Fall Out Boy Speaks Its Mind On New Album
“On some level, yes, this is a political record,” Fall Out Boy singer/guitarist Patrick Stump tells Billboard of “Folie A Deux,” due Nov. 4 via Island. “But it’s a political record only insofar as anyone making music and paying attention to what’s happening will make a record tinged with politics. You can’t ignore it.”
The band played at last month’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, and is teaming with Rock the Vote until the election in November. At the Convention, Stump says the band kept its official comments nonpartisan, only encouraging people to register and vote. But, he adds, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama “is the most excited I’ve been about a candidate.”
Fall Out Boys members are less forthcoming about the content of “Folie A Deux” — bassist Pete Wentz says the record contains more “outside perspectives” and “fictionalized accounts” than previous efforts, but he declined to reveal any specifics.
“I’d rather let the listener interpret them,” he says. “Every time you think we’re talking about a girl, we’re not, and every time you think we’re not talking about a girl, we are.”
Stump says an emphasis on the music was what Fall Out Boy was going for. “I felt frustrated with the last record because my voice was the focal point for many of the songs,” he says. “When we were writing this one, we wanted it to be about all the parts coming together to form a whole.”
Fall Out Boy will appear in this fall’s teen comedy “Sex Drive”; the single “I Don’t Care” will be featured in TV and radio ads for the film starting in September and will be used in the film’s end credits. After the album is released, the band will team with the creators of the Got Milk? campaign to star in a series of ads called “Milk’s Got Noise?”
An extensive tour will have to wait until the second quarter of 2009, as Wentz is expecting his first child with wife Ashlee Simpson.
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