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corbaeHey! I've transcribed the article from the new issue of Rock Sound. Scans can be found at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icecreamhdaches. I've left their grammar and spelling unchanged.
This ain't a scene, it's a pap's race
Despite the offer to spend 48 hours in Los Angeles with Fall Out Boy, Rock Sound feel aggravated and disconsolate. Why? Two words: Air France. After 11 hours of suffering at the hands of the French transatlantic farce, Rock Sound land in the city of angels utterly lagged and completely over the lifestyle of a journalist (despite its many perks and benefits). Transfer and check-in at the Standard Hotel on the once decadent, but now desperate, Sunset Strip is achieved by 10:30pm and Rock Sound can think of nothing other than food and sleep. Then Andy Hurley calls. Thirty minutes later a BMW M3 rolls up outside the hotel with the bearded Fall Out Boy drummer in the driving seat. Sleep is overrated.
Hurley takes Rock Sound to a vegan restaurant just outside of Hollywood and it’s here the catch up begins. The last time we were together was in November 07, the band’s final US headline tour. The band were miserable. “Yeah, it was suicide or break then,” Hurley admits laughing. “It was getting bad. It had been non-stop for six years; we were always either touring or recording and we never got to unwind and sit at home. It had started to feel like work by that last tour.”
After that tour the band took time off, went to ground and put Fall Out Boy to the bottom of their lists. Hurley went back to his palatial spread in Milwaukee (known affectionately as Fuck City) and hung out with his touring musician housemates. “Even after Christmas we were still busy every other week, but we started to decompress for real for the first time in quite a while,” he remembers. “I was hanging out at home in Fuck City, all of the Misery Signals dudes got home in May and it became one of the greatest summers of my life. We ended up doing a bunch of projects together for fun, hanging out and partying everyday. It was the first time in my life that I have felt like these are the best days.”
Hurley and his fellow residents spent the summer writing songs for any of the 10 side-projects that exist between the members of the house, while Hurley also started collecting ideas for a comic he hopes to write in the coming months. Oh, and he also attended his bassist’s wedding. “That was awesome,” he states emphatically. “Being an insider, I really believe in their marriage and in their love. It is honestly the best thing that has happened to Pete. Ever. He’s the happiest he has ever been, we get along better than ever and the band is doing great. I think a lot of that hinges on Pete’s happiness.”
After dinner and several extended discussions on the work of Simon Pegg, Cristiano Ronaldo and Fran Healy of Travis (who is friendly with the drummer), Hurley eventually drops Rock Sound back at the hotel as the clock nears 3am. He has a 25-minute drive back to the hills, where he is currently residing in Pete’s old house. Once he’s there he has to pack as tomorrow he leaves Los Angeles and flies to the Bahamas for his first holiday in nearly six years. All of this would be absolutely fine, but the band photoshoot is scheduled to start at 8:45am the following morning. Rock Sound doubts the schedule is going to hold.
The following morning a phone call confirms the already obvious: the Rock Sound shoot that was due to start in the afternoon will now be starting in the evening. As a result, the day is spent poolside observing the absurdity of the hotel’s guests. Rock Sound snapper Nigel Crane adds to the stupidity by insisting on only drinking Strawberry daiquiris when in the hotel’s bar. Hollywood truly is a disease, not a place. At 7:04pm, Rock Sound arrive at Smashbox studios where approximately 40 people are working on three different sets for new promotional shots of the band. One set is in a dirty corner of the room and filled with toy rabbits, another has a 50’s election podium and the third looks like a room of worn leather La-Z-Boy chairs. After the shoots conclude the band switch their attention to a television commercial of Rock The Vote. A crew of 15 quickly rattle through the script and then, as 9:30pm approaches, the spotlight finally falls on Rock Sound – with a crew total of two.
By this point, the band have been at the studio for nearly 13 hours and delirium has set in. Hurley is shot first so he can leave for his flight, and Trohman often leaves the set for 10 minutes at a time, returning markedly lighter in spirit and redder in eye, while Wentz and Stump thinly veil their lack of belief in the concept of the shoot with sarcastic jokes.
Rock Sound joins Trohman in his Smart car on one of his ‘breaks,’ and while bluesy metal cranks out of the speakers he confirms Hurley’s assertions that all was not well within the band.
