Aughts Songs: #14 Jimmy Eat World - "If You Don't, Don't" (Demo) from Bleed American Demos ('00)

It's easy for me to forget this, but there was a time around the fall of 2000 to summer 2001, where Jimmy Eat World seemed like they had limitless potential. They were already one of my favorite bands, but they were starting to show signs that they could really fly off the charts (so to speak). They had just put out three excellent songs on their split with Jebediah, bootlegs of Jim Adkins' side project Go Big Casino were floating around that featured one especially great song ("Power"), and their live show in Sept. '00 blew me away. They opened with "What I Would Say To You Now," played an ace version of "No Sensitivity" from the split, and debuted new songs from their upcoming album. One of these songs was called "If You Don't, Don't." And this song had the sweetest, cleanest, shimmeriest guitars I'd heard in my life to that point. If that weren't enough, they added a sort of call-and-answer chorus that is sublime. J.E.W. was in between labels at the time, so they recorded Bleed American themselves to shop around. That demo version leaked on Napster and it was full of really great and exciting songs. I spent so much time with it, that it became sort of a faux-official album itself. And of course, the story of B.A. ends badly: Dreamworks releases a neutered version of the album, every song sounds worse instead of being better, the guitars don't sound the same, there's no soul, and they never recover. BUT...
Have you ever been hoping to hear a certain kind of music or to hear a specific thing, and then actually be lucky enough to have it fall into your lap within that same phase of your life? Personally, it's been such a rare phenomenon that I always remember when it happens. Even if it was fleeting, this was certainly one of those moments for me.