The story of Fall Out Boy

Hardcore kids from the Chicago suburbs

Fall Out Boy grew out of the Chicago hardcore punk scene of the late nineteen nineties. Its best known face there was Pete Wentz, a kid from the wealthy suburb of Wilmette who had been an all state soccer player before music won him over. Wentz barked vocals for the metalcore band Arma Angelus and played in the political hardcore group Racetraitor. One summer Arma Angelus took a sixteen year old named Joe Trohman on tour as their bassist, but his stage fright was so severe that he was moved to the merch table halfway through. By 2001 Wentz felt the scene was drifting from activism towards moshing, and he and Trohman started a pop punk side project that was meant to be easy and escapist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The missing piece turned up at a Borders bookstore in Wilmette. Trohman was talking about the band Neurosis with a friend when a stranger with long sideburns cut in to correct how they had described them. That was Patrick Stump, a drummer in local grindcore and hardcore bands. The chat turned to the new project, and Stump pointed Trohman to his page on MP3 dot com. He hoped to try out as a drummer, but Trohman told him to bring his acoustic guitar instead. Stump won the others over by singing songs from Saves the Day's album Through Being Cool, and the drummer ended up as the singer. Wentz later admitted that on first meeting, the two of them looked at each other wondering who on earth the other guy was.[1] [2] [3]

The first show was in a cafeteria at DePaul University, where Wentz was a political science student, and the band called itself Forget Me Not. Nobody was proud of it. Wentz liked long jokey names, while Stump wanted a nod to Tom Waits, so friends voted on a short list that included Fall Out Boy, the sidekick of Bart Simpson's favourite comic book hero. At the next gig in southern Illinois, a heckler yelled that they were Fall Out Boy, and Tim McIlrath of the Killing Tree, later the singer of Rise Against, introduced them that way. Trohman and Stump were diehard Simpsons fans, so the name stuck.[1] [2] [3]

Drummers and guitarists came and went. A small label, Uprising Records, run by Sean Muttaqi, wanted to release the band's demo, and the group rushed out a batch of songs in two days, recorded as Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend. They hated the result. Then came a session at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, where engineer Sean O'Keefe suggested they try an old friend of Wentz's, the vegan, straight edge drummer Andy Hurley. Hurley was recording with his own band in Chicago that same day, but he raced up to Madison to play. Wentz called it an a ha moment. Stump later said he did not consider it Fall Out Boy until Andy joined.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Take This to Your Grave

Labels started circling. Bob McLynn of Crush Management became the band's first manager, and John Janick of the Florida indie Fueled by Ramen cold called their apartment after hearing a song online. Then Rob Stevenson of Island Records came up with what was described as the first ever incubator deal. Island gave the band money to sign with tiny Fueled by Ramen for one album, planning to move them up to the major label for the second. Around the same time Wentz, feeling pushed into the back seat, briefly questioned whether he belonged in the band at all. It was Stump who talked him out of leaving.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They went back to Smart Studios with Sean O'Keefe and cut seven new songs in nine days. They slept on a stranger's floor for a few hours a night, lied to their parents about what they were doing and asked the studio to swap their soda money for bread, peanut butter and jelly. Island had put up forty thousand dollars, and the album was finished for roughly eighteen thousand. The sessions also settled the band's famous division of labour. Wentz began picking apart Stump's lyrics syllable by syllable, the two argued for nine days straight, and from then on Wentz mostly wrote the words while Stump wrote the music.[1] [2]

Take This to Your Grave came out on the sixth of May 2003. The cover, with the four of them squeezed onto a broken futon in a blue tint borrowed from old Blue Note jazz records, was a second choice after the label could not clear the posters and cereal boxes in the original shot. The band toured anywhere that would have them, playing record store appearances and sweaty club shows, and some venues banned them because the whole crowd kept ending up on stage. On one of their five Warped Tour dates in 2004 the stage collapsed after three songs, and they finished by singing Where Is Your Boy with the audience, no instruments at all.[1] [2]

There was a sour side note. Uprising Records put out Evening Out with Your Girlfriend in March 2003, just ahead of the real debut, even though the band tried to stop it and called it garbage recorded before Hurley arrived. When the band got famous, the label reissued it again without their involvement, and Stump later said both releases were a scam on them, since they received no royalties. Meanwhile Take This to Your Grave kept selling, helped by listening stations at Hot Topic, and by the time the band moved to Island it had sold somewhere between two and three hundred thousand copies, a huge number for an independent record. Rolling Stone later ranked it the fifth greatest pop punk album ever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From Under the Cork Tree and a crisis