“We all needed time apart,” the guitarist recalls. “We all pursued different stuff because we needed to. We needed to be reminded about how much we loved doing Fall Out Boy. It did eventually start to feel like work. It became daunting and we had to take time to refresh that.”
The guitarist recorded a boatload of riffs, spent time with his girlfriend and began to look for a place to live in New York, but he admits that giving each other space was a frightening prospect to begin with. “I think there was a nervousness about giving each other space to explore new ideas separately,” he continues. “However, by the end of our time off we had all started throwing around ideas for a new record and by July we were tracking.”
The band chose to work with Neal Avron again for this, their fourth major album release. “Neal is definitely the fifth member of Fall Out Boy,” the guitarist states. “There will never be a fifth member of this band but he is the candidate on top of the list if we ever change our mind. We didn’t meet with anyone before we started doing this record, we did the meetings with other producers before we started ‘…Cork Tree’ and that was such a cluster fuck, so many people just didn’t get what we were about. Working with Neal makes sense and makes me want to be better at what I do.” The band set about recording their new album with Avron, their favourite producer, almost two months ago, and have actively avoided telling the press about it. Whose idea was that? “Whose idea do you think it was?” replies Trohman with a grin. Ah, Wentz…
The following day Rock Sound head over to the studio where the band are recording in secret – as does Wentz. However, the difference is that a car of paparazzi follows him and not us. They sit at the bottom of his road on a public street and wait for him, or his pregnant wife, to leave the house. “If I put as much time into neuroscience as I do into losing photographers I’m sure I would be a doctor by now,” he admits laughing. For obvious reasons Rock Sound will not divulge his tactics of choice, but needless to say they are both effective and hilarious. Even when they are not, the intelligence of the average pap is astounding. When Wentz is unable to lose the chasing cameras they follow him to the gate of the studio, a gate that clearly states the name of where the band are recording. If any photographer were to Google the moniker the game would be up, but they don’t, so the band are still recording in absolute anonymity. At this point they have been here for over five weeks. “It is the most absurd culture on the planet,” the bassist continues. “There are over 500 paparazzi in LA serving these celeb worship / celeb defamation websites. Interestingly, it’s never about what a person did as an artist; it’s about a person’s proximity to other famous people. I think it has to end soon. It’s like when someone is blowing bubblegum and it gets so big that with a bit more air it’s going to smash over everyone’s face.”
Wentz is in this particular building three-and-a-half days a week. He spends the other day-and-a-half 20 minutes down the road at a sound stage in RenMar Studios presenting FNMTV. Despite the massive amount of time spent at this location no one seems close to rumbling him, and he is delighted. “It just reminds me of good stories,” admits Wentz grinning. “In The Empire Strikes Back Luke lost his hand and you genuinely didn’t know if he was coming back. I like the suspense of Pete going out to Starbucks every day, attending red carpet events, recording his TV show and making people wonder whether he even cares about his band anymore. I feel like, as an artist, I need to deliver a jolt of reality to people. In the summer that you thought I made a TV series and went to the dog park I actually helped make an album and spent nine hours a day working on Fall Out Boy songs. I love that everyone is actually missing the story. I think it is telling.” Two weeks after this interview and two weeks before this magazine comes out Wentz will deliver his ‘jolt’ and announce the album title and release date through an online marketing campaign.
So what is the album called? “’Folie à Deux’,” he remarks hesitantly. “It’s the madness of two, the psychological definition of what Romeo and Juliet had, or what some people think Blake and Amy have. It is when two people bring their neurosis together and it becomes something new and something only shared by those two. It nearly always ends in murder, murder suicide or suicide suicide.” We thought that you guys were happy? “We are, but it is an interesting idea,” Wentz continues. “I think everyone experiences it in some way, with friends, fans or within a relationship. It may not be playing Russian roulette together, but I definitely know that Patrick and I have a measure of this and our neurosis have combined over time.”
Despite the album being scheduled for release on November 04, the day America votes in its 56th presidential election and despite protestation otherwise, Wentz is aware that many will hear the title and assume the album is an ode to Mrs W. “I’m sure that could happen,” he admits disappointedly. “That is what gets the most views on the internet so I’m sure people will either confuse it accidentally or purposefully.”
