Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down

0:00Patrick Stump:You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. Song Exploder is sponsored by TaskRabbit. For the last few months, I've been meaning to put up this framed Richard Misrak photo that I love, but I wanted to hang it above my bed, which meant it really needed to be done right, because I don't want it to fall off and land on me while I'm sleeping. So I've been putting it off. But then instead, I found a tasker on TaskRabbit who specializes in hanging artwork and TVs in homes. And he came over the next day with a laser level and he hung the picture with precision and care.

0:40Patrick Stump:And then I felt so much better than if I tried to do it myself. And really, who knows when I would have done it myself. When life happens, your to-do list grows. So get ahead of it now and get$15 off your first task at TaskRabbit.com or on the TaskRabbit app using promo code SONGEXPLODER. Taskers book up fast, especially for same-day tasks. So book Trusted Home Help today. That's$15 off your first task using promo code SONGEXPLODER with the TaskRabbit app or at taskrabbit.com. Thanks to Quince for their support of Song Exploder. It's August and it is hot here in LA. And in my attempt to not look like melted cheese in the heat, I've turned to Quince for their beautiful linen clothes and I got their 100 % European linen utility shirt, which is a button-down that's lightweight and breathable and looks very classy.

1:34Patrick Stump:It kind of has an old world style to it, which I love because my people, Indian people, we know about beating the heat. We also know about savings and everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80 % less than similar brands. That's because they work directly with ethical factories. So you're paying for high quality, not brand markup. Upgrade your every day. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash songexploder. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's quince.com slash songexploder. Fall Out Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001.

2:19Patrick Stump:The first album, Take This to Your Grave, was a hit, especially in the punk rock world. When they put out their second album, though, in 2005, that was on a whole other scale. That album's called From Under the Cork Tree, and it went double platinum, and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. For this episode, I talked to the band's singer, Patrick Stump, about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song Sugar We're Going Down.

3:10Patrick Stump:Could you just say your name and your role in the band? I'm Patrick Stump, and I sing and play guitar and a lot of other instruments and write a lot of the music for Fall Out Boy. And who else is in the band? Pete Wentz, who plays bass, and he writes a lot of the lyrics. Joe Troman, who plays guitar, and Andy Hurley, who plays drums. How did you guys get started? So the band kind of happened by accident. Both Pete and Andy had pretty serious full-time hardcore bands. And I'd never sung before. I'd never played guitar, anything other than drums before in a band. The kind of gag was we were going to do a pop-punk band, but kind of it was for fun.

3:49because again, these were, everybody had like what we all thought of as real bands, you know? And then the band started kind of taking off and it was really fun. And I remember telling my parents, you know, okay, so I think I'm going to take this semester off. And the whole time my parents like, wait, you sing? Like, you know, I never sung before in my life, you know? And they're like, wait, the band where you sing, that's the one you're not going to school. You know, my parents believed in me, but they were kind of shocked. Like that doesn't really sound like you, but okay. and then we got offered a record deal with Fueled by Ramen.

4:22And basically they said, if you sell 350 ,000 copies of this record, then the way this deal is structured, then you might have to talk to a major label. And I was like, that has never happened. But then we got struck by lightning and Take This to Your Grave, the album Take This to Your Grave, did really well and it sold 350 ,000 copies. And now we kind of have to contractually talk to Island Records about making a major label debut. And that was kind of where we were, was figuring out how to do that. So we had to make the big record for the big major label. But then also, I personally was kind of, I kind of had this very fatalistic take on everything where I'm like, this is going to fail.

5:06Just statistically, like not even being negative about it. Like that's how this plays out. Every band that I knew that got signed, that's what happened. One of my favorite bands was this band, the Blue Meanies in Chicago. And they were like huge locally. They put out these two records that, you know, it was just this upward trajectory. And then they got signed to the major label and it tanked and they disappeared. But there was this part of me, I don't know, this was this very silly part of me that's like, well, what if we don't? What if it does succeed?

