Pete Wentz Q&A: Why Fall Out Boy’s Reunion Needed To Be A Secret | Billboard
By Jason Lipshutz, New York | April 16, 2013 2:20 PM EDT
“I can’t imagine trying to make an album after making the announcement,” the FOB bassist tells Billboard.
“What if the Smiths got back together? How would I want it to go down?” Fall Out Boy bassist and main songwriter Pete Wentz asks rhetorically. “I’d want a song right away, shows right away … ‘And by the way, they’ve already recorded the album.’ The whole time you thought they were secretly meeting, they were secretly meeting. How crazy would that be?”
When you were promoting Fall Out Boy’s last album, “Folie a Deux,” in 2009, no one in the group looked happy to be onstage together. How were you guys feeling during that last album cycle?
I think we were all burned out. We had been doing seven or eight years straight of promo, record, tour, and not ever taking a break. Communication had broken down. It’s at the point, like, when you’re playing sports where the mechanics start to go, the basic shit. We weren’t talking to each other, we were talking through managers, not speaking up to each other. I mean, I was 21 or 22 when this band started. Patrick and Joe were out of high school — they never really had been adults without Fall Out Boy. At the time, I think it was really hard. I definitely had a hard time with it when it happened, and I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person, so it felt like it was done to me. I don’t know, I guess it was the right time [to take a break].
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At what point did that turn into considering a reunion?
Me and Patrick, we always write together. I called him up to write and we wrote three or four songs, and it’s like, these aren’t Fall Out Boy songs. I don’t know what they are — it just wasn’t right and didn’t feel right. Then Patrick hit me up to write, and I was definitely always open to it, but the songs were really cool and seemed compelling and different and they did feel like Fall Out Boy songs, so we sent them to everybody. And we decided we were going to go and have a meeting, and this was probably a year and a half ahead of us making the announcement. We went to New York and had an all-day meeting, where we laid out what the ideas were and the way things would have to work and the mechanics. Some of it was real simple as far as getting into the studio and working together, but keeping [tour] dates around the world quiet… at some point, Fall Out Boy is a little bit of a big machine, and it takes a little bit to get it going. And to get it going and not have anyone talk about it is pretty crazy.
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