Fall Out Boy drops into town Saturday night for concert
“I can’t imagine going to, like, China on a record that’s just fine.”
Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz is explaining why he and his bandmates hit restart on “Mania,” the much-anticipated followup to “American Beauty/American Psycho,” their second consecutive chart-topping album.
“I mean, I guess you could,” he says. “But I just can’t imagine looking in the mirror and feeling great about it. And I think a Fall Out Boy record in 2017 can kind of be anything just because the parameters are pretty vast. But ‘fine’ or ‘mediocre’ is the one place I just don’t think you can go. Like, I don’t think that’s gonna turn out well.”
And what’s weird is the album got off to a promising start when singer Patrick Stump came in with “Young and Menace,” the lead single they released in April.
“I think of our last two albums as kind of one big record cycle because we made them so backto-back,” Wentz says.
“And when Patrick played me the song ‘Young and Menace,’ it was like, ‘This feels important, this feels different. It feels like a little bit of a shock and a palate cleanse.’ So we put that out and basically put ourselves on the clock as far as making an album.”
They were four or five songs deep in the creative process, Stump assuming Wentz was really
liking where the songs were headed, Wentz assuming much the same of Stump’s reaction.
Then they talked. And as it turns out, neither one of them was loving it. Nor was guitarist Joe Trohman or drummer Andy Hurley.
That’s when they decided it was time to make a fresh start.
“And in doing that,” Wentz says, “we got back in with a couple producers, like Butch Walker, who we had worked with before. We started working with Dave Sardy, so we had this grunge guitar sound on some of the songs that he really nailed. We worked with this producer Illangelo on ‘The Last of the Real Ones.’ ”
In the end, he says, it offered the bandmates a bit of a different perspective. “So I think the record will be quintessentially different than the last two records sonically.”
Restarting the songwriting process also allowed them to come at the lyrics from a fresh perspective.
“I think the lyrics kind of address the subtle neuroses we all have that make us part of humanity,” Wentz says, “or feelings that we probably couldn’t have tapped into in our 20s just because you’re a little more present when you get older.”
As to whether the not-necessarilysubtle neuroses of our political climate had an impact on the lyrics, Wentz says, “I think they did. Somewhat. But someone was asking me the other day, ‘Is this your “American Idiot?” ’ And it’s not. Because I think ‘American Idiot’ was super-important and it was kind of in a weird way, like, a lone dissenting voice.”
Now, Wentz says, “we’re in a different time where there’s so many hot takes, you know what I mean? You can read ‘em all day. It’s almost to the point where it’s fatiguing for people, I think.”
There’s also the very real danger that you’re preaching to the choir, where as Wentz says, “it’s like, ‘well, these people all sort of agree anyway. And I don’t know how to reach people who don’t.’ “
Wentz has been feeling that way since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
“I was like, ‘Well, if this doesn’t force us to have hard conversations and make changes, I just don’t know that there’s anything that will,’” he says. “I have an eight-year-old. I see his friends and hear them talk, and I’m like, ‘That’s the future, that’s the change to me.’ So that’s who this record is for. That’s who I want to talk to.”
He’s not saying “Mania” was made for 8-year-olds.
“The record is being consumed by people probably 15-30,” he says with a laugh. “Or whatever. I just wanted to feel like there’s moments of levity on the record. And I mean levity in the way that you’re like, ‘I can’t believe we’re all part of this thing. It’s so f—king insane. And how did we get here as a culture?’ ”
They’re not shoving their political ideals down anybody’s throat, he says. “But I think the personal can be pretty political. If you’re a compassionate, empathetic person, then that’s gonna be portrayed in what you project into the world. And if you’re not, then that’ll probably be portrayed in what you project into the world, too.”
They called the album “Mania,” he says, because we live in manic times.
“People think of mania as the opposite of depression and it really isn’t, to me,” Wentz says. “It’s this feeling of happiness that turns into elation that consumes you. You stop sleeping. You get paranoid. It’s like a massive wave that you can’t stop. Even if you can stop part of it, the wave is so big. And the time we live in, It feels pretty manic.”
The album was originally scheduled for release in mid-September. The new, improved edition hits the streets on Jan. 19. In the meantime, they’ve released three singles, causing a bit of a stir when when they tested the waters with “Young and Menace,” a bit of a sonic departure.
Wentz says they knew going in that it would be a polarizing choice and he was fine with that. “There’s nothing worse,” he says, “than when people just don’t have an opinion, where it’s like, ‘I don’t know. It’s just, like, fine.’ ”
So is that why they shared it first? “Um, honestly?,” he says, “It was the only song we had done at the time. And I was like, ‘I’m sure it will be polarizing.’ But I think it was more like when you’re smelling perfumes and you smell the coffee grounds in between? I think that’s, like, the coffee grounds. A chance to restart.”
The lyrics to “Young and Menace” were inspired by memories of growing up in the Chicago suburbs, feeling like he didn’t fit in anywhere until he found a foster home with other misfits on the punk scene.
One of the things that really drew him to that scene, he says, “is that it was a bunch of outsiders who kind of came together because they didn’t fit anywhere else.”
He liked that sense of inclusivity, he says. “And I liked that we were talking about broader issues. Even though you’re, like, a 15-year-old kid, it was important to be thinking about things outside of who you were or what class you were going to.”
Having found that sense of personal identity and acceptance in the punk scene, Fall Out Boy’s career for several years now has been based on expanding the boundaries of what a band that came up through that punk community can get away with.
“To me, the most punk-rock thing Fall Out Boy could do is put out ‘Young and Menace’ or put a song like ‘Uma Thurman’ on pop radio two years ago,” Wentz says.
“I think about it in the way that rock and roll or punk rock was always subversive, always dangerous and it evolved. And for some people, it just stopped evolving. It was just like, ‘This is what it looks like. These are the haircuts.’ And to me, it’s not. To me, Kanye West is punk rock. And Skrillex is rock and roll.”
Punk and rock and roll, he says, “should evolve and adapt and keep being dangerous. Thus our attempts at doing that. It’s like an art project. So it’s experimental. But it’s always gonna be stuff that’s authentic to us. And I think that’s the important part. Doing things we like and working with people that we think are interesting and cool.”