5:35Patrick Stump:I can imagine being faced with that situation of, you know, now you have to make your big record that for some people, it would be really intimidating and make them, you know, kind of hide away or get intimidated into writer's block or something like that. But the way that you're describing it, that there's a certainty that this was going to be the last thing, then in some ways it could be really liberating. Well, yeah, absolutely. My, my dad was a folk singer, right? And he kicked around for like 10 years trying to make it, and it didn't really happen. Did he put out records? No. And that was actually a big thing to me was that he'd never put out a record and he never went on tour as a performer.

6:10Patrick Stump:Yeah. So I was like, I want to do that. And there was this extra added thing to it where it was like, it wasn't just for me. It was like, you know, the people around me had been wanting this exact thing for forever. And it's like, okay, well now the pressure's on. Did you have an initial sense of how your process was going to have to change from the previous album to this new one you were about to make? So Take This Your Grave was recorded as three different recordings over the span of like a year. and at the beginning of it we were kind of this like pop punk band side project that i didn't take seriously and i was the lyricist i was the you know songwriter kind of so i was writing the songs all together and i was like i'll just write some pop punk stuff i'll write very kind of like just oh this is a silly fun pop punk song and so i wasn't going to give us like my good lyrics you know and pete didn't like that it just irked him he wasn't like mean about it but he's like i just can't, we need to take this more serious.

7:08I need to take this more seriously. Like he would have trusted me to write the lyrics, but it really disturbed him that I would ever half-ass that. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here, this. And he started sending me lyrics. The way Pete would write lyrics was not related to a song in any way. It was just words. It was just one-liners. My dad had this coffee table book of like Yogi Berra quotes. And it was kind of like that, where it was just like thought, thought, thought, thought, thought. And there's a couple songs on Take This to Your Grave that by the end of the recording, I had gotten so fed up with the kind of minutia of like changing every individual word that I was like, just give me words and I will write around that.

7:49I had had a song, the opening song on Take This to Your Grave, I had written a completely other lyric to it. The entire lyric was different. And that one, And Pete made me change the entirety of it from start to finish, which was incredibly difficult. Astoundingly, extraordinarily difficult to go through each of these sections of songs that had, you know, emphasis and syllable structure that was like really kind of stuck now. But now I had to put somebody else's words into it that didn't even have a rhyme scheme. And it was incredibly, it was like really, really hard. The song came out great. the record came out great but I'm like I am never doing that again was it hard technically or was it hard emotionally yes yeah both it was it was hard both emotionally and technically because emotionally you know the ego of like of like okay no but I am a lyricist I know I was giving you my like d material but like I can write good stuff but at that point it was like I crashed the car and it's like well okay we're gonna take the keys away yeah so that really hurt emotionally but then structurally, just like logistically, it's very, very, very difficult.

8:59And Pete, he's inspired when he's inspired. So he's not the guy that you're going to say, okay, I need two syllables that rhyme with family. And he's like, okay, I would say that. And then he would send me like six paragraphs, like whatever. And none of it really ended with a definite E sound, you know? So it was like, he didn't really work that way. So going into Corktree, I was like, I'm going to start with his lyrics. So he started giving me, he would just rip pages out of his notebook and hand them to me after he had written enough. And I would grab his lyrics and I'd start just kind of sifting through them and be like, okay, well, this could go here with this, could go here with this.

9:39Patrick Stump:Did you talk to Pete about the meaning of his words or what was inspiring his words when you would go to build a song around them? No. He is a closed book about that. I don't think it's intentional. I think his lyrics are how he thinks and talks. He can't explain it anymore. That's how he would explain it. And Pete was a little bit older than me. He had been in a real band, as far as I was concerned. Yeah. So I felt uncomfortable questioning him. So with Sugar We're Going Down, how did that first start? So Sugar was built around this really gentle kind of verse. Shut your mouth, you know what you'd say Besides I write you better than you write yourself anyway This is my interpretation And I'm asking all the questions Forget what you heard, this is a dance craze You know, I have this idea for this slower song, this more mellow song.

