#the only thing that is NOT fall out boy? is soul punk

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

...at this point I don't even know what to say

[turnstileskyline]

The Oral History of Take This To Your Grave – transcription under the cut

The pages that are just photographs, I haven't included. This post is already long enough.

Things that happened in 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California. Teen Vogue published its first issue. The world lost Johnny Cash. Johnny Depp appeared as Captain Jack Sparrow for the first time. A third Lord of the Rings movie arrived. Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, and Andy Hurley released Take This To Your Grave.

"About 21 years ago or so, as I was applying to colleges I would ultimately never go to, Fall Out Boy began as a little pop-punk side project of what we assumed was Pete's more serious band, Arma Angelus," Patrick wrote in a May 2023 social media post.

"We were sloppy and couldn't solidify a lineup, but the three of us (Pete, Joe, and I) were having way too much fun to give up on it."

"We were really rough around the edges. As an example of how rough, one of my favorite teachers pulled me aside after hearing the recording that would eventually become Evening Out With Your Girlfriend and tactfully said, 'What do you think your best instrument is, Patrick? Drums. It's drums. Probably not singing, Patrick.'"

"We went into Smart Studios with the Sean O'Keefe... So, there we were, 3/5 of a band with a singer who'd only been singing a year, no drummer, and one out of two guitarists. But we had the opportunity to record with Sean at Butch Vig's legendary studio.

"Eight or so months later, Fueled by Ramen would give us a contract to record the remaining songs. We'd sleep on floors, eat nothing but peanut butter and jelly, live in a van for the next three years, and somehow despite that, eventually play with Elton John and Taylor Swift and Jay-Z and for President Obama and the NFC championship, and all these other wildly unpredictable things. But none of that would ever come close to happening if Andy hadn't made it to the session and Joe hadn't dragged us kicking and screaming into being a band."

Two decades after its release, Take This To Your Grave sits comfortable in the Top 10 of Rolling Stone's 50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums, edging out landmark records from Buzzcocks, Generation X, Green Day, The Offspring, Blink-182, and The Ramones.

It even ranked higher than Through Being Cool by Saves The Day and Jersey's Best Dancers from Lifetime, two records the guys in Fall Out Boy particularly revere.

Fall Out Boy's proper full-length debut on Fueled by Ramen is a deceptively smart, sugar-sweet, raw, energetic masterpiece owing as much to the bass player's pop culture passions, the singers deep love of R&B and soul, and their shared history in the hardcore scene as any pioneering punk band. Fall Out Boy's creative and commercial heights were still ahead, but Take This To Your Grave kicked it off, a harbinger for the enduring songwriting partnership between Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz, the eclectic contributions from Joe Trohman, and the propulsive powerhouse that is Andy Hurley.

The recordings document a special moment when Fall Out Boy was big in "the scene" but a "secret" from the mainstream. The band (and some of their friends) first sat down for an Oral History (which doubled as an Oral History of their origin story) with their old friend Ryan J. Downey, then Senior Editor for Alternative Press, upon the occasion of the album's 10th anniversary. What follows is an updated, sharper, and expanded version of that story, newly re-edited in 2023. As Patrick eloquently said: "Happy 20th birthday, Take This To Your Grave, you weird brilliant lightning strike accident of a record."

– Ryan J. Downey.

A Weird, Brilliant Lightning Strike Of A Record. The Oral History Of Fall Out Boy's Take This To Your Grave.

As told by:

Patrick Stump

Pete Wentz

Joe Trohman

Andy Hurley

Bob McLynn - Crush Music

Sean O'Keefe - Producer/Mixer

John Janick - Fueled By Ramen

Tim McIlrath - Rise Against

Mani Mostofi - Racetraitor

Chris Gutierrez - Arma Angelus

Mark Rose - Spitalfield

Sean Muttaqi - Uprising Records

Rory Felton - The Militia Group

Richard Reines - Drive-Thru Records

"To Feel No More Bitterness Forever" - From Hardcore to Softcore, 1998-2000

PETE WENTZ: When I got into hardcore, it was about discovering the world beyond yourself. There was a culture of trying to be a better person. That was part of what was so alluring about hardcore and punk for me. But for whatever reason, it shifted. Maybe this was just in Chicago, but it became less about the thought process behind it and more about moshing and breakdowns. There was a close-mindedness that felt very reactive.

TIM MCILRITH: I saw First Born many years ago, which was the first time I saw Pete and met him around then. This was '90s hardcore - p.c., vegan, activist kind of hardcore music. Pete was in many of those bands doing that kind of thing, and I was at many of those shows. The hardcore scene in Chicago was pretty small, so everyone kind of knew each other. I knew Andy Hurley as the drummer in Racetraitor. I was in a band called Baxter, so Pete always called me 'Baxter.' I was just 'Baxter' to a lot of those guys.

JOE TROHMAN: I was a young hardcore kid coming to the shows. The same way we all started doing bands. You're a shitty kid who goes to punk and hardcore shows, and you see the other bands playing, and you want to make friends with those guys because you want to play in bands too. Pete and I had a bit of a connection because we're from the same area. I was the youngest dude at most shows. I would see Extinction, Racetraitor, Burn It Down, and all the bands of that era.

WENTZ: My driver's license was suspended then, so Joe drove me everywhere. We listened to either Metalcore like Shai Hulud or pop-punk stuff like Screeching Weasel.

MCILRITH: I was in a band with Pete called Arma Angelus. I was like their fifth or sixth bass player. I wasn't doing anything musically when they hit me up to play bass, so I said, 'Of course.' I liked everyone in the band. We were rehearsing, playing a few shows here and there, with an ever-revolving cast of characters. We recorded a record together at the time. I even sing on that record, believe it or not, they gave me a vocal part. Around that same time, I began meeting with [bassist] Joe [Principe] about starting what would become Rise Against.

CHRIS GUTIERREZ: Wentz played me the Arma Angelus demo in the car. He said he wanted it to be a mix of Despair, Buried Alive, and Damnation A.D. He told me Tim was leaving to start another band - which ended up being Rise Against - and asked if I wanted to play bass.

TROHMAN: Pete asked me to fill in for a tour when I was 15. Pete had to call my dad to convince him to let me go. He did it, too. It was my first tour, in a shitty cargo van, with those dudes. They hazed the shit out of me. It was the best and worst experience. Best overall, worst at the time.

GUTIERREZ: Enthusiasm was starting to wane in Arma Angelus. Our drummer was really into cock-rock. It wasn't an ironic thing. He loved L.A. Guns, Whitesnake, and Hanoi Rocks. It drove Pete nuts because the scene was about Bleeding Through and Throwdown, not cock rock. He was frustrated that things weren't panning out for the band, and of course, there's a ceiling for how big a metalcore band can get, anyway.

