Songfacts®:

• Jump, Little Children is an indie-rock band who released their major label debut, Magazine, in 1998. The album included the moody cello tune "Cathedrals," which received nationwide airplay and earned the band a following. According to frontman Jay Clifford, the song is about former bandmate Christopher Pollen, who left the group in 1993 to join a religious cult. He told Songfacts the story in a 2022 interview:
  
  "He was Catholic. He had some real difficulties functioning within normal society. He had a very unhealthy relationship with himself, and a shattered relationship with his friends and his parents. Watching him devolve out of society into this smaller world of a cult is where the song 'Cathedrals' comes from. The idea that you can walk through these gothic cathedrals and feel a sense of awe but also feel intimidation, an institutional ominousness that makes you want to figure out where you fit in.
  
  Watching him go through this desperate journey to find where he fits into this world is where that song came from. It was a strange kind of reverse metamorphosis to watch him sort of drink this poison. This ideology that backed him out of relationships and a healthy life in the normal world. It was a really difficult thing to watch."
• The band formed in 1991 after its members met at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They started out playing Irish music and even traveled to Ireland in the winter of 1992 to hone their craft. Not long after coming back home and spending a fruitful summer in Charleston, South Carolina, they decided to relocate to Boston for six months because "there's more Irish people in Boston than there are in Ireland."
  
  They issued a self-titled cassette that featured a mix of original songs and traditional Irish tunes, but really started to gain traction when they incorporated alternative rock into their sound and started regularly touring throughout the Southeast. After releasing the live EP Buzz in 1997, they caught the attention of several record labels and opted to sign with Breaking Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic founded by Hootie & The Blowfish.
• The band takes its name from a blues tune written by Leroy Dallas and popularly covered by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, a blues duo from North Carolina. "They'd play a lot of the tobacco barns back in the early part of the 20th century," Clifford told Songfacts. "It's amazing stuff. Acoustic guitar, blues, and harmonica. And they have a song called 'Jump, Little Children.' The central idea is that mama and papa are gone, so let's just have fun."
• This was used on the TV series Everwood ("Home" - 2003) and The Society ("Our Town" - 2019).