Jimmy Eat World finds an unlikely muse in Cindy Sherman

Singer Jim Adkins explains how the iconic photographer led the band to a re-Invented phase

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: October 8th, 2010 | 12:01pm

"I like that there's a story there but nothing is forced on you," Jim Adkins, singer of Jimmy Eat World, says of Cindy Sherman's iconic photographs. In fact, Adkins was so moved by the artist's works that he used Sherman's oeuvre as the inspiration for the band's latest (and seventh) album, Invented (David Geffen Company).

Listening to Invented, it's clear Adkins successfully channeled cinematic aspects of Sherman's work into sonic portraits. That's no small feat, given the complexity of the images and the required brevity of a pop song. "Every fiction writer has to inject some of themselves into it. It can't be purely an academic exercise. Otherwise there'd be no passion in it," says Adkins by phone from his native Arizona.

When it comes to songwriting, Adkins is as merciless as he is passionate. Speaking of Invented, he recalls, "Our bigger idea from the beginning was that it should be one huge crescendo. But we scrapped that and made the album the more dynamic arrangement that it is now. As an artist, you have to be willing to put everything on the table, including the possibility that you may have to cut what you like about it."

Adkins developed this keen editorial eye not only after years in a band but also during his journalistic studies, where he first encountered Sherman's work. "Growing up, I was always a photography enthusiast. For a while there, I was going to school for journalism with an emphasis on photojournalism. But the whole rock 'n' roll thing kind of took over. A couple of years ago though, I started flipping through Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series and [would] write anything that came to mind about the character, anything that seemed pertinent to the scene, who the character was, what kind of decisions they're making in that moment. Later on, I'd be working on songs and the more interesting parts of those writing sessions would creep into the songs that I was working on."

Though Sherman's entire body of work is comprehensive and constantly challenging in its questioning and reinvention, it was largely her Untitled Film Stills that captured Adkins' imagination. In this series, an epic work done during the 1970s, Sherman took a number of self-portraits in which she portrayed herself as an anonymous character in photographs reminiscent of movie stills.

Never specifically recreating any real movie scenes, Sherman's photographs rely on their contextual complicity and Sherman's versatility as a subject as well as a photographer. These qualities are clear inspirations for songs on Invented, including the aptly-titled "Movielike," which tells the story of an imagined break-up.

"Songwriting is a first-person kind of story. In the majority of Sherman's work, the character is the main focal point of the image. That was a good place to jump off from for building an imaginary backstory behind the music," says Adkins. Similarly to Sherman's refrain from referencing specific movies, Adkins abstains from directly referencing or addressing Sherman's work in the songs on Invented.

Invented is hardly the first time Sherman's work has met the music world. Sherman, who is currently dating former Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne, has been referenced by a number of other bands. A lyric in the Chicks on Speed song "Spoken by Stephanie from Marseille, Yes I Do" contains the comparison "got more faces than Cindy Sherman." Billy Bragg also wrote about her in "Cindy of a Thousand Lives" from his 1991 album Don't Try This At Home (Elektra). More bleakly, the Cherry Poppin' Daddies' "Grand Mal" features the couplet "She takes Cindy Sherman pictures / And she cuts herself." Though there are no direct lyrical references, Tori Amos compared her persona-adopting 2007 concept album American Doll Posse (Sony) to Sherman's work. It's clear that Adkins is just one of many to find musical inspiration in Sherman's work. Like any talented songwriter, he finds at least one story in each of her images, though some moreso than others.

"Untitled #62 from 1977 is probably one of my favorites. That one in particular, my mind goes to a lot of different places at once with it. I started doing this as an exercise, but now I look at her work and it's like the stories just come to you, no matter what."

—

Jimmy Eat World official site

Jimmy Eat World MySpace page

David Geffen Company

Cindy Sherman official site