Jimmy Eat World tours 25 years of breakthrough rock album "Bleed American"

Rock band Jimmy Eat World is playing 2001's "Bleed American" start to finish on a 25th-anniversary tour, opening the run at Red Rocks Amphitheatre with the crowd singing the closing chorus of "The Middle" back at the band. "This is your guys' record as much as it's ours, really," singer-guitarist Jim Adkins told the crowd from the stage, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The album's origin story starts with a setback. Capitol Records dropped the band after 1999's "Clarity," an influential record the label never figured out how to market, even after the single "Lucky Denver Mint" got airplay on L.A.'s KROQ-FM. Without a label check, the four Mesa, Ariz., natives, Adkins, bassist Rick Burch, drummer Zach Lind and guitarist Tom Linton, paid their own way into the studio with construction work, driving car-dealership customers around and selling art supplies and auto parts. "We just kind of figured we might have to go out and just release this ourselves," Linton said.

Producer Mark Trombino, who had also made "Clarity," worked for free, betting on the album's future. The band tracked drums at Cherokee Studios, then moved to the cramped Harddrive Analog & Digital Recording in North Hollywood, which was so small it had no lounge. "The studio was so small, it didn't have a lounge," drummer Zach Lind recalled, so the band hung out at the bus stop outside instead.

The gamble paid off slowly, then all at once. "Bleed American" reached No. 31 on the Billboard album chart and stayed there for 70 weeks, while the single "The Middle" climbed to No. 5 on the Hot 100 and spent 33 weeks on the chart. A couple of months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the label briefly retitled pressings of the album to the self-titled "Jimmy Eat World," reverting to "Bleed American" in 2008. Drummer Zach Lind said he understands why "The Middle" in particular still resonates on tour: fans have told the band the song got them through hard times, "whether they're dealing with a breakup or going through cancer."

On this run, which also stopped at Warped Tour in Long Beach and, as covered in Jimmy Eat World bring their anniversary tour to London's Crystal Palace Bowl, crossed the Atlantic, the band has leaned into deep cuts rather than just the hits, reworking rarely played tracks like "Your House" and debuting the Japanese-import bonus track "(Splash) Turn Twist" live for the first time. Bassist Rick Burch called seeing the record embraced by a new generation of fans, some in line as young as 8 when the album first came out, "a very accomplished feeling."