In a new interview with Rock Sound, Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz talked about his musical approach and why he prefers to make ‘weird’ music.
“I’ve always really just loved when I watch artists and they could really make the same thing, and instead, they make something that’s challenging to them or challenging to their audience. Sometimes you miss, sometimes you do a big thing and you miss. We’ve definitely done that, but I gotta say, all the things that I’ve really loved about art and music has so enriched my life, but all the things that I’ve loved are like when people take chances, you don’t get the invention of anything or any new thing. There’s no way I would.”
The bassist thinks not being weird would feel like losing a piece of your personality. “To me to not honor the idea of that or to go on stage and say, ‘Make weird stuff,’ but then like not to make weird stuff would feel odd. I personally would much rather lose and miss doing our own thing. To play it safe and to cut yourself off around the edges and to stand it down and then to miss also, those to me are the worst misses because you didn’t even go big as yourself.”
Wentz might be more on the side of being weird, but Fall Out Boy’s seventh studio album, ‘Mania,’ was all about the ‘globalization of music.’ “The thing I point to now more than anything is we’re listening to a lot more music happening worldwide,” Wentz said of the album during an interview with Billboard. “The thing I love about the globalization of music is I’m listening to beats that this kid in Lagos made… that would have never happened before.”
On the other hand, their latest record ‘So Much (for) Stardust’ focused less on the bigger hits and more on the earnestness. “I found myself in a similar place five years after ‘Mania,’ but for opposite reasons — now there’s no stakes. It had been so long, and I think a lot of people didn’t anticipate a Fall Out Boy record by that point. So, it wasn’t really under the gun, like ‘Where’s the big hit?’ or whatever. It was just us going in and doing something honest and earnest.”
“And in that context, I felt the same fire of like, if we’re getting to do this, then I’m gonna throw everything I have in here out. It’s weird because obviously, there’s the guitars and there’s the strings and there’s the horns and things like that on this record, but there are some electronics, too. It was kind of about weaving all of it together. In this weird way, it’s the most Fall Out Boy record. It’s like ‘Fall Out Boy concentrate,’ where it’s all of the stuff, all at once,” he added.
Fall Out Boy is scheduled to play in the Innings Festival in Tempe, Arizona on February 25. After the festival, they will play another show in Monterrey, Mexico on April 4.