Indie music publisher and neighboring rights company Peermusic has made its second senior leadership change of the year, promoting Jody Farber to chief financial officer. The move was announced Tuesday by executive chair Ralph Peer II and CEO Mary Megan Peer. Farber, who joined the company in 2024 as senior vice president of finance and strategy, will be based in New York and report directly to Mary Megan Peer.

Her appointment follows last month’s promotion of Paul Smelt to the newly created role of COO, overseeing the day‑to‑day administration of publishing and neighboring rights divisions across Peermusic’s global offices. 

As CFO, Farber will lead all financial operations, including global treasury, budgeting, accounting, reporting, deal analysis and long-term strategic planning. She will work closely with Peermusic’s worldwide leadership team to support the company’s ongoing growth.

Farber succeeds longtime finance chief Bill Gorjance, who is stepping down after two decades in the role. During his tenure, Gorjance helped triple the company’s revenues, expand its footprint into Korea and China, strengthen its neighboring rights business and modernize financial and administrative systems. He will continue his involvement with Peermusic part‑time as international vice president of the company’s classical division.

Before joining Peermusic, Farber spent 25 years in finance roles across the music, entertainment and nonprofit sectors, holding senior posts at Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment South Africa, World Wrestling Entertainment and the South African nonprofit loveLife Trust. She has also served on boards and finance committees for several South African music rights organizations.

In a joint statement, the Peers praised Gorjance’s contributions and expressed confidence in Farber’s leadership. 

“[Gorjance’s] contributions go well beyond the financial and his wisdom has left an indelible mark on our company and writers,” they said. “As CFO, we are confident that Jody will ensure that peermusic’s profitable growth continues. In the two years she has been at peermusic, she has become an integral part of our global finance team. We know that she will bring continued commitment to financial integrity and operational excellence as we build successful partnerships with our songwriters and artists.”

Gorjance called his tenure “a dream job” and said he was “happy to hand a debt-free balance sheet over to Jody,” while Farber said she was honored to carry forward his legacy.

“I look forward to leveraging my industry experience and finance expertise while collaborating with our global finance teams,” she said. “Together we aim to serve our clients and business partners, ensuring the ongoing financial strength and success of our organization and our creative community.”

Founded in 1928, Peermusic operates 39 offices in 33 countries and is the world’s largest independent music publishing and neighboring rights company.

The heat is kissing 90 degrees on a mid-October Friday in Austin, where Bobby Epstein is giving a Jurassic Park-style media tour through the perpetually under construction Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racing grounds.

Standing at the head of a moving shuttle bus like a safari guide, the circuit’s chairman points to piles of dirt. As he tells us in his easygoing drawl, a carousel and Ferris wheel will soon stand here; the skeletons of future roller coasters tower over the horizon behind him.

On the property’s great lawn, we pass two massive music stages and rows of vendors selling everything from LEGO race cars to cowboy hats. (About 6,000 of the latter, to be precise, are stocked for the weekend.) There’s a lucha libre wrestling ring, miniature golf and go-karts, and in one section showing off cutting-edge technology, a tent housing a life-size model of a six-propeller flying taxicab hailed as the “future” of air travel.

When I remark that it feels like we’re at the World’s Fair, a delighted grin flashes across Epstein’s face. “That’s exactly what we’re after,” he says.

In reality, we’re at the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, where hundreds of thousands of fans will soon pack in to catch flashes of race cars zipping through the course’s famously sharp corners and deceptively steep hills during one of the racing organization’s tentpole events. But for over a decade, COTA has been working to transform this annual affair — the biggest of about nine races held here each year since it opened in 2012 — into more than just a sporting event.

The COTALand theme park they’re in the midst of building is just COTA’s latest push to make motor sport a way of life in the United States, a market F1 in particular had long struggled to crack before it finally erupted in mainstream popularity at the end of the 2010s.

Now, the amount of U.S. Grands Prix has shot up from just one to three of the 24 total in-season F1 stops, with annual races introduced in Miami in 2022 and Las Vegas in 2023; this past November, Beyoncé and Jay-Z made appearances on the track in Sin City, and mgk, T-Pain and Zedd headlined a festival-like run of outdoor shows surrounding the race. What once was a niche sport predominantly associated with European car enthusiasts has exploded into an America-size media and entertainment spectacle. And — if the Academy Award-nominated, Brad Pitt-led F1: The Movie’s $189.5 million in domestic box-office revenue in 2025, and its star-packed soundtrack, which hit No. 13 on the Billboard 200, are any indication — it’s only getting bigger.