10:46so we're on the road and I was just writing and in fact I remember the day that I wrote the chorus of Sugar it was in like Orange Vale or something I don't know somewhere in California this venue and there wasn't really a backstage there was like an office across the parking lot and I was sitting on the floor with Pete's lyrics and somebody's acoustic guitar I'm reading his lyrics and just kind of going through it and it got to the part of drop a heart break a name and that grabbed me and I was like, oh, I like that, you know. Not really thinking about what it actually meant, just I like that it's wordplay.

11:37So I go to the next part, which feels to me like it probably wants to be some kind of chorus. and I start kind of singing what's there. His lyric was, we're going down in the earlier rounds, but it doesn't really fit and doesn't really rhyme yet. And I kind of said to myself, well, okay, we'll figure out how to fix that.

11:59Patrick Stump:So you didn't talk to Pete about his ideas of what the meaning was behind the words that he was giving you. Would you imbue the words with your own meaning? Like, was there a story that was forming for you? Well, I mean, I just kind of thought it was a couple kind of falling apart, but trying as hard as they could to hold it together. And that was kind of where I was coming from in putting it together. And at that point, I kind of had this skeleton of a song, but that verse, it's not in the song anymore. What happened? Why did it go away? So we were talking to producers. We had recorded with Sean O 'Keefe, who produced Take This to Your grave.

12:38And Sean was a big part of us becoming who we were because Sean also, in a similar way to Pete, would not put up with us half-assing it. And we were really happy with the recording we'd done with Sean. Sean was very unproven though. He had never done a major label record at that time, but we really fought for him. The thing that was really funny was we're fighting with Island records were like, Hey, we need to go with Sean. It needs to be Sean. And Sean is a, is a dear friend of mine. So this is not, he will say this. Sean really did not want it. He really didn't like pop punk. It was not, he could not have wanted to do something less than doing a follow play record.

13:19It was because we were friends that he did it. He's a real deal producer. And this was where he was at the time. He did not want to be doing this band. I had never sung before. You know, I sang one album and now I'm a singer, but I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never played guitar before. I've been playing guitar for maybe a year. So we weren't really up to snuff, you know? And he comes and he sits me down and he goes, Patrick, these songs, these are good. These are very good. You are not good enough to play them. And he's like, I don't want to make this. I don't want to be the guy that makes this.

13:56And I was like, oh no. More with Patrick Stump from Fallout Boy after this.

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16:41So now we don't have our producer. Then the whole thing changed, and now we had to go meet producers. And we saw everybody. We saw every producer that did big major label rock records. And no one wanted us. Absolutely no one wanted us. Because they hear my voice and they think that this is what I sound like. Not knowing, and by the way, I didn't know either, that apparently I could sing better than that. But we kept sending things around, and we did send something to Neil Avron. And Neil called us and he said, I don't know about your last record, but I really like these songs. There was a demo.

17:21He's like, I really like this sugar song. So we talked and we met up and right away, I think Pete was impressed with the way that Neil was like very serious about recording. and I think Neil was like okay you know he saw us live and he was like I think there's something here live I think Patrick can sing I think Andy's a really good drummer I think Pete has this like energy like Joe's a great guitar player I think there's a thing here I can make something out of this so we go out to Los Angeles and we do pre-production with Neil and it was this very different experience for us because there would be whole sections of songs where he wouldn't say anything.

