Hurley happy to come home to Milwaukee to play with Fall Out Boy
Since he’s the drummer for Fall Out Boy, you might think that Andy Hurley is one of Milwaukee’s most accomplished musical expats.
Except he didn’t completely leave. The Menomonee Falls native, 43, moved from his primary home on North Lake Drive in 2015, relocating to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Meredith. They married this past Valentine’s Day.
But Hurley still has a condo in Milwaukee, and makes it back to his old hometown a few times a year. And for about the past 13 years, he has taken part in the Polar Bear Plunge into Lake Michigan on New Year’s Day.
“It feels like a cool ritual to ring in the New Year,” Hurley told the Journal Sentinel over the phone. “It sets the intention that it can’t get worse. Then it’s only uphill from here.”
“I just love the city. It’s always just meant a lot to me,” Hurley added. “I always wanted to play Fiserv Forum since it’s opened. I think we’re finally doing it because I basically told our manager, ‘We’ve got to play Milwaukee this time.’”
Touring in support of ‘Stardust’
“This time” is Tuesday. The band’s first show at the Bucks arena is part of the second touring leg behind last year’s “So Much (for) Stardust,” Fall Out Boy’s first studio album in five years.
“So Much (for) Stardust” earned the band its best reviews since returning from a hiatus in 2013. It was a return to the more guitar-oriented, poppunk sound they introduced two decades prior on the band’s debut album “Take This to Your Grave,” recorded in part at Butch Vig and Steve Marker’s since-shuttered Smart Studios in Madison.
“It’s my favorite record of ours, the one I’m most proud of, something we couldn’t have done until now,” Hurley said of “So Much (for) Stardust.” “It was kind of a return in a way, but we didn’t want to retread and do anything we’ve done before. The approach was really to take everything we’ve learned in these 20 years and put all of that into one album. It was a really magical, organic process.”
And it wouldn’t have been possible, Hurley suggested, if he and his bandmates — frontman Patrick Stump, bassist Pete Wentz and guitarist Joe Trohman — didn’t still have a strong respect and admiration for each other.
Bandmates ‘all still best friends’
For most of his life, Hurley wanted to be in a band — he wrote as much in a sixth-grade assignment at Menomonee Falls North Middle School. Ultimately, he accomplished something greater than his childhood dream: He ended up in the rare rock band in which the core lineup, from first album to its latest 20 years later, remained intact.
“We are all still best friends,” Hurley said, saying they all recently went out to see “Dune: Part 2” together. “We still love each other and have fun playing together. … There is not jealousy, there is no ego driving us. …. We always include each other in decisions.”
“We have grown and evolved as musicians and friends and have different, wiser stories to tell,” he said.
On “Some Much (for) Stardust,” that includes first single “Love From the Other Side,” the last song the band recorded for the album, and the first song they’ve been playing on the current tour. The song features some of Hurley’s most intense drumming in all of the Fall Out Boy catalog.
“It kind of kicks the door open in a really fun, energetic way,” Hurley said.
‘Playing connects me to her’
The album also includes “Heaven, Iowa,” which is also on the new tour’s setlist. With lyrics like “They don’t know how much they’ll miss/At least until you’re gone like this,” Hurley said the song hits differently after his mother, Ann, died last year.
Hurley was on the road when she died, and he credits his bandmates and the crew for helping him with his loss. It’s similar to the grace and support they offered Trohman when he took a break for a few months last year to support his mental health.
“Playing connects me to her, and I think we all have something like that that inspires us and animates us,” Hurley said.
“It’s just too big to kind of fit in your head,” Hurley said of returning to Milwaukee to play Fiserv Forum. “It’s all a testament to my mom and how she raised me and who she made me as a person. … She enabled it all and pushed me to do what I love.”