MANI MOSTOFI: Pete had honed this tough guy persona, which I think was a defense mechanism. He had some volatile moments in his childhood. Underneath, he was a pretty sensitive and vulnerable person. After playing in every mosh-metal band in the Midwest and listening exclusively to Earth Crisis, Damnation A.D., Chokehold, and stuff like that for a long time, I think Pete wanted to do something fresh. He had gotten into Lifetime, Saves The Day, The Get Up Kids, and bands like that. Pete was at that moment where the softer side of him needed an outlet, and didn't want to hide behind mosh-machismo. I remember him telling me he wanted to start a band that more girls could listen to.

MCILRATH: Pete was talking about starting a pop-punk band. Bands like New Found Glory and Saves The Day were successful then. The whole pop-punk sound was accessible. Pete was just one of those guys destined for bigger things than screaming for mediocre hardcore bands in Chicago. He's a smart guy, a brilliant guy. All the endeavors he had taken on, even in the microcosm of the 1990s Chicago hardcore world, he put a lot of though into it. You could tell that if he were given a bigger receptacle to put that thought into, it could become something huge. He was always talented: lyrics, imagery, that whole thing. He was ahead of the curve. We were in this hardcore band from Chicago together, but we were both talking about endeavors beyond it.

TROHMAN: The drummer for Arma Angelus was moving. Pete and I talked about doing something different. It was just Pete and me at first. There was this thuggishness happening in the Chicago hardcore scene at that time that wasn't part of our vibe. It was cool, but it wasn't our thing.

MCILRITH: One day at Arma Angelus practice, Pete asked me, 'Are you going to do that thing with Joe?' I was like, 'Yeah, I think so.' He was like, 'You should do that, dude. Don't let this band hold you back. I'll be doing something else, too. We should be doing other things.' He was really ambitious. It was so amazing to me, too, because Pete was a guy who, at the time, was kind of learning how to play the bass. A guy who didn't really play an instrument will do down in history as one of the more brilliant musicians in Chicago. He had everything else in his corner. He knew how to do everything else. He needed to get some guys behind him because he had the rest covered. He had topics, themes, lyrics, artwork, this whole image he wanted to do, and he was uncompromising. He also tapped into something the rest of us were just waking up to: the advent of the internet. I mean, the internet wasn't new, but higher-speed internet was.

MOSTOFI: Joe was excited to be invited by Pete to do a band. Joe was the youngest in our crew by far, and Pete was the 'coolest' in a Fonzie sort of way. Joe deferred to Pete's judgement for years. But eventually, his whole life centered around bossy big-brother Pete. I think doing The Damned Things was for Joe what Fall Out Boy was for Pete, in a way. It was a way to find his own space within the group of friends. Unsurprisingly, Joe now plays a much more significant role in Fall Out Boy's music.

WENTZ: I wanted to do something easy and escapist. When Joe and I started the band, it was the worst band of all time. I feel like people said, 'Oh, yeah, you started Fall Out Boy to get big.' Dude, there was way more of a chance of every other band getting big in my head than Fall Out Boy. It was a side thing that was fun to do. Racetraitor and Extinction were big bands to me. We wanted to do pop-punk because it would be fun and hilarious. It was definitely on a lark. We weren't good. If it was an attempt at selling out, it was a very poor attempt.

MCILRITH: It was such a thing for people to move from hardcore bands to bands called 'emo' or pop-punk, as those bands were starting to get some radio play and signed to major labels. Everyone thought it was easy, but it's not as easy as that. Most guys we knew who tried it never did anything more successful than their hardcore bands. But Pete did it! And if anyone was going to, it was going to be him. He never did anything half-assed. He ended up playing bass in so many bands in Chicago, even though he could barely play the bass then, because simply putting him in your band meant you'd have a better show. He was just more into it. He knew more about dynamics, about getting a crowd to react to what you're doing than most people. Putting Pete in your band put you up a few notches.

"I'm Writing You A Chorus And Here Is Your Verse" - When Pete met Patrick, early 2001.

MARK ROSE: Patrick Stump played drums in this grindcore band called Grinding Process. They had put out a live split cassette tape.

PATRICK STUMP: My ambition always outweighed my ability or actual place in the world. I was a drummer and played in many bands and tried to finagle my way into better ones but never really managed. I was usually outgunned by the same two guys: this guy Rocky Senesce; I'm not sure if he's playing anymore, but he was amazing. And this other guy, De'Mar Hamilton, who is now in Plain White T's. We'd always go out for the same bands. I felt like I was pretty good, but then those guys just mopped the floor with me. I hadn't been playing music for a few months. I think my girlfriend dumped me. I was feeling down. I wasn't really into pop-punk or emo. I think at the time I was into Rhino Records box sets.

TROHMAN: I was at the Borders in Eden's Plaza in Wilmette, Illinois. My friend Arthur was asking me about Neurosis. Patrick just walked up and started talking to me.

STUMP: I was a bit arrogant and cocky, like a lot of young musicians. Joe was talking kind of loudly and I overheard him say something about Neurosis, and I think I came in kind of snotty, kind of correcting whatever they had said.

TROHMAN: We just started talking about music, and my buddy Arthur got shoved out of the conversation. I told him about the band we were starting. Pete was this local hardcore celebrity, which intrigued Patrick.

STUMP: I had similar conversations with any number of kids my age. This conversation didn't feel crazy special. That's one of the things that's real about [Joe and I meeting], and that's honest about it, that's it's not some 'love at first sight' thing where we started talking about music and 'Holy smokes, we're going to have the best band ever!' I had been in a lot of bands up until then. Hardcore was a couple of years away from me at that point. I was over it, but Pete was in real bands; that was interesting. Now I'm curious and I want to do this thing, or at least see what happens. Joe said they needed a drummer, guitar player, or singer, and I kind of bluffed and said I could do any one of those things for a pop-punk band. I'd had a lot of conversations about starting bands where I meet up with somebody and maybe try to figure out some songs and then we'd never see each other again. There were a lot of false starts and I assumed this would be just another one of those, but it would be fun for this one to be with the guy from Racetraitor and Extinction.

TROHMAN: He gave me the link to his MP3.com page. There were a few songs of him just playing acoustic and singing. He was awesome.