But while the rest of America might only just be catching up to speed, COTA has been in this race for years — and it’s been a key player in helping F1 achieve its own long-term goal of crossing over as a competitive force in the music business.

“They were far ahead of everyone,” F1 chief communications and corporate relations officer Liam Parker says of COTA. “Every time you go to COTA, the talk is around not only the racing but what’s the big act everyone is going to see that evening.”

Tonight, that artist is Kygo, set to perform after the evening’s weekend–opening sprint. After playing Grands Prix in Bahrain, Mexico City and Miami over the years (with more to be announced later), the Norwegian DJ has become an F1 devotee — but the chance to advertise himself to the sport’s diverse, rapidly expanding fan base at each race is more than enough reason on its own to keep coming back.

“If you play a music festival, a lot of people have already heard about you or your music,” Kygo tells Billboard in his trailer Friday night, just minutes before taking the Super Stage. “But if you go play at F1, that might be 80,000 people who don’t even know who you are.”

“Some other [venues] were doing it, but I think what [COTA] has done is help wake up the rest of the racing world within Formula 1 to realize: This has an impact,” Parker adds. “This makes you global.”

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Ask any spectator milling about in Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren team gear beneath the unforgiving Texas sun this weekend how they became interested in F1, and it’s a good bet that three words will come up: Drive To Survive.

With seven seasons since its 2019 debut and an eighth on the way, the Netflix docuseries has introduced a horde of new American fans to the league’s once-insular world of high-class, high-stakes and high-octane drama, with cameras following top international drivers like Lando Norris (who, two months after racing in Austin, was crowned the 2025 F1 world champion), Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton on every stop of each year’s racing season. Viewers attend the Grand Prix in Texas hoping to see their favorites in action — and get hooked on the overall culture of race day that can only be fully experienced in person, not just because the cars roar past at truly dizzying speeds (like, so fast your eyes can barely even clock them) but also because of all the live music and entertainment opportunities between the stops and starts on the track.

After Kygo in Austin last October, that involved sets from country icon Garth Brooks following Saturday’s qualifying round and Americana band Turnpike Troubadours after Sunday’s main event, each attended by thousands of ticketholders who chose to stay and listen long after all the drivers had retired to their garages.

But what many Drive To Survive bandwagoners may not realize is that COTA, the site of the U.S. Grand Prix since the year it opened, had been preparing for this surge in demand well before the show premiered in 2019.

“I honestly believe we were right at the front end of that,” COTA senior vp of music and entertainment Glynn Wedgewood says over Zoom a few weeks after the U.S. Grand Prix. “We just fully went for it in 2016 and haven’t looked back.”

The turning point he’s referencing was swift — Taylor Swift, to be exact. After testing out adding live music to COTA’s F1 race weekend with an Elton John performance that was dampened by Hurricane Patricia rainfall in 2015, Wedgewood says that COTA took a gamble on inviting the pop star, fresh off her 1989 world tour, to headline its first-ever festival-style lineup the following year, which also featured Usher and The Roots.

Swift is known for backing the right horses, and F1 turned out to be one of them. That October, she played her first and only show of 2016 at the U.S. Grand Prix for a crowd of 80,000 fans, helping COTA set a then-record for overall weekend attendance (270,000, which would skyrocket to 440,000 by 2022) and paving the way for the event (and ultimately, F1 as a whole) to rebrand as a premier concert outlet.

“To just go, like, ‘We’re doing the biggest pop star in the world’ — nobody [in F1] was doing that,” Wedgewood recalls.

Ten years later, it seems like everyone’s doing that. It’s now common for A-list artists to perform on multiact Grand Prix bills, with the sport’s numerous host cities all over the world following COTA’s lead. And in the decade since Swift performed, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Britney Spears, Billy Joel, Ed Sheeran and more have each headlined an F1 weekend in Austin.

Like Kygo, many artists are also now F1 fans themselves; as Wedgewood notes, he doesn’t have to field nearly as many questions from prospective performers before booking. (“What is this? We’re playing around cars?” he recalls people asking in the past with a laugh.) But previously, a big way COTA enticed musicians was by investing in a main stage that appealed to performers as much as it did fans, constructing its now-signature Super Stage in 2015 between turns 11 and 12 on the track — not far from its 14,000-capacity open-air Germania Insurance Amphitheater, which was built in 2013 — so that audiences could watch shows while standing exactly where their favorite drivers had raced just hours prior.

