My Life In 35 Songs, Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World

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I can’t help it baby, this is who I am; sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel.

You can’t make me leave. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

In October of 2004, for two weeks that felt like a lifetime, my parents briefly entertained the notion of uprooting our family and moving us somewhere new. I know that’s something that a lot of kids have to deal with growing up, but it had never even been on my radar before that fall. I’d lived in the same town since I was three years old, and I’d been with the same group of classmates since first grade. I’d also watched my older siblings go through the local high school, and I already had a lot of ideas for how I wanted to follow (or diverge from) their footsteps when I got there. It never occurred to me that my immediate future might be spent anywhere other than this town.

There was also a girl – the first girl from school I’d ever developed a real, yearning, aching kind of crush for. I probably thought I was in love with her, because what else do you do with those kinds of feelings when you’re 13 years old and you’ve never experienced anything like them before? What’s love if not those fluttering butterflies you feel in your stomach every time you see that other person? I definitely wondered whether there could be some big, grand future in store for me and her, somewhere down the road.

A big part of the reason I was feeling those feelings, beyond the inevitable whiplash of hormones that hits you in middle school, was this song. Prior to the fall of 2004, Jimmy Eat World were cataloged in my brain as a one-hit wonder. They were the band that hit it big on the radio in the spring and summer of 2002 with an uproariously catchy song called “The Middle.” And as far as I was concerned, they’d evaporated into thin air after that. I liked “The Middle,” but that song had gotten so mercilessly overplayed in the moment that it dampened any desire I would have had to dig deeper into Bleed American, the 2001 LP it was pulled from. I was still only in my fledgling days of music exploration, and I considered other bands riper for full discovery and appreciation. It’s not the most wrong I’ve ever been about a band, but it’s close.

The first time I heard “Kill” was one of those electric, all-consuming “Who made this song?” moments for me. Something about the voice singing the words sounded familiar, but my ears weren’t honed enough, yet, to make the immediate connection to “The Middle.” Luckily, that first listen to “Kill” came at the tail end of an episode of One Tree Hill, so I only had to wait a few minutes to get the “Here’s the music featured on tonight’s episode” rundown that aired each week alongside the closing credits. I listened hard for a snippet of that beautiful, aching song I’d just heard close the episode, and was surprised when I saw it credited to a band I already knew. I also saw a striking image cross my TV screen: a black and white photograph of a man huddled outside of an out-of-order telephone booth. That image, the cover to the then-brand-new Jimmy Eat World album Futures, is the most instantly an album cover has ever been burned into my brain.

I downloaded “Kill” from Limewire after school the next day, and spent the afternoon memorizing every word of the thing. I loved how emotionally raw it was, and how completely unabashed it was in its capital-F “Feelings.” It’s a song that is completely lovelorn, and completely heartbroken, and completely defiant, all at the same time. “You kill me,” frontman Jim Adkins sings in the chorus, a line so direct it’s almost startling. In the final refrain, he follows those three words up with this: “You build me up but just to watch me break/I know what I should do but I just can’t walk away.” Man.

“Kill” is an amazing song to have in your ears when you’re young and hormonal and starting to feel all the wonder and agony of the world for the first time. There’s something that happens as you grow up that seems to unlock hitherto-untapped potential for all of your senses, to the point where your first real love or your first real heartbreak end up feeling like bona-fide sensory overloads. That’s what listening to “Kill” feels like, too, and I think I’d believe that even if I hadn’t found the song on the cusp of turning 14, when all my emotional receptors suddenly seemed to be going haywire. Just listen to the way Adkins sings this song. Just take a look at the lyric sheet and pull out a few sample lines: “Oh god, please don’t tell me this has been in vain/I need answers for what all the waiting I’ve done means.” “I loved you, and I should have said it/But tell me just what has it ever meant.” “I can’t help it baby, this is who I am/Sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel.”

I had not, at this point in my life, ever heard the word “emo” before, but I think I felt it implicitly just listening to “Kill” that first afternoon. The emotions in this song are so bare and bruising that the recording almost can’t contain them. What could possibly be better for a teenaged boy experiencing so many emotions that his body also can’t contain them? I loved “Kill” because it seemed to take every single thing I was feeling and put it through a speaker – about that girl, about my fading childhood and my impending adolescence, about my yearning to connect with the world around me in brand-new ways. I was an emo kid before I knew what an emo kid was, and it was all because of this song.