WENTZ: Joe told me we were going to this kid's house who would probably be our drummer but could also sing. He sent me a link to Patrick singing some acoustic thing, but the quality was so horrible it was hard to tell what it was. Patrick answered the door in some wild outfit. He looked like an emo kid but from the Endpoint era - dorky and cool. We went into the basement, and he was like, trying to set up his drums.

TROHMAN: Patrick has said many times that he intended to try out on drums. I was pushing for him to sing after hearing his demos. 'Hey! Sing for us!' I asked him to take out his acoustic guitar. He played songs from Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. I think he sang most of the record to us. We were thrilled. We had never been around someone who could sing like that.

WENTZ: I don't think Patrick thought we were cool at all. We were hanging out, and he started playing acoustic guitar. He started singing, and I realized he could sing any Saves The Day song. I was like, 'Wow, that's the way those bands sound! We should just have you sing.' It had to be serendipity because Patrick drumming and Joe singing is not the same band. I never thought about singing. It wasn't the type of thing I could sing. I knew I'd be playing bass. I didn't think it'd even go beyond a few practices. It didn't seem like the thing I was setting myself up to do for the next several years of my life in any way. I was going to college. It was just a fun getaway from the rest of life kind of thing to do.

STUMP: Andy was the first person we asked to play drums. Joe even brought him up in the Borders conversation. But Andy was too busy. He wasn't really interested, either, because we kind of sucked.

WENTZ: I wanted Hurley in the band, I was closest to him at the time, I had known him for a long time. I identified with him in the way that we were the younger dudes in our larger group. I tried to get him, but he was doing another band at the time, or multiple bands. He was Mani's go-to guy to play drums, always. I had asked him a few times. That should clue people into the fact that we weren't that good.

ANDY HURLEY: I knew Joe as 'Number One Fan.' We called him that because he was a huge fan of a band I was in, Kill The Slavemaster. When Fall Out Boy started, I was going to college full-time. I was in the band Project Rocket and I think The Kill Pill then, too.

MOSTOFI: After they got together the first or second time, Pete played me a recording and said, 'This is going to be big.' They had no songs, no name, no drummer. They could barely play their instruments. But Pete knew, and we believed him because we could see his drive and Patrick's potential. Patrick was prodigy. I imagine the first moment Pete heard him sing was probably like when I heard 15-year-old Andy Hurley play drums.

GUTIERREZ: One day at practice, Pete told me he had met some dudes with whom he was starting a pop-punk band. He said it would sound like a cross between New Found Glory and Lifetime. Then the more Fall Out Boy started to practice, the less active Arma Angelus became.

TROHMAN: We got hooked up with a friend named Ben Rose, who became our original drummer. We would practice in his parents' basement. We eventually wrote some pretty bad songs. I don't even have the demo. I have copies of Arma's demo, but I don't have that one.

MOSTOFI: We all knew that hardcore kids write better pop-punk songs than actual pop-punk kids. It had been proven. An experienced hardcore musician could bring a sense of aggression and urgency to the pop hooks in a way that a band like Yellowcard could never achieve. Pete and I had many conversations about this. He jokingly called it 'Softcore,' but that's precisely what it was. It's what he was going for. Take This To Your Grave sounds like Hot Topic, but it feels like CBGBs.

MCILRITH: Many hardcore guys who transitioned into pop-punk bands dumbed it down musically and lyrically. Fall Out Boy found a way to do it that wasn't dumbed down. They wrote music and lyrics that, if you listened closely, you could tell came from people who grew up into hardcore. Pete seemed to approach the song titles and lyrics the same way he attacked hardcore songs. You could see his signature on all of that.

STUMP: We all had very different ideas of what it should sound like. I signed up for Kid Dynamite, Strike Anywhere, or Dillinger Four. Pete was very into Lifetime and Saves The Day. I think both he and Joe were into New Found Glory and Blink-182. I still hadn't heard a lot of stuff. I was arrogant; I was a rock snob. I was over most pop-punk. But then I had this renaissance week where I was like, 'Man, you know what? I really do like The Descendents.' Like, the specific week I met Joe, it just happened to be that I was listening to a lot of Descendents. So, there was a part of me that was tickled by that idea. 'You know what? I'll try a pop-punk band. Why not?'

MOSTOFI: To be clear, they were trying to become a big band. But they did it by elevating radio-friendly pop punk, not debasing themselves for popularity. They were closely studying Drive-Thru Records bands like The Starting Line, who I couldn't stand. But they knew what they were doing. They extracted a few good elements from those bands and combined them with their other influences. Patrick never needed to be auto-tuned. He can sing. Pete never had to contrive this emotional depth. He always had it.

STUMP: The ideas for band names were obnoxious. At some point, Pete and I were arguing over it, and I think our first drummer, Ben Rose, who was in the hardcore band Strength In Numbers, suggested Fall Out Boy. Pete and I were like, 'Well, we don't hate that one. We'll keep it on the list.' But we never voted on a name.

"Fake It Like You Matter" - The Early Shows, 2001

The name Fall Out Boy made their shortlist, but their friends ultimately chose it for them. The line-up at the band's first show was Patrick Stump (sans guitar), Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, drummer Ben Rose, and guitarist John Flamandan in his only FOB appearance.

STUMP: We didn't have a name at our two or three shows. We were basically booked as 'Pete's new band' as he was the most known of any of us. Pete and I were the artsy two.

TROHMAN: The rest of us had no idea what we were doing onstage.

STUMP: We took ourselves very seriously and completely different ideas on what was 'cool.' Pete at the time was somewhere between maybe Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski, and kind of New Romantic and Manchester stuff, so he had that in mind. The band names he suggested were long and verbose, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I was pretty much only into Tom Waits, so I wanted everything to be a reference to Tom Waits. The first show was at DePaul [University] in some cafeteria. The room looked a lot nicer than punk rock shows are supposed to look, like a room where you couldn't jump off the walls. We played with a band called Stillwell. I want to say one of the other bands played Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath in its entirety. We were out of place. We were tossing a few different names around. The singer for Stillwell was in earshot of the conversation so I was like 'Hey, settle this for us,' and told him whatever name it was, which I can't remember. 'What do you think of this name?' He goes, 'It sucks.' And the way he said it, there was this element to it, like, 'You guys probably suck, too, so whatever.' That was our first show. We played first and only had three songs. That was John's only show with us, and I never saw him again. I was just singing without a guitar, and I had never just sung before; that was horrifying. We blazed through those songs.

ROSE: Patrick had this shoulder-length hair. Watching these guys who were known for heavier stuff play pop-punk was strange. Pete was hopping around with the X's on his hands. Spitalfield was similar; we were kids playing another style of music who heard Texas Is The Reason and Get Up Kids and said, 'We have to start a band like this.'