For their major label debut the band moved into corporate housing in Burbank, California, and worked with producer Neal Avron. For the first time Stump wrote all the music and Wentz all the lyrics. They struggled to find the sound, and two weeks before recording they threw out ten songs and wrote eight more, including the future lead single, Sugar, We're Goin Down. Island nearly made them cut its chorus for being too wordy. The label and their lawyer also made them rename the opening track, originally titled after the Temptations singer David Ruffin, so they called it Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2005, just as the album was being made, Pete Wentz reached a breaking point. He has bipolar disorder and had been on medication since he was eighteen. He had withdrawn from the band, was barely sleeping and had become fixated on the Indian Ocean tsunami and his own self doubt. In the parking lot of a Best Buy in Chicago he swallowed a handful of the anxiety drug Ativan. He was rushed to hospital, had his stomach pumped and spent about a week there, then moved back in with his parents in Wilmette while the band toured Britain without him. He later spoke openly about it and filmed public service announcements about youth depression.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From Under the Cork Tree was released on the third of May 2005 and entered the Billboard chart at number nine. Its title came from The Story of Ferdinand, a children's book about a bull who would rather smell flowers under a cork tree than fight. Sugar, We're Goin Down climbed slowly, driven at first by downloads rather than radio, and a performance at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards sent it to number eight on the Hot 100. Its strange video, about a boy with deer antlers, helped. The song spent forty two weeks on the chart, and Rolling Stone later placed it among the five hundred greatest songs of all time.[1] [2] [3]

The second single, Dance, Dance, reached number nine. Suddenly the band that had slept four to a hotel room floor was playing arenas to around ten thousand people a night. Stump remembered getting a text congratulating him on a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and assuming someone was teasing him. Wentz had also started a label, Decaydance, as an imprint of Fueled by Ramen. Its first signing was a group of Las Vegas teenagers who had sent him a demo through LiveJournal and had never played a show. They were Panic! at the Disco, and their first tour was the 2005 Nintendo Fusion Tour, opening for Fall Out Boy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fame came with a harsh spotlight, and it landed mostly on Wentz. In March 2006 private nude photos he had taken of himself spread across the internet. He believed someone had hacked the backup site for his phone, and said that when he heard the news he was so distracted he crashed into the car in front of him. His clothing line, Clandestine Industries, and his blog made him the most visible member of the band. There was a legal cost to the lyrics too. In 2007 it emerged that the band had settled out of court with Wesley Eisold of the band American Nightmare over the use of his poetry in some songs, and later pressings credited him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Infinity on High and the top of the charts

The band wanted to strike again quickly. Infinity on High was recorded in Los Angeles in 2006, again mostly with Neal Avron, and took its title from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. The band reached for unlikely collaborators. They admired the R and B producer Babyface for his work on the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack, and he ended up producing two songs. Jay-Z, whose label released the record, recorded a spoken introduction for the opening track, Thriller. Wentz said they expected to get an assistant when they rang him, but Jay-Z picked up the phone himself.[1] [2]

Infinity on High came out on the sixth of February 2007 and went straight to number one in America, selling two hundred and sixty thousand copies in its first week. On release day the band played three free shows in three cities, starting in Times Square in the morning, then Chicago, then Los Angeles late at night. The single This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race debuted at number two on the Hot 100 with a hundred and sixty two thousand downloads, the biggest opening week for a group since digital sales tracking began. Thnks fr th Mmrs, read as Thanks for the Memories, followed and became their biggest hit in Australia.[1] [2] [3]

The pace was punishing. The 2007 Honda Civic Tour was pushed back by several weeks, with Wentz citing exhaustion and being worn down. In March 2008 the band tried to set a record by playing all seven continents in nine months, with a show for scientists in Antarctica, but bad weather grounded their flight from Chile. Instead Wentz and Stump set a record for the most interviews given by a duo in twenty four hours, seventy four of them. Their cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It, with a solo by John Mayer, became another hit.[1] [2] [3]

Wentz's private life became tabloid property. In 2006 he began dating the pop singer Ashlee Simpson, and the two became fixtures of the gossip pages. They married on the seventeenth of May 2008 at her parents' home in Encino, Los Angeles, with her father officiating, and their son Bronx was born that November. Behind the celebrity, Wentz described a darker inner life. He told Rolling Stone that at fourteen he had been sent to an eight week tough love boot camp after skipping school, where he was beaten up, and said it left him with dependency and attachment issues he was still working through.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Folie a Deux and the fall