With that, Wentz heads off to track parts, send texts, make calls and scheme – in that order. Due to the time constraints on this record, the band are tracking potential singles first to meet deadlines and enable promotion to begin on earnest while they complete the record. Song titles like ‘American’s Sweethearts’, ‘New Passports’ and ‘Does Your Husband Know?’ are tossed around as shorthand for tracks that are being created while Rock Sound sit in the lounge above Studio T. As tracking continues Rock Sound get a brief listen to the three songs in their varying stages of completion; they all have the essence of classic Fall Out Boy, but the blend is certainly different. More direct, more pop, yet more reliant on strong guitar parts at the same time. If the remaining songs follow this trajectory then the album will certainly continue to excite, appal and confuse in equal measure.
Rock Sound sit and wait for guitarist, vocalist and arranger extraordinaire Patrick Stump. This interview was scheduled to take place three weeks ago when six major publications were scheduled to visit the band in the studio. However, after one irate phone call by Stump to their management all press was cancelled. To date, Rock Sound has the only feature that has been rescheduled. “At the moment I get furious about doing anything other than working here,” Stump admits when Rock Sound catches him later in the afternoon. “I have no tolerance for anything right now. I flip out all the time about things that take me away from creating this album. I suppose this is the most eccentric I’ve ever been on record.” Stump is taking this record incredibly seriously and with only Hurley’s drum parts fully recorded there is a lot to do and little time to do it in. “I would be taking this record just as seriously if we hadn’t been signed by Fueled By Ramen or anyone else,” he says. “I want to promote the record, but I want to know that I’ll love the record I’m promoting before I talk, that is why I cancelled the press. I don’t give a shit otherwise, there is no incentive, you can’t pay me enough, that doesn’t move me at all. I know this about myself. Even when I was starving, and I was, I was not prepared to compromise when doing something that mattered this much.”
And ‘Folie à Deux’ does matter. It has only been created by the urge to write something important. If that urge hadn’t been there then Stump wouldn’t be here. “At this point in my life I have more money than I ever wanted, needed, cared to have or imagined I’d have,” Stump admits honestly. “I don’t particularly want to be famous and I’ve put out three records that I’m proud of. It would be a great time to pack it in and relax were it not for the need to put out something great.”
Stump had 60 songs demoed at the beginning of May, but no one could identify the single. “It was very scary,” he acknowledges. “It suggested that we had a really good record or the worst thing we have ever made. I’m a total pessimist so I thought we were doomed.” To sort through the songs, Stump created a criteria of what each song had to do to qualify for inclusion on the record. “I actually wrote the list down,” Stump concedes. “Each song had to have a cool factor and work on a purely visceral level, each song had to have cohesion between the lyric and music and each song had to say something and have a distinct purpose and reason for being there.”
The band’s album has so much forethought and deliberateness running through it that after a bit of nudging Stump finally gives in. “There is a concept to this album artistically,” he admits before swiftly adding. “It is not a concept album of wizards and Orcs, I can safely say there is no Orc blood being spilled, but it does have a tight concept as to why these songs are put together on an album rather than just put out as singles.”
With that Stump heads back to the mixing room and Rock Sound is left with a set of clues. The album title is a nod to the lover’s psychosis, it will be released on election day in the US, the songs are conceptually bound, yet do not create a concept and the songs have to be immediate, while having a distinct purpose. Any ideas as to what this record if going to finally sound like? No, us neither…
Fall Out Boy tour the UK in October; see gig guide for dates.
www.falloutboyrock.com
Inset:
Wedding Cells
On May 17, Pete Wentz married fiancée Ashlee Simpson at her parent’s home in Encino, Los Angeles, and according to the groom it was a beautiful (but strange) day: “It is so much more insane to plan a wedding when you know that every section has to be tented because otherwise a helicopter will be filming you,” Wentz admits. “There was a metal detector at our wedding and all of the guests had to go through it, but here’s the thing, I think everyone should implement a no cell phone rule at their wedding. One of the greatest things about it was that people actually had conversations with each other.