MOSTOFI: The first show was a lot of fun. The musical side wasn't there, but Pete and Patrick's humor and charisma were front and center.

TROHMAN: I remember having a conversation with Mani about stage presence. He was telling me how important it was. Coalesce and The Dillinger Escape Plan would throw mic stands and cabinets. We loved that visual excitement and appeal. Years later, Patrick sang a Fall Out Boy song with Taylor Swift at Giants Stadium. It was such a great show to watch that I was reminded of how wise Mani was to give me that advice back then. Mani was like a mentor for me, honestly. He would always guide me through stuff.

MOSTOFI: Those guys grew up in Chicago, either playing in or seeing Extinction, Racetraitor, Los Crudos, and other bands that liked to talk and talk between songs. Fall Out Boy did that, and it was amazing. Patrick was awkward in a knowing and hilarious way. He'd say something odd, and then Pete would zing him. Or Pete would try to say something too cool, and Patrick would remind him they were nerds. These are very personal memories for me. Millions of people have seen the well-oiled machine, but so few of us saw those guys when they were so carefree.

TROHMAN: We had this goofy, bad first show, but all I can tell you was that I was determined to make this band work, no matter what.

STUMP: I kind of assumed that was the end of that. 'Whatever, on with our lives.' But Joe was very determined. He was going to pick us up for practice and we were going to keep playing shows. He was going to make the band happen whether the rest of us wanted to or not. That's how we got past show number one. John left the band because we only had three songs and he wasn't very interested. In the interim, I filled in on guitar. I didn't consider myself a guitar player. Our second show was a college show in Southern Illinois or something.

MCILRITH: That show was with my other band, The Killing Tree.

STUMP: We showed up late and played before The Killing Tree. There was no one there besides the bands and our friends. I think we had voted on some names. Pete said 'Hey, we're whatever!'; probably something very long. And someone yells out, 'Fuck that, no, you're Fall Out Boy!' Then when The Killing Tree was playing, Tim said, 'I want to thank Fall Out Boy.' Everyone looked up to Tim, so when he forced the name on us, it was fine. I was a diehard Simpsons fan, without question. I go pretty deep on The Simpsons. Joe and I would just rattle off Simpsons quotes. I used to do a lot of Simpsons impressions. Ben was very into Simpsons; he had a whole closet full of Simpsons action figures.

"If Only You Knew I Was Terrified" - The Early Recordings, 2002-2003

Wentz's relationships in the hardcore scene led to Fall Out Boy's first official releases. A convoluted and rarely properly explained chain of events resulted in the Fall Out Boy/Project Rocket split EP and Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend. Both were issued by California's Uprising Records, whose discography included Racetraitor's first album and the debut EP by Burn It Down. The band traveled to Wisconsin to record their first proper demo with engineer Jared Logan, drummer for Uprising's 7 Angels 7 Plagues.

TROHMAN: This isn't to be confused with the demo we did in Ben's basement, which was like a tape demo. This was our first real demo.

STUMP: Between booking the demo and recording it, we lost Ben Rose. He was the greatest guy, but it wasn't working out musically. Pete and Joe decided I should play drums on the demo. But Jared is a sick drummer, so he just did it.

TROHMAN: We had gotten this great singer but went through a series of drummers that didn't work out. I had to be the one who kicked Ben out. Not long after, our friend Brett Bunting played with us. I don't think he really wanted to do it, which was a bummer.

STUMP: I showed up to record that demo, feeling pulled into it. I liked hanging out with the guys, but I was a rock snob who didn't really want to be making that type of music. The first few songs were really rough. We were sloppy. We barely practiced. Pete was in Arma Angelus. Joe was the guy determined to make it happen. We couldn't keep a drummer or guitar player, and I could barely play guitar. I didn't really want to be in Fall Out Boy. We had these crappy songs that kind of happened; it didn't feel like anything. Joe did the guitars. I go in to do the vocals, I put on the headphones, and it starts playing and was kind of not bad! It was pretty good, actually. I was shocked. That was the first time I was like, 'Maybe I am supposed to be in this band.' I enjoyed hearing it back.

SEAN MUTTAQI: Wentz and I were pretty tight. He sent me some demos, and while I didn't know it would get as big as it did, I knew it was special. Wentz had a clear vision. Of all the guys from that scene, he was the most singularly focused on taking things to the next level. He was ahead of the game with promotion and the early days of social media.

STUMP: Arma Angelus had been on Eulogy. We talked to them a bit and spoke to Uprising because they had put out Racetraitor. At some point, the demo got to Sean, and he decided to make it half of a split with Andy's band, Project Rocket. We were pretty happy with that.

HURLEY: It was kind of competitive for me at the time. Project Rocket and Fall Out Boy were both doing pop-punk/pop-rock, I met Patrick through the band. I didn't really know him before Fall Out Boy.

TROHMAN: We got this drummer, Mike Pareskuwicz, who had been in a hardcore band from Central Illinois called Subsist.

STUMP: Uprising wanted us to make an album. We thought that was cool, but we only had those three songs that were on the split. We were still figuring ourselves out. One of the times we were recording with Jared in the studio, for the split or the album, this guy T.J. Kunasch was there. He was like, 'Hey, do you guys need a guitarist?' And he joined.

MUTTAQI: I borrowed some money to get them back in the studio. The songwriting was cool on that record, but it was all rushed. The urgency to get something out led to the recording being subpar. Their new drummer looked the part but couldn't really play. They had already tracked the drums before they realized it didn't sound so hot.

STUMP: The recording experience was not fun. We had two days to do an entire album. Mike was an awesome dude, but he lived crazy far away, in Kanakee, Illinois, so the drive to Milwaukee wasn't easy for him. He had to work or something the next day. So, he did everything in one take and left. He played alone, without a click, so it was a ness to figure out. We had to guess where the guitar was supposed to go. None of us liked the songs because we had slapped them together. We thought it all sucked. But I thought, 'Well, at least it'll be cool to have something out.' Then a lot of time went by. Smaller labels were at the mercy of money, and it was crazy expensive to put out a record back then.

MUTTAQI: Our record was being rushed out to help generate some interest, but that interest was building before we could even get the record out. We were beholden to finances while changing distribution partners and dealing with other delays. The buck stops with me, yes, but I didn't have that much control over the scheduling.

WENTZ: It's not what I would consider the first Fall Out Boy record. Hurley isn't on it and he's an integral part of the Fall Out Boy sound. But it is part of the history, the legacy. NASA didn't go right to the moon. They did test flights in the desert. Those are our test flights in the desert. It's not something I'm ashamed of or have weird feelings about.

