The Past, The Present, & The "Futures"

In high school, I was in the perfect demographic to be a Weezer fan. I saw others wearing the t-shirts, and I knew the "Buddy Holly" video, but I kept my distance from the band's music. While others were talking about "The Blue Album", I nodded my head and kept to myself. I didn't want to be associated with Weezer, although I could not have told you why at the time. As it turned out, my intuitions were strong, and I have spent much of the last twenty years attempting to reconcile the appeal their early music has with the distaste I have for almost everything about Rivers Cuomo.

"Pinkerton" is the most obvious bone of contention, but it's far from the only one. When I was eighteen years old, I fell under the spell of the disaffected youth the album carried in its dirty guitars and pained lyrics. When I was in my twenties, I thought of the album as a nostalgic nugget that took me back to a time when my mind was less cluttered. When I hit my thirties, I finally saw it for the toxic mire it truly is. I have written about that topic before, so I will only say that I am ashamed to have spent so many years letting those ugly thoughts and ideas into my ears without realizing the need to wall myself off from them.

That brings us to Jimmy Eat World's album, "Futures". When the record came out in 2005, I had enjoyed "Bleed American", but when it came to darker music intended for the losers of the world, that was not the direction I was looking. When things were truly dark, I had Killswitch Engage's "The End Of Heartache" to pull at my strings. When I felt out of place, I still had "Pinkerton". This new record from the band I knew best from a poppy little single was on my radar, but faded quickly. Jimmy Eat World had made a more demure version of what I was already listening to, and I needed to be hit in the face at that point.

My mind had tied "Futures" and "Pinkerton" together, telling myself the latter album was the polished attempt to take an underground classic into the mainstream. All these years later, my intention was right, but reversed in the lenses of nostalgia.

The two albums are mining the same territory, but "Pinkerton" is the slag left behind to get caught in the tread of our shoes, while "Futures" is the refined ore cut into a gleaming gem. Both are albums of outsiders, both mine the darkness some of us prefer to stand in, but only one of them is written with a grace and maturity echoing the reality that bad things sometimes happen to good people. On "Pinkerton", bad things happen to Rivers because he is exposed as a terrible person. On "Futures", bad things happen because there can be no good without the bad.

That is illustrated in the lyrics to the title track, where Jim Adkins asks, "Why is it so hard to find a balance between living decent and the cold and real?" That's the question many of us have asked ourselves, and as the song reminds us, there is no answer. We look to the future in the hope something better is due to come along, but sometimes that hope is the only good thing we have. Is that enough?

The songs talk about relationships of convenience, and whether the connections we feel in the moment are enough to satisfy us, when we know they may not last forever. As committed as we might be in the here and now, tomorrow is a different day, and even the strongest foundation will eventually crumble.

"We're only just as happy as everyone else seems to think we are," he sings on "The World You Love". In that one line, we twist together issues of identity and meaning. We paint on a smile to fool people into thinking we're happier than we are, because we foolishly believe being thought happy is as important as actually being so. If we are looked at with envy rather than pity, perhaps the attention will swell our egos. It almost doesn't matter if the attention we receive is real or not, so long as it keeps us from fading into the ether.

The songs then transition into metaphors of drugs and depression, using both people and narcotics to stop ourselves from feeling reality's cold touch. It's a sad state, and a lonely road, but these songs understand the situation and make no excuses for how we ended up here. Rivers wrote songs about being miserable where he blamed everyone other than himself (almost exclusively women, for what it's worth), while "Futures" knows every wound is self-inflicted. It's the difference between acceptance and blame. Neither is healthy, but only one sets us on a path toward a better place.

By the album's end, Jim is singing, "I won't always live in my regrets". That is the silver lining in this dark cloud of a record. In time, either fortune will gift us something better than our depressive fog, or we will come to regret having our regrets. In either case, our focus will shift away from the pains, and toward whatever comes next. It may not be any better, but it will be different, only reinforcing how pointless it is to be consumed by temporary bouts with our demons.

There is a lot of philosophical thinking that "Futures" brings up in my mind, from reconciling the past with the present, to realizing it only takes one person to invite us in from being outsiders.

"Pinkerton" is not an album of reflection. It is a visceral reaction that feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves us hollow. Like screaming until our voice gives out, or getting a misspelled tattoo, it is an action that leaves us in worse condition than when we started. If you listen to "Pinkerton" because you feel hopeless, it does nothing to reaffirm any faith in humanity. Hearing a litany of toxic attitudes, finished off with only a faint and half-hearted 'apology', we're asked to forgive a man who doesn't come across truly sorry. "Futures" doesn't paint a much brighter view of the world, but we understand and accept hope relies as much on us as anyone, or anything, else.

"Pinkerton" is an album that celebrates the very things that make us miserable. "Futures" celebrates that we are strong enough to make it through the waves of depression mostly in tact. The younger version of myself might not have understood all of this, but my subconscious recognized how "Futures" was making up for my own mistakes as a music fan.

I still have regrets, and I still have dark clouds. I also still have control of the ending, which as Jim finishes with, is "the one thing that stays mine".

And I will finish with another honest take. As much as "Futures" means to me, and as much as I love it, I'm also glad it's a one-off moment in time. Having more albums that mine this territory and echo in my soul the same way would be amazing, but they would become less special by rote. It's the flash of dark lightning "Futures" captures that makes it so hard to pull away from. The happenstance of finding one album out of an entire ocean of music that writes itself on your heart is the sort of thing you could call a miracle. If anyone could pull off the same feat, it would be a mere parlor trick.

Sign me up for the miracle.