14 Things We Learned on the Road With Fall Out Boy
Though it may be hard to believe, 10 years have passed since Fall Out Boy first landed on the pop charts with “Sugar, We’re Going Down.” It was a time of MySpace, Pretty Ricky and Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Those things are pretty much gone and forgotten, but Fall Out Boy have a new song, “Centuries,” rising up the Top 20, currently sandwiched between hits by Nicki Minaj and Selena Gomez. It’s a remarkable comeback for a band dismissed as dead and buried just a few years ago.
Last month, we spent the day with the group as it drove across Florida – from Jacksonville to St. Petersburg – in an SUV caravan during a marathon tour of radio station festivals. We wrote about the experience in the new issue of Rolling Stone, but here are 14 additional things we learned while reporting the story.
1. They share all band money equally.
“Real early on we decided that, regardless of who wrote what, we’d split everything four ways,” says Patrick Stump. “There are records where I’ve done a whole song or Joe [Trohman] has written an entire music bed, but we all get the same credit. If there’s four of us onstage, the four of us are receiving the same amount of credit, the same amount of money and the same amount of everything.”
Many of their friends in other bands were shocked when they learned of the arrangement. “They were like, “Are you guys crazy?'” says Stump. ‘You do all the writing!’ And all those bands are broken up, every single one of them.”
2. Their new song “Uma Thurman” required the approval of the real Uma Thurman.
“At lot has changed since Outkast released ‘Rosa Parks,'” says Pete Wentz. “We might have been able to get away with it under parody law, but we don’t know many lawyers. We do have a ragtag bunch of friends and someone was able to get it right to her and explain the vibe.” This still makes Stump crack up. “That’s just so crazy to me,” he says. “I can’t even imagine what she was saying when she heard it.”
3. Don’t expect them to pull a Taylor Swift and yank their catalog off Spotify.
“I get so tired of people saying, ‘Oh, this is hurting the industry’ or complaining about whatever the new boogie man is this year,” says Stump. “People always think that whatever the new future is will put them in the poor house. I always hear these arguments and this anger and this vitriol, and I’m like, ‘That’s just bullshit! You’re just pretending that you didn’t record the radio when you were a kid.’ There were always different avenues of getting music. We still bought records. We still went to shows. People that care still care. I don’t think streaming has hurt anything, and I’ve discovered a lot of great bands that way.”
“I spent my twenties as literally the most selfish person that I know” — Pete Wentz
Pete Wentz completely agrees. “If you’re going to deny those things exist and pretend you live in a vacuum, then you’re the guy who’s on the other side of the Roman Empire that hasn’t heard it’s all over yet,” he says. “It’s just antiquated. If you pull music off streaming, the kids are on YouTube. That’s how a lot of people are consuming music. We should be a part of it, though the bigger artists need to speak out to make it equitable for smaller artists. The longer you hold onto the past the further the future moves away from you when you need to jump onto it. You’re going from life raft to life raft instead of building a bridge, or even a fucking airplane.”
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