STUMP: It's kind of embarrassing to me. Evening Out... isn't representative of the band we became. I liked Sean a lot, so it's nothing against him. If anybody wants to check out the band in that era, I think the split EP is a lot cooler. Plus, Andy is on that one.

TROHMAN: T.J. was the guy who showed up to the show without a guitar. He was the guy that could never get it right, but he was in the band for a while because we wanted a second guitar player. He's a nice dude but wasn't great to be in a band with back then. One day he drove unprompted from Racine to Chicago to pick up some gear. I don't know how he got into my parents' house, but the next thing I knew, he was in my bedroom. I didn't like being woken up and kicked him out of the band from bed.

STUMP: Our friend Brian Bennance asked us to do a split 7" with 504 Plan, which was a big band to us. Brian offered to pay for us to record with Sean O'Keefe, which was also a big deal. Mike couldn't get the time off work to record with us. We asked Andy to play on the songs. He agreed to do it, but only if he could make it in time after recording an entire EP with his band, The Kill Pill, in Chicago, on the same day.

MOSTOFI: Andy and I started The Kill Pill shortly after Racetraitor split up, not long after Fall Out Boy had formed. We played a bunch of local shows together. The minute Andy finished tracking drums for our EP in Chicago, he raced to the other studio in Madison.

STUMP: I'm getting ready to record the drums myself, getting levels and checking the drums, pretty much ready to go. And then in walks Andy Hurley. I was a little bummed because I really wanted to play drums that day. But then Andy goes through it all in like two takes and fucking nailed the entire thing. He just knocked it out of the park. All of us were like, 'That's crazy!'

WENTZ: When Andy came in, It just felt different. It was one of those 'a-ha' moments.

STUMP: Sean leaned over to us and said, 'You need to get this guy in the band.'

SEAN O'KEEFE: We had a blast. We pumped It out. We did it fast and to analog tape. People believe it was very Pro Tools oriented, but it really was done to 24-track tape. Patrick sang his ass off.

STUMP: The songs we had were 'Dead On Arrival,' 'Saturday,' and 'Homesick at Space Camp. There are quite a few songs that ended up on Take This To You Grave where I wrote most of the lyrics but Pete titled them.

WENTZ: 'Space Camp' was a reference to the 1986 movie, SpaceCamp, and the idea of space camp. Space camp wasn't something anyone in my area went to. Maybe they did, but it was never an option for me. It seems like the little kid version of meeting Jay-Z. The idea was also: what if you, like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie, took off to outer space and wanted to get home? 'I made it to space and now I'm just homesick and want to hang out with my friends.' In the greater sense, it's about having it all, but it's still not enough. There's a pop culture reference in 'Saturday' that a lot of people miss. 'Pete and I attack the lost Astoria' was a reference to The Goonies, which was filmed in Astoria, Oregon.

HURLEY: I remember hearing those recordings, especially 'Dead on Arrival,' and Patrick's voice and how well written those songs were, especially relative to anything else I had done - I had a feeling that this could do something.

WENTZ: It seemed like it would stall out if we didn't get a solid drummer in the band soon. That was the link that we couldn't nail down. Patrick was always a big musical presence. He thinks and writes rhythmi-cally, and we couldn't get a drummer to do what he wanted or speak his language. Hurley was the first one that could. It's like hearing two drummers talk together when they really get it. It sounds like a foreign language because it's not something I'm keyed into. Patrick needed someone on a similar musical plane. I wasn't there. Joe was younger and was probably headed there.

HURLEY: When Patrick was doing harmonies, it was like Queen. He's such a brilliant dude. I was always in bands that did a record and then broke up. I felt like this was a band that could tour a lot like the hardcore bands we loved, even if we had to have day jobs, too.

"(Four) Tired Boys And A Broken Down Van" - The Early Tours, 2002-2003

STUMP: We booked a tour with Spitalfield, another Chicago band, who had records out, so they were a big deal to us. We replaced T.J. with a guy named Brandon Hamm. He was never officially in the band. He quit when we were practicing 'Saturday.' He goes, 'I don't like that. I don't want to do this anymore.' Pete talked with guitarist Chris Envy from Showoff, who had just broken up. Chris said, 'Yeah, I'll play in your band.' He came to two practices, then quit like two days before the tour. It was only a two-week tour, but Mike couldn't get the time off work from Best Buy, or maybe it was Blockbuster. We had to lose Mike, which was the hardest member change for me. It was unpleasant.

TROHMAN: We had been trying to get Andy to join the band for a while. Even back at that first Borders conversation, we talked about him, but he was too busy at the time.

STUMP: I borrowed one of Joe's guitars and jumped in the fire. We were in this legendarily shitty used van Pete had gotten. It belonged to some flower shop, so it had this ominously worn-out flower decal outside and no windows [except in the front]. Crappy brakes, no A/C, missing the rearview mirror, no seats in the back, only the driver's seat. About 10 minutes into the tour, we hit something. A tire exploded and slingshot into the passenger side mirror, sending glass flying into the van. We pulled over into some weird animal petting zoo. I remember thinking, 'This is a bad omen for this tour.' Spitalfield was awesome, and we became tight with them. Drew Brown, who was later in Weekend Nachos, was out with them, too. But most of the shows were canceled.

WENTZ: We'd end up in a town, and our show was canceled, or we'd have three days off. 'Let's just get on whatever show we can. Whatever, you can pay us in pizza.'

STUMP: We played in a pizza place. We basically blocked the line of people trying to order pizza, maybe a foot away from the shitty tables. Nobody is trying to watch a band. They're just there to eat pizza. And that was perhaps the biggest show we played on that tour. One of the best moments on the Spitalfied tour was in Lincoln, Nebraska. The local opener wasn't even there - they were at the bar across the street and showed up later with two people. Fall Out Boy played for Spitalfield, and Spitalfield played for Fall Out Boy. Even the sound guy had left. It was basically an empty room. It was miserable.

HURLEY: Even though we played a ton of shows in front of just the other bands, it was awesome. I've known Pete forever and always loved being in bands with him. After that tour, it was pretty much agreed that I would be in the band. I wanted to be in the band.

WENTZ: We would play literally any show in those days for free. We played Chain Reaction in Orange County with a bunch of metalcore bands. I want to say Underoath was one of them. I remember a lot of black shirts and crossed arms at those kinds of shows. STUMP: One thing that gets lost in the annals of history is Fall Out Boy, the discarded hardcore band. We played so many hardcore shows! The audiences were cool, but they were just like, 'This is OK, but we'd really rather be moshing right now.' Which was better than many of the receptions we got from pop-punk kids.

