The Middle

Jimmy Eat World had just weathered the worst stretch of their career: after 1999's Clarity, Capitol Records dropped them over low sales and thin radio play, and the band kept themselves alive through relentless touring and word of mouth. In 1999, while learning drums at home in Tempe, Arizona, frontman Jim Adkins wrote the bones of what would become "The Middle" — the drumbeat borrowed its drive from Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me," and most of the lyrics came in a single day. The message was direct: don't give up on yourself, even when social unease is screaming that you should. It was partly inspired by a fan's account of feeling like an outsider, turned into something universal.

"The Middle" arrived in October 2001 as the second single from Bleed American, and by early 2002 it hit number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart — then kept climbing, crossing to top-40 radio and peaking at number five on the Hot 100. It remains the band's only top-40 hit on that chart, and in Canada it was the most-played song on radio in all of 2002. The video captured the song perfectly: a high-school pool party where everyone but the band is in their underwear, and one clothed teenage boy wanders awkwardly through until he finds a girl who kept her clothes on too — and they leave together.

Two years earlier, Jimmy Eat World had been an underground emo act known to a small, devoted crowd. The crossover was sudden and improbable: a moment when the mainstream briefly aligned with what the kids in the back already knew.