Fall Out Boy: “When we get onstage, we as a band are still earning it. That’s exciting!”

For Pete, these 12 months of live music have also provided some similarly neat realisations about Fall Out Boy. And he’s just as blown away as his bandmate – even if his favourite memories from this chapter of the FOB story aren’t quite as wonderfully specific.

“Personally, I was really, really nervous about the tour – honestly, because it was all going so smooth and everybody seemed to be a part of it!” he admits. “Sometimes it’s easier, to me, when there’s a little polarisation. When it goes so smoothly, it terrifies me! I was like, ‘Do people like it? Are they gonna not like it tomorrow? What will the next thing be?’ That was a little scary for me.

“But there were moments where the thing genuinely felt bigger than just being in the room,” he adds, proudly. “And that’s what it felt like in 2005 [during FOB’s first breakthrough]. Feeling both of those feelings, and thinking back, and trying to remember what it was like and being different, and having lived all this life… it’s been a very cool feeling.”

And it’s getting bigger still. Kerrang! finds Pete and Patrick taking stock today in a rare window between massive gigs; tour may be over, but a first-time headline set at Download Festival awaits.

Despite some very brief downtime, though, it doesn’t go unnoticed that both are still happily working hard and taking care of behind-the-scenes business. And as well as enjoying Fall Out Boy’s current purple patch, Pete reveals that touring So Much (For) Stardust has benefitted them in other ways beyond general career stuff – something that’s evident as he and Patrick effortlessly bounce off each other in conversation, constantly laughing and even feeling comfortable enough to occasionally speak on the other’s behalf.

“I think doing the live show in the way that we have,” the bassist grins at one point in our interview, “has just kind of strengthened us as a band and our friendships, honestly.”

Which is a great thing. Because Fall Out Boy are as beloved as they’ve ever been, and very soon they’ll be crossing the pond to stand in the same spot as some of their heroes. To quote one of the band’s recent songs: what a time to be alive.

Then there’s their influence on so many other bands – particularly on the Download line-up. From Busted to the likes of NOAHFINNCE and The Hunna, they’ve made a seismic impact on those also playing various strands of rock, emo and pop-punk today.

So… does all this officially make Fall Out Boy elder statesmen now?

“It’s a matter of your perspective,” Pete replies with a big laugh – and an even bigger name-drop. “I play tennis with Dave Grohl, and I’m always looking to him as the elder statesman. But he’ll talk to me about Paul McCartney. I think it’s just a matter of what your perspective is.

“One of the beauties of our band forming in the suburbs of Chicago, and never being one of those bands who were listed on the ‘bands to watch!’ things, we honestly benefitted from that. It allowed us to be who we were, and kind of do weird things, musically. And so people could be like, ‘Well, why is this band playing Download?’ But we’ve always operated from that perspective, and it’s been helpful for our art.”

“There is the elder statesmen thing,” agrees Patrick, “but I think there’s still this neat inability to be settled. I don’t really have anything to prove, but I think on some level when we get onstage, we as a band are still earning it, if that makes sense. And I feel like that’s rad! That’s exciting to me.

“One of the new things that’s really funny is I’ve been bumping into a lot of people who haven’t listened to us in probably, like, 15 years. There’s this whole world of an audience that we’ve been building over that time, but then there’s this other audience that is kinda coming back to us, and they’re like, ‘Wait, this is what you’ve been doing in that time? I had this narrative that you guys were making cheeseball pop!’

“This tour was so interesting for me,” he adds, “and maybe this is the ‘elder statesmen’ thing, but I really figured out that we have those different eras. But whatever it is, I feel like we’re maybe the youngest elder statesmen (laughs).”

Of equal triumph to Patrick is just how well the material from So Much (For) Stardust has gone down. Mentioning the likes of the title-track, What A Time To Be Alive and I Am My Own Muse, the frontman believes these songs have “taken on a different life” since the release of the record.

“There’s so much to it where I just didn’t expect so many moments,” he says. “I think it’s really easy these days to look at your Spotify plays, and assume that it represents your audience. And it’s really not math, you know? It really is this kind of living thing. And it’s weird: I think it was one of the first times that we ever became one of those bands where I’m like, ‘Ooooh, I want to listen to this live show!’ For a long time, I was always striving to get us to the point where I wanted us to sound as good as the record, and there were a few times on this tour for sure where I think we beat the record! It’s just come into its own, in a way, and especially those songs.”

The album’s strong, forward-thinking sentiment has been faithfully honoured live, too. While Patrick acknowledges that there’s an element of Magic 8-Ball that does inherently partake in nostalgia – something both he and Pete are generally completely allergic to – these shows have been in keeping with their never-look-back ethos.