MOSTOFI: Pete made sure there was little division between the band and the audience. In hardcore, kids are encouraged to grab the mic. Pete was very conscious about making the crowd feel like friends. I saw them in Austin, Texas, in front of maybe ten kids. But it was very clear all ten of those kids felt like Pete's best friends. And they were, in a way.

MCILRITH: People started to get into social networking. That kind of thing was all new to us, and they were way ahead. They networked with their fans before any of us.

MOSTOFI: Pete shared a lot about his life online and was intimate as hell. It was a new type of scene. Pete extended the band's community as far as fiber optics let him.

ROSE: Pete was extremely driven. Looking back, I wish I had that killer instinct. During that tour; we played a show in Colorado. On the day of the show, we went to Kinko's to make flyers to hand out to college kids. Pete put ‘members of Saves The Day and Screeching Weasel’ on the flyer. He was just like, 'This will get people in.'

WENTZ: We booked a lot of our early shows through hardcore connections, and to some extent, that carries through to what Fall Out Boy shows are like today. If you come to see us play live, we're basically Slayer compared to everyone else when we play these pop radio shows. Some of that carries back to what you must do to avoid being heckled at hardcore shows. You may not like our music, but you will leave here respecting us. Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to give a shit. But you need to earn a crowd's respect. That was an important way for us to learn that.

MOSTOFI: All those dudes, except Andy, lived in this great apartment with our friend Brett Bunting, who was almost their drummer at one point. The proximity helped them gel.

STUMP: There were a lot of renegade last-minute shows where we'd just call and get added. We somehow ended up on a show with Head Automatica that way.

MCILRITH: At some point early on, they opened for Rise Against in a church basement in Downers Grove. We were doing well then; headlining that place was a big deal. Then Pete's band was coming up right behind us, and you could tell there was a lot of chatter about Fall Out Boy. I remember getting to the show, and there were many people there, many of whom I had never seen in the scene before. A lot of unfamiliar faces. A lot of people that wouldn't have normally found their way to the seedy Fireside Bowl in Chicago. These were young kids, and I was 21 then, so when I say young, I mean really young. Clearly, Fall Out Boy had tapped into something the rest of us had not. People were super excited to see them play and freaked out; there was a lot of enthusiasm at that show. After they finished, their fans bailed. They were dedicated. They wanted to see Fall Out Boy. They didn't necessarily want to see Rise Against play. That was my first clue that, 'Whoa, what Pete told me that day at Arma Angelus rehearsal is coming true. He was right.' Whatever he was doing was working.

"My Insides Are Copper, And I'd Like To Make Them Gold" - The Record Labels Come Calling, 2002

STUMP: The split EP was going to be a three-way split with 504 Plan, August Premier, and us at one point. But then the record just never happened. Brian backed out of putting it out. We asked him if we could do something else with the three songs and he didn't really seem to care. So, we started shopping the three songs as a demo. Pete ended up framing the rejection letters we got from a lot of pop-punk labels. But some were interested.

HURLEY: We wanted to be on Drive-Thru Records so bad. That was the label.

RICHARD REINES: After we started talking to them, I found the demo they had sent us in the office. I played it for my sister. We decided everything together. She liked them but wasn't as crazy about them as I was. We arranged with Pete to see them practice. We had started a new label called Rushmore. Fall Out Boy wasn't the best live band. We weren't thrilled [by the showcase]. But the songs were great. We both had to love a band to sign them, so my sister said, 'If you love them so much, let's sign them to Rushmore, not Drive Thru.'

HURLEY: We did a showcase for Richard and Stephanie Reines. They were just kind of like, 'Yeah, we have this side label thing. We'd be interested in having you on that.' I remember them saying they passed on Saves The Day and wished they would have put out Through Being Cool. But then they [basically] passed on us by offering to put us on Rushmore. We realized we could settle for that, but we knew it wasn't the right thing.

RORY FELTON: Kevin Knight had a website, TheScout, which always featured great new bands. I believe he shared the demo with us. I flew out to Chicago. Joe and Patrick picked me up at the airport. I saw them play at a VFW hall, Patrick drank an entire bottle of hot sauce on a dare at dinner, and then we all went to see the movie The Ring. I slept on the couch in their apartment, the one featured on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. Chad [Pearson], my partner, also flew out to meet with the band.

STUMP: It was a weird time to be a band because it was feast or famine. At first, no one wanted us. Then as soon as one label said, 'Maybe we'll give 'em a shot,' suddenly there's a frenzy of phone calls from record labels. We were getting our shirts printed by Victory Records. One day, we went to pick up shirts, and someone came downstairs and said, 'Um, guys? [Owner] Tony [Brummel] wants to see you.' We were like, 'Did we forget to pay an invoice?' He made us an offer on the spot. We said, 'That's awesome, but we need to think about it.' It was one of those 'now or never' kinds of things. I think we had even left the van running. It was that kind of sudden; we were overwhelmed by it.

HURLEY: They told me Tony said something like, 'You can be with the Nike of the record industry or the Keds of the record industry.'

STUMP: We'd get random calls at the apartment. 'Hey, I'm a manager with so-and-so.' I talked to some boy band manager who said, 'We think you'll be a good fit.'

TROHMAN: The idea of a manager was a ‘big-time' thing. I answered a call one day, and this guy is like, 'I'm the manager for the Butthole Surfers, and I'd really like to work with you guys.' I just said, Yeah, I really like the Butthole Surfers, but I'll have to call you back.' And I do love that band. But I just knew that wasn't the right thing.

STUMP: Not all the archetypes you always read about are true. The label guys aren't all out to get you. Some are total douchebags. But then there are a lot who are sweet and genuine. It's the same thing with managers. I really liked the Militia Group. They told us it was poor form to talk to us without a manager. They recommended Bob McLynn.

FELTON: We knew the guys at Crush from working with Acceptance and The Beautiful Mistake. We thought they'd be great for Fall Out Boy, so we sent the music to their team.

STUMP: They said Crush was their favorite management company and gave us their number. Crush's biggest band at the time was American Hi-Fi. Jonathan Daniels, the guy who started the company, sent a manager to see us. The guy was like, "This band sucks!' But Jonathan liked us and thought someone should do something with us. Bob was his youngest rookie manager. He had never managed anyone, and we had never been managed.

