existential crisis and spiritual awakening, the reality was that somewhere along the way I had found myself falling in love with Jim Adkins.

No one was more surprised than me because I’d come to realize that I’d never been in love before. I say this as a literal divorcee.

And what I mean by that is that in suddenly becoming more involved and aware of who this person was beyond what they did on stage and what they played or sang on a record, I had a lot of funny moments where I’d catch myself just genuinely enjoying the company as I watched interviews, performances, the podcast. I’d get unseasonably excited when a new Spotify playlist would come out, like my new best friend was showing me his record collection and it was full of killer tunes I wasn’t familiar with. It gave me that same kind of excitement you get when you’re young and you’re just discovering The Clash’s London Calling for the first time and you’re like, “has anybody heard this? This is insanely good?” and everyone you show is like, “yeah that’s been out for like 20 years” but in a way that’s not judgemental and instead is like bringing you into the fold.

And whereas when I had previously been sat with my ex bored out of my fucking mind watching another sports game I absolutely did not care about, I’d learn a little more about things that interested Jim and say to myself “wouldn’t it be cool to be with someone like that? That would actually be so much more fun”.

Now these are all my own perceptions of things that were said or the way they were said and how I took them in, so I recognize that the person I’ve built up in my head is not the same person that probably exists day to day, and certainly not on any of the days I’d met him because I left almost every interaction feeling hollow and like I couldn’t actually connect with the person I was so sure I would have. It was supposed to be effortless and I was putting in a lot of effort (and air miles).

But it was a great thing to experience because it helped me understand the type of person I do want to be with one day does actually exist somewhere in the world – not in my ex and not in Jim, but somewhere, I’m sure.

And so mark them down in those other key areas of living a full and purposeful life – I suddenly had hope that I could really find love again (or for the first time) and I was getting better at reading what was really driving me and my projects.

Last week I saw Jimmy Eat World perform at Echo Beach for what I truly believe will be the last time.

I almost missed the show which is funny because there were a few times over the weeks leading up to this show that I thought I shouldn’t even go at all. I was having trouble still letting go of this grand plan, these big ideas and aspirations that seemed so centered on this band; these conversations that I was having with myself that I wanted so badly to have with them instead.

I thought the show as supposed to be on Wednesday, for some reason I had repeatedly written this down incorrectly and I’m normally pretty good at getting dates right. The universe seemed hell bent on me missing this show because despite wanting to have a relaxing day off from work, I woke up bright and early, got a big workout in at the gym and then settled in for a full day of recording and even a little bit of screen printing. Ironically the music I was recording was another cover – the one for I Will Steal You Back.

I sat down to dinner just after 6 and casually flipped my phone on as I forked down some gnocci to see one of the first posts pop up be one from the band, “See you tonight Toronto!”. They’d posted it hours ago.

I dropped my fork.

“I’m supposed to be at a concert tonight”.

I ran out of the kitchen. I changed my clothes. Grabbed my wallet. Grabbed my phone.

As fate would have it the band was playing the earlier time-slot tonight, which meant I was in a race against time and at the mercy of Toronto’s generally terrible public transit system. If everything went smoothly, I’d make it just in time for their set.

I got a ride to the subway to save time and kicked myself internally the entire ride down.

Had I realized, I would have left for downtown hours ago, taken my time, gotten a bite to eat or a coffee and enjoyed my day off down by the waterfront.

I was annoyed with myself for getting so wrapped up in my projects that I messed up the date. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was right to feel like I just shouldn’t be there.

As I fought back the urge to beat myself up in my own mind a man got on the subway and sat one seat over and across from me. His clothes were tattered and he was holding plastic bags full of I’m not sure what. As my eyes lowered to the floor beneath him I noticed he only had on one shoe.

“There are worse things than being late to a concert, Jaimee,” I said to myself, stilling my shaking knee.

I made it the the show with 15 minutes to spare. I looked around the crowd for a way to weasel my way forward to be closer to the stage but I didn’t end up getting very far and something seemed to hold me back in my position. somewhere in the middle of the crowd more on Tom’s side of the stage. As we all waited for the set to start I caught myself wondering to myself how many more times I was going to put myself through this – this awkward feeling where I’m alone at a Jimmy Eat World concert somewhere farther from the stage than I want to be when I really at this point in my life should be spending more time on my own stages.

I cannot keep spending my life standing in the back looking around.

The band played their usual set and I noticed that Jim was trying harder this time than I had seen him at previous shows including last years show at History – more stage banter, making a point to thank the fans, animated in his playing and singing but not so much as to go out of tune vocally – at least not until more towards the end. Tom seemed to be making an effort to at least look like he was having a good time going through the normal motions of these songs they’ve played probably a million times before, and Rick was doing the same although he seemed a bit more bored. I couldn’t really see what Zach and Robin were doing. By the end of the set Jim and Tom had thrown out more guitar picks than I’d ever seen them throw out into the crowd and I was mildly annoyed with myself again for not pushing myself closer – what can I say, it’s just one of those weird novelty things that you really want when you’re a guitar player.

And they actually took a moment to make their way collectively to the front of the stage for a bow and wave. It’s something I’ve commented a bit on previously that bands don’t do enough of and even from my sort of far position, I appreciated them doing it.

And it feels like the right way to end this chapter between them and me. A moment of mutual respect and gratitude between fan and band.

I will never be able to wholly express how vitally important this band has been in my life – no amount of covers or blog posts or awkward post-show conversation will ever meet the level that I feel so deep inside my heart and mind.

To Jim, Tom, Zach, Rick, Robin & everyone else who played a part in this extravagant theatre, thank you for helping me hear myself when no one was listening.