Rock Sound’s offer of 100 quid, a free subscription and a copy of the new Suicide Silence album was trumped by People magazine’s estimated $1,000,000 payment for exclusive pictures of the event.
icecreamhdaches. I've left their grammar and spelling unchanged.Despite the offer to spend 48 hours in Los Angeles with Fall Out Boy, Rock Sound feel aggravated and disconsolate. Why? Two words: Air France. After 11 hours of suffering at the hands of the French transatlantic farce, Rock Sound land in the city of angels utterly lagged and completely over the lifestyle of a journalist (despite its many perks and benefits). Transfer and check-in at the Standard Hotel on the once decadent, but now desperate, Sunset Strip is achieved by 10:30pm and Rock Sound can think of nothing other than food and sleep. Then Andy Hurley calls. Thirty minutes later a BMW M3 rolls up outside the hotel with the bearded Fall Out Boy drummer in the driving seat. Sleep is overrated.
Hurley takes Rock Sound to a vegan restaurant just outside of Hollywood and it’s here the catch up begins. The last time we were together was in November 07, the band’s final US headline tour. The band were miserable. “Yeah, it was suicide or break then,” Hurley admits laughing. “It was getting bad. It had been non-stop for six years; we were always either touring or recording and we never got to unwind and sit at home. It had started to feel like work by that last tour.”
After that tour the band took time off, went to ground and put Fall Out Boy to the bottom of their lists. Hurley went back to his palatial spread in Milwaukee (known affectionately as Fuck City) and hung out with his touring musician housemates. “Even after Christmas we were still busy every other week, but we started to decompress for real for the first time in quite a while,” he remembers. “I was hanging out at home in Fuck City, all of the Misery Signals dudes got home in May and it became one of the greatest summers of my life. We ended up doing a bunch of projects together for fun, hanging out and partying everyday. It was the first time in my life that I have felt like these are the best days.”
Hurley and his fellow residents spent the summer writing songs for any of the 10 side-projects that exist between the members of the house, while Hurley also started collecting ideas for a comic he hopes to write in the coming months. Oh, and he also attended his bassist’s wedding. “That was awesome,” he states emphatically. “Being an insider, I really believe in their marriage and in their love. It is honestly the best thing that has happened to Pete. Ever. He’s the happiest he has ever been, we get along better than ever and the band is doing great. I think a lot of that hinges on Pete’s happiness.”
After dinner and several extended discussions on the work of Simon Pegg, Cristiano Ronaldo and Fran Healy of Travis (who is friendly with the drummer), Hurley eventually drops Rock Sound back at the hotel as the clock nears 3am. He has a 25-minute drive back to the hills, where he is currently residing in Pete’s old house. Once he’s there he has to pack as tomorrow he leaves Los Angeles and flies to the Bahamas for his first holiday in nearly six years. All of this would be absolutely fine, but the band photoshoot is scheduled to start at 8:45am the following morning. Rock Sound doubts the schedule is going to hold.
The following morning a phone call confirms the already obvious: the Rock Sound shoot that was due to start in the afternoon will now be starting in the evening. As a result, the day is spent poolside observing the absurdity of the hotel’s guests. Rock Sound snapper Nigel Crane adds to the stupidity by insisting on only drinking Strawberry daiquiris when in the hotel’s bar. Hollywood truly is a disease, not a place. At 7:04pm, Rock Sound arrive at Smashbox studios where approximately 40 people are working on three different sets for new promotional shots of the band. One set is in a dirty corner of the room and filled with toy rabbits, another has a 50’s election podium and the third looks like a room of worn leather La-Z-Boy chairs. After the shoots conclude the band switch their attention to a television commercial of Rock The Vote. A crew of 15 quickly rattle through the script and then, as 9:30pm approaches, the spotlight finally falls on Rock Sound – with a crew total of two.
By this point, the band have been at the studio for nearly 13 hours and delirium has set in. Hurley is shot first so he can leave for his flight, and Trohman often leaves the set for 10 minutes at a time, returning markedly lighter in spirit and redder in eye, while Wentz and Stump thinly veil their lack of belief in the concept of the shoot with sarcastic jokes.
Rock Sound joins Trohman in his Smart car on one of his ‘breaks,’ and while bluesy metal cranks out of the speakers he confirms Hurley’s assertions that all was not well within the band.