“When an artist and their crew walk in and get on that stage and look out, it’s like, ‘Oh, we get this. This was built for this,’ ” says Wedgewood, who is the talent buyer for both the Super Stage and amphitheater for F1 weekends. (Live Nation handles the majority of other bookings for the amphitheater.) “It’s not just trying to shoehorn an act into a venue that doesn’t make any sense. It makes sense because it was built that way before we even started doing it.”

Whether it’s the novelty of the Austin venue or the massive exposure an F1 gig now guarantees, more stars than ever want a slot at the U.S. Grand Prix. But Wedgewood says a key element of his job is curating a lineup that appeals to the broad, undefined music tastes of racing fans. (To wit: F1 The Album was about as eclectic as soundtracks come, featuring Sheeran, Rosé, Chris Stapleton, Peggy Gou, Burna Boy and Doja Cat among many others.)

“A large part of what we do [is] having something for everyone there,” Wedgewood says. “Like, the contrast between Kygo with the crazy loud, visually stunning dance show, or someone like Garth Brooks, who’s a legacy, legend, [one of the] biggest-selling country artist of all time — that is 100% intentional.”

Ultimately, the biggest payoff from COTA’s pioneering efforts in the space might just be that, as the highest–attended event on its calendar, the U.S. Grand Prix is also the circuit’s best opportunity each year to advertise itself to the public as a music venue, with dozens more concerts and festivals programmed annually beyond those attached to races. In the coming months, mgk and Wiz Khalifa, Jack Johnson, Toto, Subtronics and Five Finger Death Punch will all perform as part of COTA’s extensive run of amphitheater shows following the F1 weekend.

“We’re just constantly busy every year,” Wedgewood says. “It’s just this beast that keeps going … [The U.S. Grand Prix] is, without a doubt, the biggest event, but it’s just a part of what we do.”

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On Sunday morning, COTA’s paddock is buzzing with team staff, engineers, media personnel and even what appears to be a few Netflix cameramen, all milling about, the pre-race energy palpable.

Flashes bombard Mercedes team principal and F1 royalty Toto Wolff as he makes his entrance for the day. Alexandra Saint Mleux, the fiancée of Monégasque driver Charles Leclerc, stands by the Ferrari garage holding the leash to the couple’s beloved blonde dachshund, Leo, over whom VIP pass-wielding fans gasp and squeal like he’s an A-list celebrity. Later, Hamilton parts the sea on his kick scooter, speedily escaping from the hectic press area.

And whereas 2000s pop hits had blared over the speakers on Friday and Saturday, today the playlist has changed to match the stakes: “Lose Yourself” by Eminem (who headlined the 2024 U.S. Grand Prix) greets everyone as they arrive.

When the lights go out and the sound of 20 engines thundering to life cuts through the crowd’s silent anticipation, all eyes in the grandstands will fix on the race for 56 laps. Most of the rest of the weekend, however, will be busy with not just the big headline shows, but all the other ways F1 is integrating music and brand partnerships.

“Events you saw five years ago, [the promoters] just thought this was all about racing,” Parker recalls. “You turn up, you watch a race, you go home. Now, seeing what others have done — particularly in the U.S. — elevating and bringing music and festivals and environments into their world, it’s core to the overall weekend.”

Like COTA, F1 has been cultivating a wider cultural presence for years, though Parker concedes that even his fellow higher-ups, including CEO Stefano Domenicali (one of Billboard’s 2026 Sports Power Players), weren’t fully prepared for the speed with which Drive To Survive — which debuted a year before the coronavirus pandemic, when Parker posits people stuck at home were more inclined to tune in — helped them grow. Tapping into the American market through entertainment–focused crossover was key, but made difficult by the fact that, to this day, none of the drivers on the grid are from the United States. Parker remembers one of F1’s first ventures into music: “F1 Tracks,” a series of themed playlists curated by artists such as Mumford & Sons, Feeder and more that launched in 2019.

From there, the company booked increasingly well-known artists to sing different countries’ national anthems or to simply appear at races to boost the races’ profile. This year in Austin, it debuted a new “Grid Gigs” series featuring performers who would open races with miniconcerts performed on the actual track, starting with Texas singer–songwriter Drake Milligan.