18:00He'd be like, that's great. But when it wasn't great, he'd be like that. We need to like take this apart entirely down to the finest details of like, what's the kick snare pattern here? What's the guitar accent pattern? Whatever. Sugar, we get in and he really didn't touch anything except the verse. He goes, the verse doesn't work. And I didn't like that. I was like, really? This was the whole point of the song to me. It was this like weird chord verse. He's like, it doesn't work he's like all the rest of the song feels energetic the verse feels like you're asleep and he's like i think this song can be something but it can't be something with this verse and he made us try it every different way and i think i even kind of like passive aggressively was like fine whatever at some point you know i i think i took it kind of hard at one point where i'm like fine you know i'll play whatever you want you know but he was having us kind of just imagine grooves that could go there.

18:57It was really tough. We have never jammed as a band before or since. This is like the only time, because that's not really the way that any of us work. But there was this thing that Neil was hitting on where he's like, I want to maintain the energy, but the song really can't change tempo. So at some point he goes, okay, Andy, why don't you do like a four on the floor or just count?

19:25It's a fairly simple chord structure to the rest of the song. So then Pete and I start kind of experimenting with those chords over that groove.

19:42And then Joe came up with that.

19:54I started doing this rhythmic cutting of my volume on my guitar. So...

20:05And with that groove, it really started to lock into place.

20:18Patrick Stump:Was it just the music that was changing or were the lyrics changing as well? I think Neil was kind of slow walking that. Because I think he knew that he wanted the entire thing to change. I think I was pretty precious about it. I was like, I really like this part. And Neil was like, I think it needs more than that. So we just recorded us jamming that verse. And Neil sent me home with that. Sent me, well, home to the extended stay apartments. in Los Angeles. And he was like, you see what you come up with. So I took a bunch of Pete's lyrics and just sat with it and listened over and over again and like saw what I could put where.

20:56But the strange thing was because of Pete's lyrics, and like I said, they didn't ever fit in the way that like, you know, a normal rhyme scheme would. They don't really read like poetry. They read like a really strange manifesto or something, you know, because of that, this kind of run on the sentence nature of it i started with this kind of nursery rhyme element am i more than you bargained for yet but then i have to fit this next line

21:34i don't how would you repeat that even you know You know, it's just, it never, never repeats anything.

21:52So it's like it started with this very, very simplistic setup, but by necessity, it got really complicated. But that did it. That really did it. That was like where it all came together there.

22:07than you bargained for yet i've been dying to tell you anything you ought to hear because that's just who i am this week lie in the grass next to the mausoleum i'm just a notch in your bedpost but you're just a lot in a song neil is really funny he's one of the most judicious producers i've ever met where when something doesn't need anything, he will not add anything, which was not what we had done before with Sean. We were layering a lot. Neil was like, I prefer to mix less things. And so that was much more difficult, honestly, because the more layers of things that you lay in, the more that your little pockets of mistakes kind of get softened out.

22:58So there's not a lot of guitar. I remember like the biggest musical thing that we added there was the second verse has that it's very subtle you can barely hear it but there's some piano there i sat at the piano and it was one of those things where i had in true patrick fashion i had much more ornate stuff and neil would pick parts out and go like no just do this now take this out and i take this out until it was this thing that really just complemented the vocal Is this more that you bargained for yet? Oh, don't mind me, I'm watching you dip from the closet. Wish it to be the friction in your jeans.

23:46we spent forever on those drums neil was very very meticulous and he was very meticulous and there's a guy mike fasano he's set up and tuned drums for neil on all of the records we've done with neil and he would bring out this collection of drums that he had he had this whole case of snares. And I want to say maybe that snare was the November Rain snare. He ended up with the snare that was on November Rain.

24:22So I write the song around Pete's words, but I don't ever clarify what the words are going to be in the chorus because Pete's words are, we're going down in the earlier rounds, but that doesn't sing right. That doesn't sing the way I want it to, but any of the things that I can come up with don't mean the thing that he wants it to mean. So I settled on, we're going down, down in an earlier round and I managed to get a syllable out of that. Um, and I thought it was catchy and I liked it, but that's not Pete's lyrics. So I I didn't really want to confidently say that. And so I was kind of just mumbling it.