BOB MCLYNN: Someone else from my office who isn't with us anymore had seen them, but I hadn't seen them yet. At the time, we'd tried to manage Brand New; they went elsewhere, and I was bummed. Then we got the Fall Out Boy demo, and I was like, Wow. This sounds even better. This guy can really sing, and these songs are great.' I remember going at it hard after that whole thing. Fall Out Boy was my consolation prize. I don't know if they were talking to other managers or not, but Pete and I clicked.

TROHMAN: In addition to being really creative, Pete is really business savvy. We all have a bullshit detector these days, but Pete already had one back then. We met Bob, and we felt like this dude wouldn't fuck us over.

STUMP: We were the misfit toy that nobody else wanted. Bob really believed in us when nobody else did and when nobody believed in him. What's funny is that all the other managers at Crush were gone within a year. It was just Bob and Jonathan, and now they're partners. Bob was the weird New York Hardcore guy who scared me at the time.

TROHMAN: We felt safe with him. He's a big, hulking dude.

MCLYNN: We tried to make a deal with The Militia Group, but they wouldn't back off on a few things in the agreement. I told them those were deal breakers, opening the door to everyone else. I knew this band needed a shot to do bigger and better things.

TROHMAN: He told us not to sign with the label that recommended him to us. We thought there was something very honest about that.

MCLYNN: They paid all their dues. Those guys worked harder than any band I'd ever seen, and I was all about it. I had been in bands before and had just gotten out. I was getting out of the van just as these guys got into one. They busted their asses.

STUMP: A few labels basically said the same thing: they wanted to hear more. They weren't convinced we could write another song as good as 'Dead On Arrival.' I took that as a challenge. We returned to Sean a few months after those initial three songs, this time at Gravity Studios in Chicago. We recorded ‘Grenade Jumper' and 'Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy' in a night or two. 'Where is Your Boy' was my, 'Fine, you don't think I can write a fucking song? Here's your hit song, jerks!' But I must have pushed Pete pretty hard [arguing about the songs]. One night, as he and I drove with Joe, Pete said, 'Guys, I don't think I want to do this band anymore.' We talked about it for the rest of the ride home. I didn't want to be in the band in the first place! I was like, 'No! That's not fair! Don't leave me with this band! Don't make me kind of like this band, and then leave it! That's bullshit!' Pete didn't stay at the apartment that night. I called him at his parent's house. I told him I wasn't going to do the band without him. He was like, 'Don't break up your band over it.' I said, 'It's not my band. It's a band that you, Joe, and I started.' He was like, 'OK, I'll stick around.' And he came back with a vengeance.

WENTZ: It was maybe the first time we realized we could do these songs titles that didn't have much do with the song from the outside. Grand Theft Auto was such a big pop culture franchise. If you said the phrase back then, everyone recognized it. The play on words was about someone stealing your time in the fall. It was the earliest experimentation with that so it was a little simplistic compared to the stuff we did later. At the time, we'd tell someone the song title, and they'd say, 'You mean "Auto"'?

JOHN JANICK: I saw their name on fliers and thought it was strange. But I remembered it. Then I saw them on a flyer with one of our bands from Chicago, August Premier. I called them and asked about this band whose name I had seen on a few flyers now. They told me they were good and I should check it out. I heard an early version of a song online and instantly fell in love with it. Drive-Thru, The Militia Group, and a few majors tried to sign them. I was the odd man out. But I knew I wanted them right away.

HURLEY: Fueled By Ramen was co-owned by Vinnie [Fiorello] from Less Than Jake. It wasn't necessarily a band I grew up loving, but I had so much respect for them and what they had done and were doing.

JANICK: I randomly cold-called them at the apartment and spoke to Patrick. He told me I had to talk to Pete. I spoke to Pete later that day. We ended up talking on the phone for an hour. It was crazy. I never flew out there. I just got to know them over the phone.

MCLYNN: There were majors [interested], but I didn't want the band on a major right away. I knew they wouldn't understand the band. Rob Stevenson from Island Records knew all the indie labels were trying to sign Fall Out Boy. We did this first-ever incubator sort of deal. I also didn't want to stay on an indie forever; I felt we needed to develop and have a chance to do bigger and better things, but these indies didn't necessarily have radio staff. It was sort of the perfect scenario. Island gave us money to go on Fueled By Ramen, with whom we did a one-off. No one else would offer a one-off on an indie.

STUMP: They were the smallest of the labels involved, with the least 'gloss.' I said, 'I don't know about this, Pete.' Pete was the one who thought it was the smartest move. He pointed out that we could be a big fish in a small pond. So, we rolled the dice.

HURLEY: It was a one-record deal with Fueled By Ramen. We didn't necessarily get signed to Island, but they had the 'right of first refusal' [for the album following Take This To Your Grave]. It was an awesome deal. It was kind of unheard of, maybe, but there was a bunch of money coming from Island that we didn't have to recoup for promo type of things.

JANICK: The company was so focused on making sure we broke Fall Out Boy; any other label probably wouldn't have had that dedication. Pete and I talked for at least an hour every day. Pete and I became so close, so much so that we started Decaydance. It was his thing, but we ended up signing Panic! At The Disco, Gym Class Heroes, Cobra Starship.

GUTIERREZ: Who could predict Pete would A&R all those bands? There's no Panic! At The Disco or Gym Class Heroes without Wentz. He made them into celebrities.

"Turn This Up And I'll Tune You Out" - The Making of Take This To You Grave, 2003

The versions of "Dead on Arrival," "Saturday," and "Homesick at Space Camp" from the first sessions with Andy on drums are what appear on the album. "Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy" and "Grenade Jumper" are the demo versions recorded later in Chicago. O'Keefe recorded the music for the rest of the songs at Smart Studios once again. They knocked out the remaining songs in just nine days. Sean and Patrick snuck into Gravity Studios in the middle of the night to track vocals in the dead of winter. Patrick sang those seven songs from two to five in the morning in those sessions.

STUMP: John Janick basically said, ‘I'll buy those five songs and we'll make them part of the album, and here's some money to go record seven more.'

MCLYNN: It was a true indie deal with Fueled by Ramen. I think we got between $15,000 and $18,000 all-in to make the album. The band slept on the studio floor some nights.

STUMP: From a recording standpoint, it was amazing. It was very pro, we had Sean, all this gear, the fun studio accoutrements were there. It was competitive with anything we did afterward. But meanwhile, we're still four broke idiots.

WENTZ: We fibbed to our parents about what we were doing. I was supposed to be in school. I didn't have access to money or a credit card. I don't think any of us did.

STUMP: I don't think we slept anywhere we could shower, which was horrifying. There was a girl that Andy's girlfriend at the time went to school with who let us sleep on her floor, but we'd be there for maybe four hours at a time. It was crazy.