“From a pure business point of view … you want to keep people there as long as possible to enjoy the event,” Parker says. When F1 offers music programming, fans “spend longer at the event. They obviously come away from it with a bigger recognition of how good the event was, so they come back again. But at the same time, it’s the cultural area as well. You’ve got celebrities in attendance, there’s huge media coverage of that event and broadcast coverage — you’re appealing to a brand-new and different audience.”

At the 2025 U.S. Grand Prix, artists from Shaboozey to Adele to Kane Brown were all on that attendance sheet. And at one point, legions of reporters gathered for a news conference in COTA’s media center, where Domenicali, Apple senior vp of services Eddy Cue and Liberty Media CEO Derek Chang announced the newest development in their entertainment strategy: building on the success of Apple Studios’ F1: The Movie and its Billboard-charting soundtrack, the tech company will serve as the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 races for the next five years, in a deal Variety has valued at $750 million. The deal may eventually tap into the possibilities offered by Apple Music, but Parker tells me later that in its first year, the focus will mostly be on delivering the highest quality race coverage possible.

F1’s crossover with entertainment has also allowed drivers to grow their personal brands and establish themselves as multifaceted public figures beyond the sport. Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson shares videos of himself playing guitar and recording in the studio on social media. He tells Billboard in the paddock that he’s still wrapping his head around the possibilities, but to have music “aligned with my career, my world in racing, is something very important to me.”

Williams Racing’s Alex Albon has seen firsthand how the sport has changed since his rookie year, particularly stateside. “I remember coming into Austin in 2019 and [COTA] already had the stage over on the other side of the track,” he says, noting that while the drivers are always too busy to catch the post-race concerts, they’re enjoyable for his fiancée (pro golfer Lily Muni He) and other family traveling with the drivers.

“I remember thinking, like, ‘Oh, what’s this about? I’ve never seen such a huge music stage situated beside the circuit,’ ” he continues. “It just feels like every year it gets bigger. The whole thing is a show.”

With Verstappen cruising past the checkered flag with an eight-second lead over Norris, securing one more win for Red Bull, another Grand Prix is in the books. For the drivers and teams, it’s already on to the next one in Mexico City, even as the audience here heads over to the amphitheater to watch the Turnpike Troubadours set — or try out the Circuit Breaker, the first of COTALand’s roller coasters to open to the public.

As for F1, it’s on to the next big advancement in music and entertainment, whatever that might be. “Ten years ago, we were a different sport,” Parker says, noting the uptick in female viewers and fans under age 35 in recent years. “We can’t, and we shouldn’t, and we won’t keep going down the same old route, doing the same old things.”

This story appears in the Feb. 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.

As if the hype surrounding BTS‘ upcoming fifth studio album, Arirang, wasn’t already sky high after the K-pop supergroup’s nearly four-year hiatus, producer Diplo just amped things up a few more notches.

When TMZ caught up with Diplo at a Super Bowl LX party on Saturday, he said the LP due out on March 20 is gonna blow some minds. “I just feel so lucky because I’ve been working for three decades and to link up with a group like that, and have them trust me and do some awesome music,” said Diplo, who did not reveal how many of the album’s 14 tracks he worked on. “Honestly, it’s gonna shock the world,” he added, “craziest album ever.”

Diplo, who has collaborated with everyone from BLACKPINK to Britney Spears, Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber, Usher, Bad Bunny and Bailey Zimmerman over the years, also had high praise for the studio savvy he saw from members RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jung Kook. “They’re so hands-on. They’re so creative. I can’t believe it,” he said, singling out one member for particular praise. “Jungkook no autotune. Perfect voice.”

Calling them “the real deal,” Diplo also raved about the septet’s rapping skills and said, not for nothing, they “smell really good” and “they dance better than any of us.”

The upcoming release will be BTS’ first full-length album since 2020’s Be and the first since the group went on a temporary hiatus in 2022 to allow the men to complete their mandatory South Korean military service. The new album’s title, Arirang, is a reference to a traditional Korean folk song known around the world. “Transcending time and generations, the song has long been associated with emotions of connection, distance, and reunion,” BigHit Music said in a statement announcing the collection.

BigHit added that the LP is a “deeply reflective body of work” exploring the K-pop singers’ “identity and roots.” The track list and production credits for Arirang have not yet been released.

BTS will be back on the on April 9 when they kick off a world tour in Goyang, South Korea before heading to the United States in late April.