The fourth album, Folie a Deux, named after a psychiatric condition in which two people share a delusion, was made in near secrecy in 2008. Relations were at a low. Stump admitted he once threw something across the room over a change from a major to a minor chord, and producer Neal Avron recalled bickering and paparazzi hanging around the sessions. Trohman had long felt he and Hurley were treated as passengers, and he was also struggling with substance abuse at the time. The record was the band's most ambitious, with guests including Elvis Costello, Lil Wayne and Pharrell Williams, and a song called Twenty Seven about the musicians who died at that age.[1] [2]

That song came from a dangerous place. Wentz said he spent much of the year he was twenty seven toxic and over medicated, and that his managers were terrified. He was stoked, he said, just to make it to twenty eight, and Stump recalled their manager calling him on Wentz's birthday to shout that they had made it. Wentz later described a decade in a chemical haze of anxiety drugs prescribed for insomnia and fear of flying. He told Playboy in 2008 that during a drunken game of Russian roulette with a friend, each of them had pulled the trigger once on a gun pointed at himself. He has since spoken publicly about getting help.[1] [2] [3]

The album was due out on election day, the fourth of November 2008, as part of a viral campaign built around a fake Orwellian organisation. The band pulled the date, saying this was not the election to be cute. It finally appeared in December and entered the chart at number eight with about a hundred and fifty thousand copies, well short of Infinity on High. Avron later said the label briefly pulled support for the single I Don't Care after misreading radio data. When the band tried to play a free show in Washington Square Park, police told them picking up instruments meant jail, so they led a sing along with air guitars instead.[1] [2]

On tour, some fans booed the new songs. Stump later said it felt like being the last act at a vaudeville show, rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoods, and Trohman remembered that some of them were miserable on stage while others were just drunk. Wentz admitted he grew a heinous beard, got blackout drunk and smashed his face open, and that he was lost in selfishness and pills. The band did get to play a youth ball for Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009, and opened for Blink-182's reunion tour that summer. But Stump sat them down and warned that if they did not take a break, they would break up.[1] [2] [3]

Fall Out Boy played what turned out to be their last show for more than three years at Madison Square Garden on the fourth of October 2009. Hurley cried before they went on. They closed with Saturday from their first album, and near the end Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 shaved Wentz's head on stage. A greatest hits album, Believers Never Die, came out in November, and within days the band confirmed an indefinite break. Hurley tweeted the word hiatus and then deleted it, and Wentz preferred to say they were decompressing. Rolling Stone later called the head shaving a symbolic cleansing, and also the start of a very dark chapter.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The dark years apart

The break hit everyone hard. Hurley looked at an empty calendar and fell into what he called the darkest depression of his life. Wentz, who had been abusing the anti anxiety drugs Xanax and Klonopin, went back to therapy, and his marriage ended. Ashlee Simpson filed for divorce in February 2011, citing irreconcilable differences, and it was finalised that November. The two said they remained friends and devoted parents to their son. Wentz later said his personal life had become toxic and that he spent months in a fog, learning to hold himself accountable as an adult rather than as a guy in a band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Stump was the only one to go solo. He lost more than sixty pounds for his health, married his longtime girlfriend Elisa Yao, with Wentz in the wedding party, and made an album called Soul Punk on which he wrote, produced and played every instrument himself. He put much of his savings into a full band tour. Critics were kind, but the album sold only about twenty three thousand copies. Some people bought tickets just to heckle him, shouting that they liked him better fat, and he received threatening letters at his home. He opened for Bruno Mars and for Panic! at the Disco, the band Fall Out Boy had once taken on the road.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In February 2012 Stump posted a long, raw blog entry titled We Liked You Better Fat, Confessions of a Pariah. At twenty seven, he called himself a has been, said Fall Out Boy's notoriety stopped him starting over from the bottom, and wrote that it felt like a big cosmic sign that he should disappear. He was even thinking about learning a trade. The post was later taken down, and Stump explained that he had not been broke, only that he would have to work again. For the time being he moonlighted as a songwriter and producer for other acts and took acting classes.[1] [2] [3]