“It’s so strange because, yes, these are old songs, but some of them we had literally never played,” the singer points out. “There’s a song, Pavlove, that we played, and it was one of these ones where a demo had leaked out somewhere, but we’d never played it – that was me demoing it. So even though it was this old song, the first time the band had ever played it was onstage in front of an audience. So much of it is this new thing, and I think that’s something that we always have to do, for us.

“Nostalgia is nice, and I don’t want to speak for everybody, but I can’t do it,” he adds. “I can’t just live like, ‘Oh, hey, remember that?’ If we ever get to the point where it’s – for lack of a better word – the ‘Greatest Hits Tour’, that just isn’t that appealing to me. And I feel like in that regard, the album and the tour, they always have to say something new, and always have to be doing something new.”

Everything about So Much (For) Stardust has emphatically held up that end of the bargain. It’s an album they whole-heartedly love and believe in, for one, but it’s also proof that you can be elder statesmen – sorry, Patrick, the youngest elder statesmen – and continue to push your own boundaries.

“I do feel like, especially when you’re doing it this long, there’s a feeling that I think some artists get into where it’s like, ‘Why even bother with a new record when people just want to hear the old stuff?’” Patrick says. “Artistically that sounds like a death sentence. I really wanted to make a record that validated its own existence – that’s like, ‘This record exists, and it’s not a promotional tool for a tour.’ It’s an album, and respects itself as its own piece of art. And so then going out and playing these songs in that context… it’s crazy because I was talking to my dad, or somebody in my family, and I’m like, ‘We played, like, half the record every night!’ For a new record, 20 years in, that’s kinda nuts. We’ve played festivals with bands before where they have one big hit, and they open with it and close with it (laughs). It’s rare that you play the new record so deep. So it was really rewarding. And the audience was with it – that was the coolest thing.”

“If someone listens to So Much (For) Stardust and are like, ‘This reminds me of what I loved about Fall Out Boy,’ then I think that’s great,” adds Pete. “But also, that’s not the album we made. But whatever you use it for is great. It’s one of the, dare I say, luxuries of doing this for 20 years, where people have different entry points.”

As a man whose list of pop culture references in conversation are longer than Fall Out Boy’s famously wordy early song titles, Pete picks out a certain British secret agent to summarise the status of their peerless back-catalogue.

“When you’ve been making this same kind of art project for 20 years, there’s a little bit of a feeling that you’re not the new thing,” he says. “But the thing that comes with that is that we had a lot of years where we kept churning and putting out art, and so I think we’ve kind of earned this regard, and time has granted us that we’ve changed on every album. To me, now, Fall Out Boy albums are like, ‘Debate who your favourite James Bond is!’”

In the immediate future, that “next thing” is following up sets by BABYMETAL, Enter Shikari and The Offspring on Download’s Apex Stage. And while Pete teases a “different incarnation” of the So Much (For) Stardust show come Saturday night, he still buzzes about things like the philosophy of the Magic-8 Ball, and how Fall Out Boy can connect with their fans in a real way.

“I think that we live in a time of complete inauthenticity, right?” he asks rhetorically. “And we all participate in it to some degree. You see people’s Instagram, and they’re on vacation or whatever and you’ve got all this FOMO, but it’s like, ‘Is it really like that?’ It’s all programmed. Everything is at the behest of the algorithm. And I think that the great thing about live music right now, and what’s so exciting about playing it and going to see it, is that it’s the opposite of that. It’s swimming upstream, and it actually really works and connects with people because it’s the opposite of that. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can play this song that I don’t think any of you guys have heard, but I really want to play it, and it’s meaningful to me and it’s meaningful to us, and the energy exchange in this room right now.’ It connects on a level, because it’s kind of the opposite of the era we’re in.”

To that point, future music will also very likely share those ideals. And while Fall Out Boy have no idea yet what it sounds like, they do know that when it’s time, it’ll unfold naturally and with absolute authenticity.

“You should make art when you feel driven to making art,” Pete concludes. “I think the last thing you should do is when it’s like, ‘We feel like we should.’ Our band in particular does not work well under that. When we’ve done things right, and when it’s been successful artistically, it’s because we’ve followed the process. The times it hasn’t worked is because we’ve kind of tried to jam things before.

“To me,” he grins, “when we feel the next thing, whatever the itch is, then we get to scratching!”

Fall Out Boy headline Download Festival on June 15. This article originally appeared in the summer print issue of the magazine.

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