Oh yeah, and the members of Jimmy Eat World have also spent the past few months orchestrating the “Phoenix Sessions,” the new streaming concert film series that sees the band performing albums from their back catalog throughout the Icehouse art space in downtown Phoenix.
“We’ve been planning this since October and it’s taken a lot of time and effort,” Adkins says. “About a week into doing it, I realized what an enormous undertaking it all was, but by then it was too late to revise anything, so we had to barrel through and do it.”
The “Phoenix Sessions” are different from the sort of livestreamed performances that have become hallmarks of the pandemic, Adkins says. The films are prerecorded, for instance, and each will involve the band performing a specific album in its entirety, including Jimmy Eat World’s most recent release, 2019’s Surviving.
“It's pretty insane and ambitious. Each album and performance will completely have its own look with its own [feel],” he says.
Prior to the pandemic, the band was set to tour the world in support of the album before the world went screwy. Adkins says the “Phoenix Sessions” are a unique way of compensating for the loss of the tour and to engage with their audience.
“It was inspired by what other people have been doing to take advantage of the [current situation] with livestreaming and such,” he says. “Seeing how other people were trying to connect with fans and just thinking about how we would approach that. It just seemed like a new way to challenge ourselves and also connect with fans and we wanted to see what our version would look like.”
If you’re interested in seeing the “Phoenix Sessions” concert films for yourself, here’s everything you need to know about the series.