The others kept busy too. Trohman and Hurley formed a heavy metal supergroup, the Damned Things, with Scott Ian and Rob Caggiano of Anthrax and Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die, and released an album called Ironiclast in 2010. Wentz formed an electronic group called Black Cards with an unknown singer he had overheard recording demos, Bebe Rexha. The album was delayed again and again, and Rexha left in early 2012 before going on to her own pop career. Wentz also finished a novel he had been working on for six years and hosted a tattoo competition show called Best Ink. None of the side projects really took off.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The secret comeback

Around the time of Stump's blog post, Wentz reached out. He was in a dark place too and needed an outlet, and he was nervous enough that he compared the call to phoning an old lover. The first three or four songs they wrote were shelved almost at once. A few months later they tried again and came up with Where Did the Party Go, which excited them both. The four held an all day secret meeting at their manager's home in New York. Trohman was the last to get a call, a three hour conversation with Stump, and he agreed to come back on the condition that he would be writing music this time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They recorded with producer Butch Walker in California from late 2012, telling nobody. Walker feared the album would never get finished after meltdown after meltdown. Hurley stayed off Twitter so he would not be geotagged, and a week before the announcement Wentz flatly told the Chicago Tribune that no reunion was happening. The secret almost slipped when the rapper 2 Chainz posted a photo of dinner with Wentz with a caption hinting at a collaboration, but fans decided it was too absurd to be true. When the band heard that Elton John liked them, they jokingly asked him to sing, and Stump flew to Atlanta to record with him.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourth of February 2013 everything arrived at once, a new single, an album title, a tour and a show that same night at the small Subterranean club in Chicago. The announcement photo showed the four of them burning copies of their old records at the site of Comiskey Park, where the notorious Disco Demolition Night had been held in 1979. Their message said this was not a reunion, because they had never broken up. The single My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark reached number thirteen, and Taylor Swift tweeted that she had played it forty three times in one day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Save Rock and Roll came out in April 2013 and went to number one in America with a hundred and fifty four thousand copies in its first week. Music writers who had written the band off were stunned, and Rolling Stone called it a rather stunning renaissance. The band made a video for every song, stitched together as The Young Blood Chronicles. In July they recorded a raw, punk leaning EP called PAX AM Days in just two days with producer Ryan Adams, as a kind of antidote to the glossy album. They closed the era by co headlining Monumentour with Paramore across North America in the summer of 2014.[1] [2] [3]

Centuries, Mania and the stadium years

New songs came out of the Monumentour sessions, starting with Centuries, which premiered on BBC Radio One in September 2014. It borrows the melody of Suzanne Vega's Tom's Diner, sung again for the track by the singer Lolo, and Vega got a writing credit. It reached number ten, their first top ten hit in almost eight years, and ESPN adopted it for its sports coverage. Disney then asked the band to write Immortals for the animated film Big Hero 6. Stump even recorded an Italian version, singing each phrase over and over until a native speaker approved his pronunciation, though he does not speak Italian.[1] [2] [3]

The album American Beauty, American Psycho arrived in January 2015 and became the band's third American number one. Its title mashed together a Grateful Dead album and Bret Easton Ellis's novel. The single Uma Thurman built its riff from the theme of the old television show The Munsters, and the actress herself gave permission to use her name, saying she was flattered that anyone still asked. The song won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video. That same year the band inducted Green Day into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2016 they headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals in England.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The seventh album, Mania, was meant for September 2017, but Stump announced it was being pushed back because it felt rushed and was not ready. It finally came out in January 2018 and became their fourth number one, and later earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Fans were cooler. Trohman later wrote in his memoir that he mostly stayed out of the making of it and could not say he loved it. The band gave the proceeds of their Houston shows on the Mania tour to relief after Hurricane Harvey. In September 2018 they headlined Wrigley Field in Chicago, their first ever stadium show as headliners.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The giant llama puppets from the Young and Menace video brought trouble. In March 2019 the company that made them, Furry Puppet Studio, sued the band and fifteen other defendants in Manhattan, claiming the llamas had been licensed only for that video but were used on tour, on merchandise, in other videos and on television. That September the band announced the Hella Mega Tour with Green Day and Weezer. The pandemic pushed it to 2021, and in August that year a positive Covid test in their touring party forced them to miss three stadium shows. At those dates Weezer covered Sugar, We're Goin Down in their absence.[1] [2] [3]

