SURVIVAL GUIDE
Why it took nearly 20 years, and 10 albums,
for Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins to embrace success
BY CHRIS PAYNE
Q
&
AO
N JIMMY EAT WORLD’S 2002
breakthrough hit, “The Middle,”
frontman Jim Adkins sings of a
teenage punk struggling to shut out the
naysayers and fit in. Now, 18 years later,
he has realized how close to home its
storyline hits. Though the track helped the Arizona
rockers emerge as stars of the early-2000s emo-
punk boom — they have since scored seven top 10
hits on Billboard’s Alternative chart — Adkins, now
43, struggled with how to handle success. But on the
band’s 10th album, Survival — a collection of polished
alt-rock pick-me-ups and feel-good collaborations
out on RCA — he emerged mentally stronger than
ever. “In a weird way, ‘The Middle’ sums up my entire
philosophy now,” he says. “This idea — I could never
express it properly back then — that placing your self-
worth on external validation is just a losing game.”
Recently, you have said you felt like “a passen-
ger in [your] own body for 36 years and never
realized it.” What has changed?
Quitting drinking was the main thing. I have friends
who don’t finish a beer because it got warm —
Before Dom McLennon joined hip-hop
boy band Brockhampton in 2015, he
was a rising rapper who felt intimidated by
the Connecticut recording studios he fre-
quented, noticing that the more established
an artist was the better treatment he or she
received. But once the group recorded its
acclaimed Saturation trilogy in its Los Angeles
home studio, McLennon had an epiphany: A
studio could be whatever he wanted it to be.
Soon after, he decided to create his own
space with a simple goal: to welcome emerg-
ing artists who might be great at making
music in their bedrooms, but have little to no
experience working in studios. “We just tried
to create an environment that revolves around
this idea of going to your friend’s house — but
your friend’s house has all the music equip-
ment you need,” says McLennon.
Since mid-2018, he and Brockhampton’s
manager, Jon Nunes, have been working on
getting a studio up and running. In Septem-
ber, the pair opened Sea Tea Soundwerks in
Manhattan. The three-room facility offers
over 50 pieces of gear, and the space itself
was primarily designed by the studio’s sound
engineers, who opted for cooler colors like
blues and purples based on color theory —
the idea that certain hues can positively affect
a recording session for an artist or producer.
But McLennon says he’s most proud of
Signal Flow, an artist-curated sound library
that draws from bits of studio sessions, allow-
ing artists to contribute to others’ work and
get compensated for it later on without “the
pressure of turning [every] jam session into a
song.” Ownership of the clip — whether it be
a beat, sound or vocal — is split, for an undis-
closed amount, between creator and studio.
Next, McLennon hopes to create a second
nonprofit studio. Having come up with
Brockhampton, which recorded its 2018
album, Iridescence, at Abbey Road Studios in
London, he says, “When you have experience
and privilege, the best thing you can do for
anyone else is to create a service that utilizes
the best parts of that privilege.”
—BRENTON BLANCHET
Sea Tea Soundwerks engineer-
producer Ian French (right) and
assistant engineer Stephen
Handy at work in September.
INSIDE LOOK
BROCKHAMPTON
GOES BOUTIQUE
40 BILLBOARD • OCTOBER 12, 2019