"Here It Goes" by Jimmy Eat World, Thursday, December 30, 2021

Entertainment Weekly called Jimmy Eat World's seventh album, Chase This Light, "Extroverted guitar pop." Recently on an episode of Slate's Hit Parade, host Chris Molanphy told a compelling story tracing the evolution of punk to emo to its eventual influence on pop and hip hop. Between Green Day making an album about crap and My Chemical Romance sending out invitations to the black parade (and long before Machine Gun Kelly sold tickets to his downfall) came a pop one-hit wonder who from Mesa, Arizona, who is often cited early in a list of influences for pop punk, punk, emo and screamo bands. But Alternative Rock radio listeners knew that Jimmy Eat World was no one hit wonder.

DON'T ACCEPT CRITIQUE OR CREDIT. When we think of emo, we picture neo-gothic-looking kids dressed in skinny jeans and over the-the-top haircuts. The Wikipedia image to the left best sums up the stereotype. Molanphy points out that a phenomenon that I remember quite well, everyone associated with the emo scene, denounced it. Emo was used as a derogatory term for everything awful about music. And what was emo? My Chemical Romance? Green Day's American Idiot album? Three Days Grace singing about "Pain without love"?  And if it's emotional music, isn't happiness an emotion, too? With all of this hate around scene music, it got very hard to actually voice your opinions in the '00s about what music you actually liked. Jimmy Eat World proceeded the emo scene, and while they toured with some of the younger emo bands, they are often more close linked to the Power Pop or Pop Punk scene that emerged alongside emo. Their 1999 album Clarity  is viewed as an underrated gem in their scene and the scenes inspired by the band. So many Tooth & Nail bands cite Jimmy as an influence, that a case could be made that band alone influenced half of Christian Rock in the the '00s. Stephen Christian of Anberlin has said on several occasions that hearing Jimmy Eat World's Jim Adkin's praise for their single "Impossible" was a career high.

IT'S JUST MY PARTY NOW. Sometimes you just need a win, and that's what today's song is all about. This album was the last big Jimmy Eat World record, if I recall correctly. I heard the single "Big Casino" on Alternative radio, but after that I just saw online that Jimmy Eat World released new music. Chase This Light is a catchy, poppy record filled with the sweetness that Jimmy Eat World is known for. The power pop band has a diverse, upbeat array of songs, starting with the first track and biggest single from Chase This Light, "Big Casino." Along the way, listeners experience familiar pop-punk material before the album's emotional closer, "Dizzy." Track 8, "Here It Goes," feels very poppy. The song uses gang vocals, handclapping, stomps, and some other production not typically heard on a Jimmy Eat World tune. Listening to his song today feels like a shifting of gears. This year has had its ups and many downs. I wrote for 364 days trying to recover from 2020, a year that was the hardest in my professional life and scariest in terms of realizing that stability is an illusion. This year was better, but professional conflicts soured the latter quarter of the year. We are two days away from 2022, and I'm not going to declare it to be my year, or anything foolish like that. Instead, I want to set my mind up to being ready to receive new opportunities in the new year, should they present themselves. Today's song tells us to stay true to ourselves and "don't receive critique or credit."

Listen to Hit Parade: “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” Part 1, Part 2.

Read "Here It Goes" lyrics on Genius.