So Much for Stardust and twenty years on

With their Island deal finished, Fall Out Boy went home to Fueled by Ramen, now working alongside Elektra, and reunited with Neal Avron. So Much for Stardust was a deliberate return to guitars, and Stump described it as what they might have made if they had gone straight on after Folie a Deux instead of taking a break. The pink seashell on the cover came from a speech in the film Reality Bites, which Ethan Hawke recorded again for the album. The band teased songs by mailing numbered seashells to fellow musicians and leaving packages at landmarks, including the Field of Dreams site in Iowa and Wrigley Field.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighteenth of January 2023, the same day the album was announced, Joe Trohman posted that his mental health had rapidly deteriorated over several years and that he was stepping away for a while to avoid fading away and never returning. That night the band played Jimmy Kimmel Live as a trio for the first time. Trohman promised he would be back, and on the twenty ninth of May 2023 he announced his return, thanking the stand in guitarist Ben Young. The album came out on the twenty fourth of March 2023 and entered the chart at number six, their seventh top ten album in a row.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour opened at Wrigley Field in June 2023 and ran until April 2024. That summer Taylor Swift, who had covered Sugar, We're Goin Down on tour in Chicago back in 2011, featured the band on Electric Touch from her re recorded Speak Now. Not everything landed. Their updated version of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, listing events from 1989 to 2023 out of order, was widely panned, not least for leaving out the Covid pandemic. Wentz shrugged that some things felt too on the nose, and that one reference was only there because they needed the rhyme.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In July 2025 Trohman announced that years of trouble with his right hand meant he needed surgery to avoid permanent damage, so he would miss the rest of that year's shows while the band played on without him. That October the band released a twentieth anniversary edition of From Under the Cork Tree. Stump said they had never stopped playing its songs, and that he cared about them more now than in 2007 because he understood what they meant to people. As of 2026 the line up of Stump, Wentz, Trohman and Hurley, together since 2003 apart from the hiatus, remains intact.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fall Out Boy's legacy is bigger than their critics once allowed. Take This to Your Grave is regularly named a blueprint for two thousands pop punk, and Rolling Stone said From Under the Cork Tree carried emo into the mainstream. Wentz, through Decaydance, helped launch Panic! at the Disco and Gym Class Heroes, and Rolling Stone has linked his lyrical style to Taylor Swift's Blank Space. They have earned two Grammy nominations and four number one albums in America. The Guardian noted that for all the attention Wentz draws, their shy, soulful singer remains their most enduring weapon. Stump summed up the ride as the four of them against the world.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Fall Out Boy

Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump. The core partnership of Fall Out Boy. Wentz writes the words, often as a stream of consciousness, and Stump finds the melodies inside them. It has not always been easy. They fought through the first album line by line, and Stump once punched Wentz in the face during a lyric argument. Yet Wentz was in Stump's wedding, and in 2013 he called Stump a genius and admitted he had overshadowed him for years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson. Wentz began dating the pop singer in 2006 and they became tabloid regulars. They married in May 2008 at her parents' house and their son Bronx was born that November. Simpson filed for divorce in February 2011, and it was finalised that November. They said they remained friends and committed parents. Wentz later said the marriage and his fame had become a hindrance to the band.[1] [2]

Pete Wentz and Joe Trohman. The two co founders. Trohman toured as the teenage bassist in Wentz's metalcore band Arma Angelus, and on that tour, he said, the older members pulled his underwear off every day. Soon afterwards the pair talked about starting a poppier, Green Day style band, and Trohman went out and found its singer in a bookstore.[1] [2] [3]

Pete Wentz and Andy Hurley. Hurley has been friends with Wentz since he was sixteen, and Fall Out Boy is the fourth band they have played in together, including Racetraitor and Arma Angelus. Hurley, a vegan anarcho primitivist, is the only member to have stayed straight edge. He at first seemed uninterested in joining, then became the drummer who, in Stump's words, made it really Fall Out Boy.[1] [2] [3]

Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley. The band's heavy metal wing. Both often felt overlooked next to Wentz and Stump, and Trohman once said being called passengers was hard on the soul. During the hiatus the two formed the Damned Things with members of Anthrax and Every Time I Die, released Ironiclast in 2010 and returned with a second album, High Crimes, in 2019.[1] [2] [3]

Pete Wentz and Brendon Urie. Urie and Ryan Ross sent Wentz a demo of their band Panic! at the Disco through LiveJournal. Wentz drove to Las Vegas, heard a few songs at practice and signed the teenagers to Decaydance before they had played a single show. He promoted them relentlessly, and Panic! later opened for Fall Out Boy and sang on What a Catch, Donnie.[1] [2] [3]

