Fall Out Boy: 'Rock 'n' Roll Needs to Be Saved From the Old Folks' Home'

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In an era when rock music barely sells anymore and pop, country, and hip-hop dominate the charts, Fall Out Boy are an anomaly. They’re pretty much the band every talent booker has on speed-dial when there’s a need to fill the token rock spot on any awards show, and even after taking a risky five-year break between albums, Fall Out Boy were able to triumphantly return with 2013’s brazenly titled Save Rock and Roll and pick up right where they left off.

Now Fall Out Boy have released the remix collection Make America Psycho Again – a companion piece to this year’s American Beauty/American Psycho album – which features appearances by Wiz Khalifa, ASAP Ferg, Juicy J, Azealia Banks, Black Thought, Migos, Joey Badass, and others. And when the group’s Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz recently sat down with Yahoo Music, they explained that it’s their willingness to experiment like this and embrace change that has contributed to their longevity and kept them from turning into “dinosaurs.”

(photo: Reuters)

YAHOO MUSIC: When Fall Out Boy first got back together, you put out an album called Save Rock and Roll. Do you think rock can be saved? Can you save it?

PATRICK STUMP: I don’t know if we can save rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t know if that’s even the point. I think the thing is, rock 'n’ roll needs to be saved from the old folks’ home. It needs to be saved from being a vision of the past. It needs to accept that there is a future, and it needs to relate to the future.

PETE WENTZ: Yeah, it needs to include Skrillex and Kanye West, and these ideas that are interesting and don’t fit into the normal equivalent of, like, dads at Guitar Center.

STUMP: And it should be uncomfortable and piss you off. That’s the point!

WENTZ: That’s the great part about doing Fall Out Boy now, is we’re able to say, “We’ll just do this remix album and have a bunch of cool hip-hop artists on it.”

YAHOO MUSIC: So few rock bands have any mainstream success nowadays, and you’re still doing so well. To what do you attribute your longevity?

WENTZ: Something to be said for being around is just being around. You look at a band like the Rolling Stones or something, and it’s like, they just stayed the longest. I think about that with Metallica and bands like that. You [need to] stay around, and you keep doing new things – challenging things.

STUMP: It’s really underrated to experiment. I think a lot of bands just forget that. But you know, they call it “playing.” Playing music. It should be play; it should be fun. It shouldn’t be this thing that’s set in stone that you clock in for. I don’t know if that’s why we’re still here, but I do know that that’s one of the only ways that we can still function doing it.

YAHOO MUSIC: You say just sticking around is a big part of longevity, and yet Fall Out Boy did go away for several years…

WENTZ: Ah, yes. A cautionary tale of contradictions!

STUMP: Right. “Never go away – except for like, three-ish years.”

WENTZ: Honestly, the truth about that is if we hadn’t taken time off, we would have imploded, I think. It would have been the actual end of the band.

STUMP: We were stressed and kind of overwhelmed. When you put it in perspective, we were this dorky little band from Chicago. We were all college-age, and you know, that was the era of TRL on MTV and stuff, and we were on Rolling Stone; it was this really big thing. It’s hard to maintain a sense of yourself and know who you are when there’s so much of that background noise.

WENTZ: [Being in a band is like] you’re in a submarine for years with four dudes. It’s like you’re on a desert island, and it’s hard not to see your friend as a steak. You know what I’m saying? Like the cartoon steak.

YAHOO MUSIC: So when you came back after your hiatus, weren’t you worried that you would not be able to recapture your past success?

WENTZ: I think in some ways we were freed, liberated, by the idea that the cult following would come back and it would be fine, whatever. We just didn’t have that expectation [that Fall Out Boy would be hugely successful again], and I think that really liberated us to make the record that we wanted to make.

STUMP: I was almost more scared that people were going to pay attention! Because I feel like that kind of attention can really detract from… the art of enjoying yourself and just being a band. Rock 'n’ roll should just be fun. You should express yourself as honestly as you want, but it should not be this absurd, heavy thing. It should be something that you enjoy doing.

WENTZ: Yeah, it’s like we had to learn how to have fun! Isn’t that insane?

YAHOO MUSIC: It seems like there’s been a recent resurgence of nostalgia for the emo heyday of the '90s and early-to-mid-2000s. How do you feel about that?

WENTZ: It’s interesting, talking about the nostalgia for the emo era or whatever. It may have been similar with hair metal – there’s a lot of people who just missed the era, but who are nostalgic for it. I kind of remember that with the '80s, with people who weren’t on the Sunset Strip but wanted to inject that into their life.

STUMP: It’s a tough one… You still think of the word around us, the “emo” thing, but it was never a good way to describe us. So I’m not so nostalgic for the era, partially because I didn’t feel like we were part of it, really.

WENTZ: We, like, listened to rappers, you know? We were on Jay Z’s label, getting Roc-A-Fella chains…

STUMP: Wearing all-over-print hoodies and making bad fashion decisions.

WENTZ: I think when you’re nostalgic in a fun way, it’s great. When you’re nostalgic like “Those were the best years!” and you’re, like, a bald high school quarterback, that’s when it gets a little crazy to me. Or when you refuse to admit that there’s good music that comes out now. That’s when it’s not as healthy to me.

STUMP: Any band that lasted a long time had to live down some sort of name like [“emo”]. Pearl Jam was a “grunge” band. The Who were a “mod” band…

WENTZ: Guns N’ Roses was a boy band…

YAHOO MUSIC: How do you feel about playing your old material now?

WENTZ: I’ve nothing but affection for those old songs. Those songs got us to where we are now. I feel the same way about skateboarding and fireworks when I was 15: I probably shouldn’t be doing those things right now, as a father, but I love that that existed in my life at one time.

YAHOO MUSIC: You seem so tight as a band now, but what was it like when you first got back together after your time apart?

STUMP: Getting in the room together after a few years was weird…

WENTZ: It’s like kissing someone that you haven’t kissed in a long time. It’s like, “Which way do I turn my head? Do we do tongues, or no?”

STUMP: It was crazy, because with the first run-through of the first song, all four of us were like, “Oh my God, we’re the worst band!” None of us remembered any of [the old material]. But it was really fun, really exciting to be back doing it, and by the third practice we were considerably better than we’d ever been.

WENTZ: We were like, “We’ll never be like that again! We’re gonna rehearse all the time!” And that lasted for literally one rehearsal.

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