For Fall Out Boy, evolving sound is true constant
Every artist faces a variation of the same challenge: How do you evolve while not changing so radically you lose your audience? Fall Out Boy bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz knows this test well.
“You stay the same and some people complain about it; you change and some people complain about it,” Wentz said, then laughed. “But everyone’s entry point to the band is different so each album’s sound is someone’s favorite Fall Out Boy sound. To me, the funniest thing is that with every record we put out, we have changed, and still people ask, ‘Why don’t you just keep sounding like the last record?’”
Wentz is preparing hear the question again. In early to 2018, Fall Out Boy plans to release its seventh album, “Mania.” In the meantime, the Chicago band headlines a massive arena tour — the trek stops Friday at TD Garden.
Originally, this tour was meant to support “Mania,” which had been planned as a September release. But the album was pushed back when Wentz and the band decided they didn’t like it that much.
“I can’t look at my 9-year-old and my 3-yearold and tell them I’m going on a three-week tour of
Asia on a record that I don’t believe in at all,” Wentz said. “That doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel great to push a record back, but at the same time, if someone told me they have an OK version of something and they can make an amazing version of it if I give them three months, I’m going to give them that time.”
Fall Out Boy has released three new songs this year, “Young and Menace,” “Champion” and “The Last of the Real Ones,” radically different tunes that incorporate everything from punk to pop, EDM blips to hip-hop beats. All of them will make the set list, plus another, as-of-yet-unnamed new track. But while the band puts the final touches on “Mania,” it’ll play plenty of hits on this leg of the tour.
“We need to mess with things a little bit to keep it fun for us and still play stuff for everyone,” he said. “We’ll be doing different versions of songs, we’ll do some acoustic things, we’ll do a different incarnation of ‘Young and Menace.’ Just as we have to love a record to put it out, we have to love a set to play it.”
The tour will be a balancing act between evolving and doing what people expect (and love). Wentz’s hope is that the new album will pull off the same trick.
“For us, if we’re going to turn out the same record over and over again, it’s just not worth it,” he said. “But if you liked what you heard with the new stuff, then you can expect the sound to be somewhere in the middle of those songs. Hopefully, ‘Mania’ is a change, but one where people can hear our past in it.”