“We all needed time apart,” the guitarist recalls. “We all pursued different stuff because we needed to. We needed to be reminded about how much we loved doing Fall Out Boy. It did eventually start to feel like work. It became daunting and we had to take time to refresh that.”
The guitarist recorded a boatload of riffs, spent time with his girlfriend and began to look for a place to live in New York, but he admits that giving each other space was a frightening prospect to begin with. “I think there was a nervousness about giving each other space to explore new ideas separately,” he continues. “However, by the end of our time off we had all started throwing around ideas for a new record and by July we were tracking.”
The band chose to work with Neal Avron again for this, their fourth major album release. “Neal is definitely the fifth member of Fall Out Boy,” the guitarist states. “There will never be a fifth member of this band but he is the candidate on top of the list if we ever change our mind. We didn’t meet with anyone before we started doing this record, we did the meetings with other producers before we started ‘…Cork Tree’ and that was such a cluster fuck, so many people just didn’t get what we were about. Working with Neal makes sense and makes me want to be better at what I do.” The band set about recording their new album with Avron, their favourite producer, almost two months ago, and have actively avoided telling the press about it. Whose idea was that? “Whose idea do you think it was?” replies Trohman with a grin. Ah, Wentz…
The following day Rock Sound head over to the studio where the band are recording in secret – as does Wentz. However, the difference is that a car of paparazzi follows him and not us. They sit at the bottom of his road on a public street and wait for him, or his pregnant wife, to leave the house. “If I put as much time into neuroscience as I do into losing photographers I’m sure I would be a doctor by now,” he admits laughing. For obvious reasons Rock Sound will not divulge his tactics of choice, but needless to say they are both effective and hilarious. Even when they are not, the intelligence of the average pap is astounding. When Wentz is unable to lose the chasing cameras they follow him to the gate of the studio, a gate that clearly states the name of where the band are recording. If any photographer were to Google the moniker the game would be up, but they don’t, so the band are still recording in absolute anonymity. At this point they have been here for over five weeks. “It is the most absurd culture on the planet,” the bassist continues. “There are over 500 paparazzi in LA serving these celeb worship / celeb defamation websites. Interestingly, it’s never about what a person did as an artist; it’s about a person’s proximity to other famous people. I think it has to end soon. It’s like when someone is blowing bubblegum and it gets so big that with a bit more air it’s going to smash over everyone’s face.”
Wentz is in this particular building three-and-a-half days a week. He spends the other day-and-a-half 20 minutes down the road at a sound stage in RenMar Studios presenting FNMTV. Despite the massive amount of time spent at this location no one seems close to rumbling him, and he is delighted. “It just reminds me of good stories,” admits Wentz grinning. “In The Empire Strikes Back Luke lost his hand and you genuinely didn’t know if he was coming back. I like the suspense of Pete going out to Starbucks every day, attending red carpet events, recording his TV show and making people wonder whether he even cares about his band anymore. I feel like, as an artist, I need to deliver a jolt of reality to people. In the summer that you thought I made a TV series and went to the dog park I actually helped make an album and spent nine hours a day working on Fall Out Boy songs. I love that everyone is actually missing the story. I think it is telling.” Two weeks after this interview and two weeks before this magazine comes out Wentz will deliver his ‘jolt’ and announce the album title and release date through an online marketing campaign.
So what is the album called? “’Folie à Deux’,” he remarks hesitantly. “It’s the madness of two, the psychological definition of what Romeo and Juliet had, or what some people think Blake and Amy have. It is when two people bring their neurosis together and it becomes something new and something only shared by those two. It nearly always ends in murder, murder suicide or suicide suicide.” We thought that you guys were happy? “We are, but it is an interesting idea,” Wentz continues. “I think everyone experiences it in some way, with friends, fans or within a relationship. It may not be playing Russian roulette together, but I definitely know that Patrick and I have a measure of this and our neurosis have combined over time.”
Despite the album being scheduled for release on November 04, the day America votes in its 56th presidential election and despite protestation otherwise, Wentz is aware that many will hear the title and assume the album is an ode to Mrs W. “I’m sure that could happen,” he admits disappointedly. “That is what gets the most views on the internet so I’m sure people will either confuse it accidentally or purposefully.”