John Fogerty is set to receive the Johnny Mercer Award, the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s top honor, at the annual SHOF Induction and Awards Gala, set for June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York.

The Mercer Award is reserved for a songwriter or songwriting team who has already been inducted into the SHOF and whose body of work is of such high quality and impact that it upholds the high standards set by Johnny Mercer, the lyricist on such standards as “Moon River” and “The Days of Wine and Roses.” Fogerty was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005.

Fogerty was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 as a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He’s the 12th person to be inducted into the Rock Hall as a performer and also receive the Mercer Award from the SHOF. He follows Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Dolly Parton, Phil Collins (inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of Genesis), Elton John, Van Morrison, Lionel Richie and Neil Diamond.

As the songwriter, singer, lead guitarist, arranger, and producer for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty’s catalog includes such classics as “Proud Mary” and “Born on the Bayou.” Three of his songs – “Fortunate Son,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” – have each surpassed one billion streams. Two years after CCR had a smash with “Proud Mary,” Ike & Tina Turner utterly redefined the song with a soulful, and ultimately frenetic, version that reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy.

Fogerty topped the Billboard 200 with two CCR albums (Green River in 1969 and Cosmo’s Factory in 1970) and with his 1985 solo album, Centerfield. That album’s title track is the only song to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. CCR amassed nine top 10 hits on the Hot 100, including five that reached No. 2. They had more No. 2 hits without ever landing a No. 1 than any other act in Hot 100 history. Fogerty also landed a top 10 hit as a solo artist, “The Old Man Down the Road.”

Fogerty won his only Grammy in 1998 — best rock album for Blue Moon Swamp. Fogerty has received eight career Grammy nominations, but never in a songwriting category. (The Grammys might like a do-over on that one.) In 2021, he released his first original song in eight years titled “Weeping in the Promised Land,” a poignant, gospel-tinged reflection on the social and political climate. (Sadly, the song is probably even more relevant today.)

BMI has presented Fogerty with three career honors – the Icon Award (2010), Board of Directors Award (2023) and the Troubadour Award (2025). NAMM awarded him with the “Music for Life” honor (2023). Fogerty also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1998). 

In 2023, Fogerty was able to regain the publishing rights to his songs, a victory that took him more than 50 years to achieve. In 2025, Fogerty released Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years. The 20-track collection – produced by Fogerty and his son Shane, with executive production by his wife Julie – presents new versions of his most beloved songs.

By coincidence, one of this year’s SHOF inductees, Taylor Swift, also had a headline-making experience regaining control of her music (not the publishing rights, in her case, but the masters). Swift, 36, is set to become the second-youngest inductee in SHOF history. Stevie Wonder was just 32 when he was inducted in 1983.

Other SHOF inductees this year are Walter Afanasieff; Terry Britten and Graham Lyle; Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS; Kenny Loggins; Alanis Morissette; and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart.

SHOF Chairman Nile Rodgers said in a statement, “The first time I heard Creedence Clearwater Revival, I was a mere highschooler. It was also the first time I heard John Fogerty’s voice, one of the most distinctive ever. To this day I’ve never heard anyone else sound like him. His unique songwriting ability is another quality. He’s one of those rare talents who is unmistakably himself. His style of composition is rock and roll mastery. It’s what I’ve always personally believed in, something I call ‘The art of complex simplicity.’ He’s done what I believe all great songwriters do. He makes us feel. He deserves this award as much as anyone who’s ever received it, or will receive it, in the future. I send my congratulations to John Fogerty.”

Jimmy Eat World will put fans in the middle of a big celebration this summer as the group tours to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its breakthrough and top-selling album, Bleed American.

The Mesa, Arizona-formed alt-rock quartet hits the road June 9 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado for a lengthy trek celebrating its fourth album, Bleed American (full dates below). The 11-song set was the band’s first top 40 effort on the Billboard 200, launching the Billboard Hot 100 top 5 hit “The Middle” and giving Jimmy Eat World headliner status. Bleed American has sold 1.7 million copies to date, according to Luminate.

“It changed our lives,” frontman Jim Adkins, who co-founded the band in 1993, tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Phoenix. “It put us on a map. It gave us a new, broad audience of people that found something in it that they connected with. People have grown up with this record, right alongside us growing up, and I feel like it’s important to celebrate it. It’s important to acknowledge to people that we appreciate that, despite the obvious commerce involved.”

