Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of Jimmy Eat World's ninth album. Frontman Jim Adkins told Rolling Stone he considers it to be one of his favorite songs that he's ever written. He explained:
  
  "Sometimes doing everything you can, in the best way you know how, that can feel like lonely work. But the only way out of that is action, and 'Integrity Blues' is a song about coming to terms with all the things that you've decided are going to do it for you in life. It's a common theme in the record, which is why it's the title track."
• Adkins expanded on the song's meaning to Kerrang:
  
  "These things that you want and expect to fulfill you, we waste a lot of effort and energy focusing on the wrong target. Like 'Maybe this will change everything for me and none of it really will.' It's about putting in that effort, not unlike endurance athletic training. You spend a lot of time in the middle of nowhere being exhausted with no one clapping. And being at peace with yourself for that if it is really all that you have.
  
  Sometimes people might clap, sometimes people might boo, but if you know that you're doing everything you can to the best of your ability, focusing on the right path, that's all you can do. And it feels like lonely work sometimes, but the goal isn't necessarily happiness. Happiness is one of those fleeting finish line type goals - we're not always gonna be happy, and it's pointless to think that. But what is sustainable is trying to conduct yourself down the path of integrity the best that you can."
• Asked by HMV.com when the band settled on the title of Integrity Blues, Adkins replied:
  
  "It was actually called about four different things along the way. You need to have the album done before you can title it really, I like leaving it open to discovery as you go. Titling it early really limits where it can go."