With that, Wentz heads off to track parts, send texts, make calls and scheme – in that order. Due to the time constraints on this record, the band are tracking potential singles first to meet deadlines and enable promotion to begin on earnest while they complete the record. Song titles like ‘American’s Sweethearts’, ‘New Passports’ and ‘Does Your Husband Know?’ are tossed around as shorthand for tracks that are being created while Rock Sound sit in the lounge above Studio T. As tracking continues Rock Sound get a brief listen to the three songs in their varying stages of completion; they all have the essence of classic Fall Out Boy, but the blend is certainly different. More direct, more pop, yet more reliant on strong guitar parts at the same time. If the remaining songs follow this trajectory then the album will certainly continue to excite, appal and confuse in equal measure.
Rock Sound sit and wait for guitarist, vocalist and arranger extraordinaire Patrick Stump. This interview was scheduled to take place three weeks ago when six major publications were scheduled to visit the band in the studio. However, after one irate phone call by Stump to their management all press was cancelled. To date, Rock Sound has the only feature that has been rescheduled. “At the moment I get furious about doing anything other than working here,” Stump admits when Rock Sound catches him later in the afternoon. “I have no tolerance for anything right now. I flip out all the time about things that take me away from creating this album. I suppose this is the most eccentric I’ve ever been on record.” Stump is taking this record incredibly seriously and with only Hurley’s drum parts fully recorded there is a lot to do and little time to do it in. “I would be taking this record just as seriously if we hadn’t been signed by Fueled By Ramen or anyone else,” he says. “I want to promote the record, but I want to know that I’ll love the record I’m promoting before I talk, that is why I cancelled the press. I don’t give a shit otherwise, there is no incentive, you can’t pay me enough, that doesn’t move me at all. I know this about myself. Even when I was starving, and I was, I was not prepared to compromise when doing something that mattered this much.”
And ‘Folie à Deux’ does matter. It has only been created by the urge to write something important. If that urge hadn’t been there then Stump wouldn’t be here. “At this point in my life I have more money than I ever wanted, needed, cared to have or imagined I’d have,” Stump admits honestly. “I don’t particularly want to be famous and I’ve put out three records that I’m proud of. It would be a great time to pack it in and relax were it not for the need to put out something great.”
Stump had 60 songs demoed at the beginning of May, but no one could identify the single. “It was very scary,” he acknowledges. “It suggested that we had a really good record or the worst thing we have ever made. I’m a total pessimist so I thought we were doomed.” To sort through the songs, Stump created a criteria of what each song had to do to qualify for inclusion on the record. “I actually wrote the list down,” Stump concedes. “Each song had to have a cool factor and work on a purely visceral level, each song had to have cohesion between the lyric and music and each song had to say something and have a distinct purpose and reason for being there.”
The band’s album has so much forethought and deliberateness running through it that after a bit of nudging Stump finally gives in. “There is a concept to this album artistically,” he admits before swiftly adding. “It is not a concept album of wizards and Orcs, I can safely say there is no Orc blood being spilled, but it does have a tight concept as to why these songs are put together on an album rather than just put out as singles.”
With that Stump heads back to the mixing room and Rock Sound is left with a set of clues. The album title is a nod to the lover’s psychosis, it will be released on election day in the US, the songs are conceptually bound, yet do not create a concept and the songs have to be immediate, while having a distinct purpose. Any ideas as to what this record if going to finally sound like? No, us neither…
Fall Out Boy tour the UK in October; see gig guide for dates.
www.falloutboyrock.com
Inset:
Wedding Cells
On May 17, Pete Wentz married fiancée Ashlee Simpson at her parent’s home in Encino, Los Angeles, and according to the groom it was a beautiful (but strange) day: “It is so much more insane to plan a wedding when you know that every section has to be tented because otherwise a helicopter will be filming you,” Wentz admits. “There was a metal detector at our wedding and all of the guests had to go through it, but here’s the thing, I think everyone should implement a no cell phone rule at their wedding. One of the greatest things about it was that people actually had conversations with each other.
Rock Sound’s offer of 100 quid, a free subscription and a copy of the new Suicide Silence album was trumped by People magazine’s estimated $1,000,000 payment for exclusive pictures of the event.