Adkins and his bandmates — guitarist Tom Linton, drummer Zach Lind and bassist Rick Burch — plan to play Bleed American in its entirety, but probably not sequentially, during the tour. Support acts on the outing include Sunny Day Real Estate, Rise Against, the Get Up Kids, Thrice, Girls Against Boys, Hey Mercedes, Motion City Soundtrack, Illuminati Hotties, Mom Jeans, Jay Som and Pup. The itinerary includes four Vans Warped Tour stops, three performances in the U.K. (its already sold-out Aug. 15 show in Cardiff Wales will be the band’s biggest U.K. concert ever) and one in Mexico City. Jimmy Eat World will also perform at the Hello Summer Music Festival in Alberta, Canada, the Louder Than Life Festival in Kentucky and Shaky Knees in Atlanta, where it will not be performing Bleed American.

The summer shows will rekindle plenty of memories for fans, and with the tour’s announcement we drew on a few of Adkins’ own remembrances from what was a dramatic time for the group.

The Band Was Without a Label

After two albums Capitol Records dropped Jimmy Eat World following 1999’s Clarity. But Adkins maintains that the move, not entirely unexpected, did not level his band.

“I could see how people would think, ‘Oh, their record label dropped them. What are they gonna do now?!’” he says. “That’s not how it was, at all. Everything with the record label was happening in the background, and we were just focused on the next gig we were gonna do that night. And what we saw was every time we’d come back to a city we’d be playing a slightly bigger venue, or we’d be opening for a slightly bigger headlining act. We were building opportunities and we were getting to go to new places. We felt momentum. So all that stuff happening with the record label is just noise.”

Capitol would, interestingly, try to re-sign the band after Bleed American was completed, but it inked instead with DreamWorks.

It Had To Pay For Bleed American Itself

Without the support of a label, Jimmy Eat World supported itself and funded the album with an independently released Singles compilation, by touring and by taking day jobs. “Tom and Rick worked at a temp agency,” Adkins recalls, “which is really convenient when you’re going on tour all the time. So they would always have wacky stories about where they’d show up, sorting postal things or light industrial, bagel bakery things.” Lind worked for an auto dealership, while Adkins was at an art supply store.

“I would give ’em plenty of notice when we had a tour coming up, and when we came back they would rehire me because I had so many skews memorized,” he says. “Those things are so scorched in my memory I can’t get rid of them.”

Mark Trombino, who produced Clarity and 1996’s Static Prevails, also cut Jimmy Eat World a break to help make ends meet. “We were very fortunate that (Trombino) agreed to basically do it for free up front and just figure it out later,” Adkins says. “He believed in us and believed in the record we wanted to make, so he put his time and energy into building it with us.

“To be honest, it didn’t seem like a freaky or scary thing to do. It didn’t seem like, ‘We’re putting it all on this, and if it doesn’t happen, oh well.’ It wasn’t like that. Whatever happened with it, we felt like we were just gonna keep (making music), no matter what.”

The Plan

Though the songs on Bleed American, which was recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles and Harddrive in North Hollywood, were notably tighter and more focused than on preceding albums, Adkins says that Jimmy Eat World “didn’t have an album in mind. There wasn’t, like, a concept or goal we were trying to achieve.” Instead, he explains, the band and Trombino took “a song-by-song approach,” even using digital technologies “to make the best versions of those songs that we could.”

“We made Bleed American to the best of our ability with what we knew about making records, with what we knew about writing songs, with our ability as physical players,” Adkins adds. “I feel like we did the absolute best we possibly could, given our knowledge and our ability. And we were proud of it, ’cause that’s what you have to achieve as a musician, I feel. Is this rewarding? Are you proud of this? If so, put your name on it and send it forth and see what happens.”

“The Middle”

After Bleed American’s title track reached No. 18 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, its successor, “The Middle,” put the album and Jimmy Eat World on the map, hitting No. 1 on the same chart and No. 5 on the Hot 100. It was not the band’s pick as the song most likely to succeed, however.

“‘The Middle’ came together really fast and felt at the time like a solid song,” Adkins remembers. “There was nothing wrong with it; I think when something arrives quickly and just feels right, that’s that. Cool. There’s something that feels maybe not as important as (a song) that’s a creative puzzle that you spend a lot of time to solve. But when someone’s listening to an album, they don’t care about that. I don’t know if we just underestimated (‘The Middle’) or what. It’s a solid song.”

