LOS ANGELES � "Hell yes, this record is political. But it's non ever sledding to be overt. You have to look beyond that," Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump aforementioned from the studio where he and his bandmates are putt the finishing touches on their Folie � Deux album. "I think this is a very political record, but that gets misunderstood genuinely easily. I think people don't really care what 'politics' level means any longer. If there's a simple theme that I would want to express through the music, it's that you very need to think about things."
Stump is speaking, of course, more or less the recent reports of the (hypothetical) political tilt on the FOB record album that's due November 4 � Election Day. While his sentiments are probably only exit to farther confuse fans � and provide ammo to critics � we've got to admit that he's pretty dead-on in his assessment. At least, judging from the tracks we heard.
On Thursday night, MTV News visited Fall Out Boy � wHO, coincidentally, ar nominated for Best Rock Video at the 2008 Video Music Awards � at an L.A. studio to receive a purloin peek at a handful of songs from Folie, all of which eagre tentative titles ("America's Sweethearts," "Never Believe," "Does Your Husband Know?") and a healthy cupid's disease of political edge. But not of the bolshevik state/ grim state sort, mind you.
Rather, the new songs turn over deep into the politics of the heart and mind, exploring decaying relationships, moral dilemmas and societal shortcomings. The lyrics � written one time again by bassist Pete Wentz, wHO works through a series of exhaustively detestable characters on the new album � mete out heavily with concepts like truth and trust, high-handedness and infidelity, responsibility and commitment. It's a world where there's not all that much difference between a married couple vow and a campaign speech, in that both are frozen in a promise, unmatched that is easily � and often � corrupted.
"One of the things I wanted to do on this track record is � and it was very conscious ... I don't think enough hoi polloi give Pete Wentz whatsoever credit. I think he's awesome, I think he's a very talented guy," Stump aforesaid. "People simply take pictures of him on his way to somewhere. So you just see him with his cup of coffee walk into the studio, merely you don't see him in the studio. He's in here working a lot. He totally outdid himself on this record. He doesn't even know how just his lyrics are here. ... So I really had to do something to suit that. So I've been exploitation musical style as a palette to support his lyrics."
The topper example of this synergy is belike "Husband," which struts in on a massive drumfish line and crunching, processed guitars, gets amplified by a four-piece horn section, then falls away to a unproblematic, somber piano line. It's sexual one minute, heartbreaking the next � the perfect attendant for Wentz's tale of infidelity and deception.
"Swagger is a great way to describe it, because on the strain, he's lyrically adopting a character that has bluster, so I wanted the music to have that swagger. The verse is so confident and funky and forward because the lyric is so full of itself," Stump explained. "And then everything michigan, and there's a pianissimo breakdown, and it's very melancholy and sad and theatrical, and the lyric shifts to the doubt that's in arrears all that arrogance. And ultimately, I wanted the music � in conjunction with the lyric � to press out that hauteur is normally a disguise for wicked insecurity.
"What I took out of [the lyrics] was that thither was something so compelling about the character in the sung dynasty. ... Like in 'Silence of the Lambs,' when Hannibal Lecter is talking more or less how he doesn't kill, he covets. ... The birdcall is about that � the prowl of chasing a fair sex," he continued. "I mean it meant, like, this guy is cheating on his girl, but he knows she's not foul on him. There's this total 'looking into the mirror and trying to convince yourself of absolute lies' kind of thing. People ask all the time, 'Oh, Pete got married, how does that affect the record?' and I think, if anything, he just treasured to detail out how lightly people are pickings their marriages. No one seems to be apprehensive about what's going on, they just want to have things."
And that focal point on the failings of society continues on "Never Believe," which is powered by drummer Andy Hurley's work � this time a taut marching cadence � and lush, opened guitarwork from Joe Trohman. Stump's voice is loud and clear as he urges the listener to "throw your cameras in the air/ Wave 'em like you just don't care."
" 'Never Believe' contains my favourite Fall Out Boy lyric, maybe ever so. Because everything we're trying to say about crop up culture, it's in this song," Stump said. "The chorus � 'Change will come, just I testament never believe in anything again' � that's about the '90s, when we really cared, [but] then we got into all this terrible mess. And I think people stopped-up believing in the goodwill of man and that you can buoy change the world or do any good. So everything became internalized. The past decennium has been totally almost 'me.' It's wholly about 'Oh, I'm sad. I want this. I know individual who knows this soul. Me me me me me,' so that's what that song is about."
And patch he was at it, Stump decided to take apart the first single from Folie, the strutting "I Don't Care," which the band debuted earlier this week on their official site. Seems that it, too, is another attack on the vapidness of the geological era we currently inhabit, 1 obsessed with celebrity and the self. It's an attack you can shout along to, of class. It is a Fall Out Boy song, after all.
"Like the chorus says, 'I don't care what you think as long as it's about me.' It's that pop culture thing again, where people don't care about anything only the superficial, and I think there's something so tragic about that," he laughed. "I also thought there was something so ironically anthemic about the chorus, where it's non something you want to sing along to, because it's vacuous and vacate. So I wanted something really anthemic underneath it, like something you'd hear at sports games or whatever, because I wanted people to hear it and be confronted with how empty that is. I didn't want anything to be superficial on this record unless the point was to