Fall Out Boy and Neal Avron. The producer behind their biggest run, From Under the Cork Tree, Infinity on High and Folie a Deux. Avron is a stickler for pre production and blunt honesty, and it was he who told them the verse of Sugar, We're Goin Down was not good enough. After a fifteen year gap he returned to produce So Much for Stardust in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fall Out Boy and Butch Walker. Walker sang on and co produced a track on Infinity on High, then produced Save Rock and Roll, the secret comeback album of 2013. He feared it would never be finished after one meltdown after another, but it went to number one. He went on to work on American Beauty, American Psycho and Mania.[1] [2]

Fall Out Boy and Sean Muttaqi. The owner of Uprising Records released the band's rushed first mini album in 2003 even as the band tried to stop him, and reissued it again after they became famous. The relationship soured badly. Stump said the band never received royalties and called both releases a scam on them.[1] [2] [3]

Pete Wentz and Bebe Rexha. During the hiatus Wentz and producer Sam Hollander overheard an unknown singer recording demos in their studio and built the electronic group Black Cards around her. The album kept getting delayed, and Rexha left in early 2012 to go solo, later becoming a pop star. In 2019 she teased a song featuring Wentz.[1] [2]

Fall Out Boy and Taylor Swift. Swift covered Sugar, We're Goin Down in Chicago in 2011, tweeted in 2013 that she had played My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark forty three times in a day, and had Stump guest on her Red tour. In 2023 she featured the band on Electric Touch. Rolling Stone has linked Wentz's lyrics to her song Blank Space.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Pete Wentz and Meagan Camper. Wentz's partner since the years after his divorce. The couple have two children, a son born in 2014 and a daughter born in 2018. Wentz has described how having children changed him, and during the making of American Beauty, American Psycho he joked that he had a two week old son at home.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Fall Out Boy

