At the close of 1999, Jimmy Eat World negotiated their exit from their record deal with Capitol, the major label they’d signed to while still in their teens. In truth, the Arizona emo quartet didn’t have to fight too hard for their release: though critically acclaimed and well-received on the underground, neither of their records for Capitol – 1996’s Static Prevails and 1999’s Clarity – had achieved sales anywhere near the label’s expectations. Free agents, the band also decided to part company with their management, wiping the slate clean, business-wise, as they sought to rebuild their profile and relaunch their career in the new millennium.
“We had surrounded ourselves with the wrong kind of people,” drummer Zach Lind told the Phoenix New Times newspaper. “Looking back, they didn’t really even understand us, who we were. We needed to be on our own for a while. No label, no management. We needed to do it ourselves.”
In order to keep their heads above water financially, the four band members took on day jobs: frontman Jim Adkins sold art supplies, guiarist Tom Linton worked in construction, bassist Rick Burch sold parts for cars, and Lind briefly became a car salesman. None of the four were entirely happy about being assimilated back into the 9 – 5 rat race, but this cold slap of reality ensured that their minds were laser focussed on making their next batch of songs the very best that they could be. The goal, Jim Adkins recalled, was to write “the most precise, simple pop rock possible”.
While working on one new song however, Adkins hit a creative brick wall. The bridge he had written for A Praise Chorus was too long to work as an instrumental break, but was too catchy and too good to be deleted. Fortunately, Adkins wasn’t too proud to seek outside help from a friend.
“We decided to just send that song off to Davey von Bohlen, who played it in a band called The Promise Ring, just to see what he would do,” Adkins recalled recently to MusicRadar. “He came back with what you hear on the record, which is basically I sing something, ‘Come on, Davey, sing me something that I know…’ And he just basically used that as a jumping off point to reference a bunch of lyrics that he thought I might know.”
For his inspired contribution to the song, von Bohlen quoted from Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson and Clover, Madness’ 1982 single Our House, The Promise Ring’s own Why Did Ever We Meet and All of My Everythings, Bad Company’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy, They Might be Giant’s Don’t Let’s Start, and perhaps most incongruously, Motley Crue’s Kickstart My Heart, Nikki Sixx’s celebration of being brought back to life by paramedics to life following a near-fatal 1980s heroin overdose.
“Everything he references, if you’re our age and were interested in music at all, all those lyric quotes are stuff that’s just there in your mind whether you own those albums or not,” Adkins tells MusicRadar. “Maybe the They Might Be Giants one is a little stretch, but, for me, like, yeah! [Laughs]”
In another sideways tribute, the song’s title was inspired by Christian music, in a way.
“One of my friends was involved in her church’s music, and we were getting into an argument about how lame contemporary Christian music can be sometimes,” Adkins explained in 2017. “Actually, most of the time. ‘Praise Chorus’ was the way she roped in the formulaic way that all contemporary Christian music is about. It’s similar to a lot of other pop music in the way that it’s just basically all about trying to get people to clap along and sing. And it’s pretty rock and roll. I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to reference that in a song that’s really just about rock and roll: the unquantifiable release you get when rock music is doing what it should.”
A Praise Chorus was released as the fourth and final single from Jimmy Eat World’s 2001 ‘comeback’ album Bleed American, by which time the Arizona quartet already had a million-selling record on their hands: earlier this month it was certified double platinum in the US alone.
Taylor Swift would later hail Adkins as “someone who’s written songs that have gotten me through some of the toughest moments of my life”, and pronounced herself “a huge fan” of his band. Memorably, in 2016, Swift lip-synced to another Bleed American single, The Middle, in an advert for Apple Music.