Fifteen Years Later, I'm Finally Able To "Chase This Light"

If I'm being completely honest, the album that defined this year more than any other for me did not come out in 2022. The path from an album to our heart is not always linear. We don't always hear an album when it comes out and immediately find ourselves engrossed in a wonderful new experience. Sometimes, the path an album takes is more circuitous, winding around disappointments and shifting tastes, only reaching the destination when we least expect it. Those experiences are the sorts of things that keep the search alive, because there is something magical about realizing how our orbits can align after such a long time, how the whirling dervish of life and the universe is a blur right up until the moment it isn't.

This year was most defined, for me, by Jimmy Eat World's now fifteen year-old album, "Chase This Light".

After "Bleed American" caught my attention, and "Futures" won me over, I found myself disappointed in "Chase This Light". It was a stark shift from the darkness of "Futures", which is what I wanted more of. I was not in the right frame of mind for a brighter Jimmy Eat World album, and for most of the next fifteen years, I considered it to be one of the most disappointing albums I've ever come across.

This year has been filled with very bi-polar artistic feelings. I have produced some work I am extremely proud of, but the reaction to it has been underwhelming, to say the least. That has brought on a sense of melancholy, where I'm caught between the satisfaction those works have given me as I put them together, and the weight of disappointment that sets in when no one seems to care about any of that.

It is precisely that feeling Jimmy Eat World is able to capture, and during the long stretch when new music seemed to be coming in a trickle, I found myself going back to explore the albums I never gave a chance. With "Futures" now sitting atop my list of all-time favorites, I owed it to myself to see if the band had more to offer than I had always thought. I listened to everything from "Clarity" through "Surviving" again, and with the clouds just the right shade of grey in my head, everything was different.

It was "Dizzy" that hooked me. The line "if you always knew the truth/then the world would spin around you/are you dizzy yet?" caught my ear. It implies the character thinks the world revolves around her, and that thought was the complete opposite of how I felt I was at the nadir of the universe's orbit. It made me wonder, if everyone else thought the world revolved around them, would that explain why I seem so blurry, why I'm so hard to see?

Likewise, the line "I must look like I'm running away/to you at your faster pace" summed up a lot of feelings that were dragged up by life events. I wrote my own song about feeling stuck in place, and it's only as I'm saying this right now I'm realizing where that idea actually came from. That shows how much the album has seeped into my subconscious this year.

But as much as I love the lilting hook of "Always Be", or the power of "Big Casino", this is absolutely an album of mood and feeling, much like "Futures" is. They are different resistances on the dimmer switch, but Jimmy Eat World are masters of making music that sounds like the moment pain is too tired to continue hurting. "Futures" is an instant before that happens, and "Chase This Light" is an instant after. I can see how I needed to realize that before the album could open itself up to me, and I simply wasn't ready for that before now.

One of the beautiful things about music is that it doesn't change, but we do. The music will always be there for us when we are ready to accept it, when its purpose aligns with our needs. It isn't that often I backtrack and find a record from my past that has fallen into the proper context. When it does happen, I'm not questioning what was wrong with me at the time to have missed it. What goes through my mind is gratitude I heard the album at the wrong time, and it still made enough of an impression on me that I remembered it when the time became right.

Gratitude seems like an odd thing to be expressing for an album that lives in a bit of a sad feeling, but that's where I am. "Chase This Light" is the attitude I needed to have this year, and more than anything else I listened to this year, it was the soundtrack to every moment of existential thought. Whether it was doubt, angst, or something even darker, these songs were there to remind me there is a light to chase, if I can just bend my neck enough to look up.