• Patrick Stump originally tried out for Fall Out Boy as a drummer, not a singer. He had drummed in local grindcore and hardcore bands. Joe Trohman urged him to bring his acoustic guitar instead, and his singing won the band over.[1] [2]
• Stump was born Patrick Stumph and dropped the letter h in 2003. He made the change to cut down on people mispronouncing his name. He later said he might have chosen a stage name, and once liked the word Axon.[1] [2]
• Joe Trohman's first tour was as a sixteen year old bassist in Pete Wentz's metalcore band. His stage fright with Arma Angelus was so severe that the band flew their regular bassist back mid tour and moved Trohman to selling merchandise.[1] [2]
• Stump played drums at Arma Angelus's final show, which also had Fall Out Boy on the bill. At that last concert Wentz sang, Trohman played guitar and Stump sat behind the kit, a small preview of the band they were already forming.[1]
• Take This to Your Grave cost about eighteen thousand dollars to make. Island Records had invested forty thousand dollars for the album, but the band finished it for less than half that, sleeping on floors and living on sandwiches.[1]
• At Smart Studios, the band were shown the microphone used on Nirvana's Nevermind but were not allowed to use it. They were told only Shirley Manson of Garbage could use that microphone. Wentz said seeing the Nevermind plaque on the wall was mind blowing.[1]
• The straight edge band teased their producer with a list of joke stoner nicknames in the album credits. Sean O'Keefe had admitted smoking marijuana once, months earlier. The band exaggerated it into a running joke, though executives cut most of the nicknames.[1]
• The Take This to Your Grave cover was taken at two in the morning as a backup shot. The label could not clear posters of Cher, Morrissey and Edward Scissorhands in the original image. The last frame of the night became what one magazine called the pop punk Abbey Road.[1]
• The title Grand Theft Autumn was borrowed without permission from a song by the band Braid. Both Stump and Wentz disliked the song while making it, and Stump especially hated the a cappella opening, which was the producer's idea. It became a concert staple.[1]
• From Under the Cork Tree takes its name from a 1936 children's book about a bull. The Story of Ferdinand is about a bull who would rather sniff flowers under a cork tree than fight. Wentz was intrigued by the line.[1]
• Infinity on High is named after a phrase in a letter by Vincent van Gogh. Writing to his brother Theo in 1888, van Gogh spoke of being clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. The winged sheep on the cover is called Franklyn.[1]
• Thnks fr th Mmrs lost its vowels as a joke aimed at the record label. Island Records had asked the band to shorten their famously long song titles, so they simply took the vowels out of Thanks for the Memories.[1]
• Kim Kardashian appears in the video for Thnks fr th Mmrs, directed on screen by a chimpanzee. In the clip a chimp plays a demanding director who calls the band a joke and even shows Wentz how to kiss Kardashian properly.[1]
• Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump hold a record for the most interviews by a duo in twenty four hours. After bad weather stopped them flying to Antarctica in 2008 for a record attempt, they gave seventy four interviews in a single day instead.[1] [2]
• For a 2007 fan contest, prints were made with ink mixed with the band members' blood. Inspired by Kiss, Wentz's brother made the prints for the Honda Civic Tour. Wentz hoped it would draw attention to the need for blood donors.[1]
• Pete Wentz's parents met while campaigning for Joe Biden's Senate run in the 1970s. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Winston Lewis, served as U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone and was a cousin of General Colin Powell.[1]
• Wentz was sent to an eight week boot camp at fourteen after skipping school. He told Rolling Stone he was beaten up there, called home crying every day, and traced many of his later emotional struggles to it.[1]
• Andy Hurley's first instrument was the saxophone. He switched to drums in high school after his sister bought him Metallica's Ride the Lightning and Van Halen's debut. His father died when he was five.[1] [2]
• Hurley once told Rolling Stone he believes civilization will eventually collapse. The vegan anarcho primitivist admitted that being employed by a corporation contradicts his beliefs, but said he still has to make a living.[1] [2]
• Patrick Stump has synesthesia and experiences colours with letters and sounds. He has grapheme to colour synesthesia and chromesthesia. He also has ADHD.[1]
• Stump sang the Italian version of Immortals without speaking Italian. A Disney executive said he sang each phrase over and over, adjusting his pronunciation until a fluent listener said he had it right.[1]
• Uma Thurman personally approved the Fall Out Boy song named after her. She said she was flattered and found it chivalrous, because nobody asks permission for anything anymore.[1]
• Centuries uses the melody of Suzanne Vega's Tom's Diner, but it is not a sample. The singer Lolo re sang the famous melody for the track, and Vega is credited as a co writer. Stump called it a tip of the hat.[1]
• Patrick Stump wrote the ride music for a roller coaster in Orlando. He composed an original score for the on ride audio of the Incredible Hulk Coaster at Islands of Adventure, which reopened in 2016.[1]
• Police stopped a planned free show in Washington Square Park in 2008, so the band played air guitar. Warned that picking up instruments meant jail, Stump sang while Wentz and Trohman mimed guitars and Hurley drummed on his knees.[1]
• The band's comeback photo showed them burning their own records at the site of Disco Demolition Night. The fire was lit at the old Comiskey Park site in Chicago, where disco records were famously blown up at a baseball game in 1979.[1] [2]
• A dinner photo with 2 Chainz nearly exposed the secret 2013 reunion. The rapper captioned it Fall Out Boyz featuring 2 Chainz, but fans decided the idea was too absurd. Wentz said he thought it was all over.[1] [2]
• Weezer covered Sugar, We're Goin Down at three stadium shows Fall Out Boy had to miss. A positive Covid test in Fall Out Boy's touring party in August 2021 forced them off the Hella Mega Tour dates in New York, Boston and Washington.[1] [2]
• Stump once kept singing a ballad while his piano was on fire at a stadium show. He told The Independent that Wentz handles much of the staging, and that on one stadium night his entire piano caught fire during a big ballad and he simply played on.[1]
• Early in their career Wentz knocked himself out on stage and the band did not know whether to stop. Stump recalled wondering whether Wentz was actually dead, or would wake up annoyed that they had stopped the song.[1]
• On their 2005 Nintendo Fusion tour, Fall Out Boy did a costume change as a joke about selling out. Wentz said they asked themselves what the most pop thing they could possibly do would be. It mostly confused people.[1]
• Joe Trohman's house in Chicago was featured on MTV Cribs in 2007. Trohman, a guitar collector, has his own signature Squier Telecaster and later wrote a memoir called None of This Rocks.[1]
• Andy Hurley cried before the band's last show before the hiatus. At Madison Square Garden in October 2009 he thought it might be the end. They closed with Saturday from their first album.[1]
• Take This to Your Grave was once described as sounding like Hot Topic but feeling like CBGB. The line came from Mani Mostofi, former singer of Racetraitor, who had discussed the band's softcore sound with Wentz when it started.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.