I heard the rest of Futures in piecemeal fashion. I downloaded the songs one by one, figuring there was no possible way any of them could make me feel anything close to the butterflies that “Kill” did. Over and over again, I was proven wrong. Every new song I heard absolutely red-lined me emotionally, to the point where I thought my heart might burst. The title track was so packed with hope that it hurt. “Work” conjured such a wistful image of a high school dance floor on the last song of the night that it hurt. “The World You Love” had such a wise and vulnerable perspective on friendship that it hurt. By the time I got to “23,” the album’s big, symphonic closing track, Futures had done such a number on me that I knew two things: 1) I needed to hear the whole thing properly, in sequence, and 2) it was probably already my favorite album I’d ever heard, even without having had that front-to-back listen.

I was listening to Futures after school one day when my stepdad walked into the room and told me he’d been let go from his job. He sounded so unpanicked about the whole thing that I didn’t sense any need to panic, either. He was already on the hunt for a new job, and he sounded confident he’d find something soon, so I was confident, too. A night or two later, over dinner, my parents let me know that some of the jobs he was interviewing for were in other towns, a hundred miles or more from where we lived. A lot was still up in the air, they said, but there was a distinct possibility that we’d have to pack up our lives and move away.

Yeah, okay; now I’ll panic.

There was absolutely nothing I wanted to do less than move away to a new place on the cusp of high school. I was a shy kid who’d lived in the same town basically since he’d become sentient, and I’d seen enough movies and TV shows about being “the new kid in town” to know that it would be my worst fucking nightmare. So, no, thank you very much; I would not be moving away. I’d arrived at the hill I was willing to die on.

I pride myself on having not been a moody, petulant asshole to my parents for the majority of my teenage years, but I absolutely was a moody, petulant asshole to them for a week or two in the fall of ‘04. Rather than take into account the challenging reality of the situation – that working to support one’s family sometimes requires moving to where said work is possible – I made it all about me and what I wanted, or didn’t want. My sister, at least, was on my side; she made it clear to my parents that they would not uproot her life before she finished high school. But for her, “finishing high school” was just half a year away, not four and a half years away. She only needed to keep us here until June; I needed to keep us here until June 2009.

Fortunately for me, Futures is extremely good company when you’re feeling alone and betrayed and scared and sad, and like nobody understands you or even cares to try. If I was going to be an emo kid, then I might as well play the part right, which mostly meant spending a lot of time in my bedroom feeling extremely sorry for myself and listening to this album over and over again. Faced with the prospect of leaving behind everything I’d ever known, these songs that I’d already loved now felt even more profound. I’d started off relating “Kill” and the rest of the songs on Futures to a crush I had on a classmate. Now, I heard them echoing with sad, regretful goodbyes and piercing loneliness, but also with the small shred of hope I was clinging to that things might work out okay in the end. The chorus of “23” seemed especially apt: “I’m here and now I’m ready/Holding on tight/Don’t give away the end/The one thing that stays mind.”

Things did work out in the end. My step-dad found a job that allowed him to continue working out of northern Michigan, which meant we’d be staying put. My parents told me the news on a Sunday afternoon just a few days after Halloween, and I remember going for a run right after and cueing up Futures. Suddenly, I heard all the hope in this album again, especially right there at the top of the title track: “I always believed in futures/Hope for better in November.” For what felt like the hundredth time, this album was uncannily narrating what was happening in my life. I got a similar vibe listening back to “Kill,” specifically this part from the first chorus: “Could it be that everything goes round by chance/Or only one way that it was always meant to be?”

Was it chance that kept me in Traverse City, Michigan for the rest of my youth, and beyond? Or was this path the “one way that it was always meant to be”? I’ll never know for sure, but if I had to guess, I would say it was fate steering the wheel that day in November 2004. Fate, which saw I still had lots of things to do in this town, and lots of people to meet (including my future wife). Yes, I think it it was definitely fate at work. Fate, and a damn good emo band from Mesa, Arizona called Jimmy Eat World.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer

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