A Mellencamp Moment

Bleed American‘s “The Authority Song” makes direct reference to (then) John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” from his 1983 album Uh-Huh — as well as to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1989 album Automatic. “That’s another one that came together pretty quickly, maybe around the same time as ‘The Middle,’ actually,” according to Adkins. “It really is a journal entry of being a kid in the Tempe area in the late ‘90s and trying to figure out life in the social circle and the insecurities that come with your early twenties and all that.”

Adkins says Mellencamp has never acknowledged the shoutout, nor has Jimmy Eat World ever crossed paths with him.

Haden Help

Rachel Haden from That Dog, which was on hiatus while Jimmy Eat World was recording Bleed American, provided backing vocals on five of the album’s tracks. “I had met her through some mutual friends in the L.A. area,” Adkins recalls. “There were some vocal harmonies I really wanted to have a different character than just me or Tom cutting them; the That Dog material led me to her. She came in and it was like, ‘Oh wow, this really works. Do you have another hour you can hang out? I have this other thing I want you to try.’ We wound up with her doing backups for most of the record, which was great.”

By Any Other Name…

Bleed American was already a success when the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., took place, which led to copies issued from December 2001 on being titled simply Jimmy Eat World, while the title track was changed to “Salt Sweat Sugar.”

“The whole word was shaken, and we had no idea what was going to happen,” Adkins says. “We were very proud of our album. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we felt like people should make their mind up about our music based on just that. We worked too hard on this to have something (like the title) get in the way of people having that experience for themselves. And the solution we came to was turning the album into self-titled.

“It was sort of a punk rock thing to do back then. Album titles? Whatever…We felt like it might be slightly subversive, just calling it what it is. It’s our name.”

The Bleed American title was reinstated for a deluxe edition of the album in 2008, which featured a second disc of unreleased live and studio material, demos and covers of songs by Wham!, Guided By Voices and the Wedding Present.

For the North America dates, tickets are available starting with an artist, CITI and American Express presale beginning Wednesday (Feb. 11). Additional presales will run throughout the week ahead of the general on-sale on Friday (Feb. 13) at 10 a.m. local time. Citi cardmembers will have access to presale tickets in the U.S. beginning Wednesday (Feb.) 11 at 10 a.m. local time until Thursday (Feb. 12) at 10 p.m. local time through the Citi Entertainment program. For complete presale details visit citientertainment.com. For the Canada shows, American Express card members can purchase tickets before the general public beginning Wednesday (Feb. 11) at 10 a.m. local time through Thursday (Feb. 12) at 10 p.m. local time. Updates and additional information can be found at jimmyeatworld.com.

The full itinerary for Jimmy Eat World’s 25 Years of Bleed American Tour includes:

June 9 –– Denver, CO –– Red Rocks Amphitheatre
June 11 –– Chicago, IL –– Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island
June 12 –– Sterling Heights, MI –– Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill
June 13-14 –– Washington, D.C. –– Vans Warped Tour
June 16 –– Brooklyn, NY –– Brooklyn Paramount
June 17 –– New York, NY –– The Rooftop at Pier 17
June 19 –– Philadelphia, PA –– Highmark Skyline Stage at Mann
June 20 –– Boston, MA –– MGM Music Hall at Fenway
July 3 –– Calgary, AB –– Spruce Meadows
July 4 –– Fort McMurray, AB –– Hello Summer Festival
July 17 –– Bend, OR –– Hayden Homes Amphitheater
July 18 –– Seattle WA –– WAMU Theater @ Lumen Field
July 19 –– Vancouver, BC –– Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre
July 22 –– Sandy, UT –– Sandy Amphitheater
July 24 –– Concord, CA –– Toyota Pavilion at Concord
July 25-26 –– Long Beach, CA –– Vans Warped Tour
August 14 –– Halifax, UK –– The Piece Hall
August 15 –– Cardiff, UK –– Cardiff Castle
August 16 –– London, UK –– Gunnersbury Park
August 22 –– Montreal, QC –– Vans Warped Tour
August 23 –– Toronto, ON –– RBC Amphitheatre
September 6 –– Phoenix, AZ –– Chase Field (supporting My Chemical Romance) September 9 –– Austin, TX –– Moody Amphitheater
September 10 –– Dallas, TX –– The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory
September 12-13 –– Mexico City, MX –– Vans Warped Tour
November 12 –– Nashville, TN –– Venue info TBA
November 14 –– Tampa, FL –– MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre
November 14-15 –– Orlando, FL –– Vans Warped Tour