Songfacts®:

• The song title is taken from the name of a previous solo experimental album by frontman Jim Adkins called Go Big Casino. Some Go Big Casino songs have later appeared on Jimmy Eat World albums, including "Hear You Me," "My Sundown" and from their Chase This Light album, "Carry You."
• The band's frontman Jim Adkins comments on this song on flaglive.com: "It is basically a loser's anthem. I picture a burnt out musician who moved to Vegas to work, but is holding on to the dream of a life that just gets farther away. The song is basically that character sitting down and telling an up-and-coming rocker 'how it is.'"
• Ultimate-guitar.com asked Adkins who came up with the idea of this song. He replied: "I think overall there are no real rules for how we work on tunes. There is really no set way that a Jimmy Eat world song comes into existence. I think that there hasn't been an actual Jimmy Eat World song written since 1996! There is no consideration for how it's going to end up or where it's going to end up. It's really just about the song and what we think the song needs. Much later we get to a point where we can decide if it's going on an album or not, or if it's going in the don't-open-until-Christmas pile!
  
  For 'Big Casino,' everything starts as an experimentation and then a reaction to that. Like there's a guitar riff or something simple, and then it just kind of expands from there. Or there's a drum pattern or something, and then it kind of expands from there, usually with the first thing being something that is experimental or a mistake or maybe playing an instrument you don't normally play. A lot of the songs start out with me playing drums, making a loop or something, and then playing guitar along with that."
• Chase This Light was recorded in a makeshift studio space in a Tempe, Arizona, warehouse. Adkins told Performing Songwriter: "It's a very non-traditional studio setup. There's no control room. There's a couple of isolation rooms, but we use those for amplifiers most of the time. There's a garage section where we park our van [laughs]."
• Working out of a warehouse had its challenges, like dealing with sudden sounds of planes flying overhead from the nearby airport or cars rumbling down the alleyway that ran alongside the building. "The thing is, it doesn't matter," Adkins said of the daily cacophony. "In deciding to work there, we let go of the notion that you should spend so much time tweaking and not enough time worrying about whether the song is any good. We definitely had an idea of what we wanted to do, and [producer] Butch Vig was down with that. Everything about the process was geared toward fun rather than sweating over stuff too much."