HURLEY: Once, Patrick thought it would be a good idea to spray this citrus bathroom spray under his arms like deodorant. It just destroyed him because it's not made for that. But it was all an awesome adventure.

WENTZ: We were so green we didn't really know how studios worked. Every day there was soda for the band. We asked, 'Could you take that soda money and buy us peanut butter, jelly, and bread?' which they did. I hear that stuff in some ways when I listen to that album.

HURLEY: Sean pushed us. He was such a perfectionist, which was awesome. I felt like, ‘This is what a real professional band does.' It was our first real studio experience.

WENTZ: Seeing the Nirvana Nevermind plaque on the wall was mind-blowing. They showed us the mic that had been used on that album.

HURLEY: The mic that Kurt Cobain used, that was pretty awesome, crazy, legendary, and cool. But we didn't get to use it.

WENTZ: They said only Shirley Manson] from Garbage could use it.

O'KEEFE: Those dudes were all straight edge at the time. It came up in conversation that I had smoked weed once a few months before. That started this joke that I was this huge stoner, which obviously I wasn't. They'd call me 'Scoobie Snacks O'Keefe' and all these things. When they turned in the art for the record, they thanked me with like ten different stoner nicknames - 'Dimebag O'Keefe' and stuff like that. The record company made Pete take like seven of them out because they said it was excessively ridiculous.

WENTZ: Sean was very helpful. He worked within the budget and took us more seriously than anyone else other than Patrick. There were no cameras around. There was no documentation. There was nothing to indicate this would be some ‘legendary' session. There are 12 songs on the album because those were all the songs we had. There was no pomp or circumstance or anything to suggest it would be an 'important’ record.

STUMP: Pete and I were starting to carve out our niches. When Pete [re-committed himself to the band], it felt like he had a list of things in his head he wanted to do right. Lyrics were on that list. He wasn't playing around anymore. I wrote the majority of the lyrics up to that point - ‘Saturday,' 'Dead on Arrival,' ‘Where's Your Boy?,’ ‘Grenade Jumper,' and ‘Homesick at Space Camp.' I was an artsy-fartsy dude who didn't want to be in a pop-punk band, so I was going really easy on the lyrics. I wasn't taking them seriously. When I look back on it, I did write some alright stuff. But I wasn't trying. Pete doesn't fuck around like that, and he does not take that kindly. When we returned to the studio, he started picking apart every word, every syllable. He started giving me [notes]. I got so exasperated at one point I was like, ‘You just write the fucking lyrics, dude. Just give me your lyrics, and I'll write around them.' Kind of angrily. So, he did. We hadn't quite figured out how to do it, though. I would write a song, scrap my lyrics, and try to fit his into where mine had been. It was exhausting. It was a rough process. It made both of us unhappy.

MCLYNN: I came from the post-hardcore scene in New York and wasn't a big fan of the pop-punk stuff happening. What struck me with these guys was the phenomenal lyrics and Patrick's insane voice. Many guys in these kinds of bands can sing alright, but Patrick was like a real singer. This guy had soul. He'd take these great lyrics Pete wrote and combine it with that soul, and that's what made their unique sound. They both put their hearts on their sleeves when they wrote together.

STUMP: We had a massive fight over 'Chicago is So Two Years Ago.' I didn't even want to record that song. I was being precious with things that were mine. Part of me thought the band wouldn't work out, and I'd go to college and do some music alone. I had a skeletal version of 'Chicago...'. I was playing it to myself in the lobby of the studio. I didn't know anyone was listening. Sean was walking by and wanted to [introduce it to the others]. I kind of lost my song. I was very precious about it. Pete didn't like some of the lyrics, so we fought. We argued over each word, one at a time. 'Tell That Mick...' was also a pretty big fight. Pete ended up throwing out all my words on that one. That was the first song where he wrote the entire set of lyrics. My only change was light that smoke' instead of ‘cigarette' because I didn't have enough syllables to say 'cigarette.' Everything else was verbatim what he handed to me. I realized I must really want to be in this band at this point if I'm willing to put up with this much fuss. The sound was always more important to me - the rhythm of the words, alliteration, syncopation - was all very exciting. Pete didn't care about any of that. He was all meaning. He didn't care how good the words sounded if they weren't amazing when you read them. Man, did we fight about that. We fought for nine days straight while not sleeping and smelling like shit. It was one long argument, but I think some of the best moments resulted from that.

WENTZ: In 'Calm Before the Storm,' Patrick wrote the line, 'There's a song on the radio that says, 'Let's Get This Party Started' which is a direct reference to Pink's 2001 song 'Get the Party Started.' 'Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today' is a line from the movie Rushmore. I thought we'd catch a little more flack for that, but even when we played it in Ireland, there was none of that. It's embraced, more like a shoutout.

STUMP: Pete and I met up on a lot of the same pop culture. He was more into '80s stuff than I was. One of the first things we talked about were Wes Anderson movies.

WENTZ: Another thing driving that song title was the knowledge that our fanbase wouldn't necessarily be familiar with Wes Anderson. It could be something that not only inspired us but something fans could also go check out. People don't ask us about that song so much now, but in that era, we'd answer and tell them to go watch Rushmore. You gotta see this movie. This line is a hilarious part of it.' Hopefully some people did. I encountered Jason Schwartzman at a party once. We didn't get to talk about the movie, but he was the sweetest human, and I was just geeking out. He told me he was writing a film with Wes Anderson about a train trip in India. I wanted to know about the writing process. He was like, 'Well, he's in New York City, I'm in LA. It's crazy because I'm on the phone all the time and my ear gets really hot.' That's the anecdote I got, and I loved it.

O'KEEFE: They're totally different people who approach making music from entirely different angles. It's cool to see them work. Pete would want a certain lyric. Patrick was focused on the phrasing. Pete would say the words were stupid and hand Patrick a revision, and Patrick would say I can't sing those the way I need to sing this. They would go through ten revisions for one song. I thought I would lose my mind with both of them, but then they would find it, and it would be fantastic. When they work together, it lights up. It takes on a life of its own. It's not always happy. There's a lot of push and pull, and each is trying to get their thing. With Take This To Your Grave, we never let anything go until all three of us were happy. Those guys were made to do this together.

WENTZ: A lot of the little things weren't a big deal, but those were things that [felt like] major decisions. I didn't want 'Where Is Your Boy' on Take This To Your Grave.

JANICK: I freaked out. I called Bob and said, 'We must put this song on the album! It's one of the biggest songs.' He agreed. We called Pete and talked about it; he was cool about it and heard us out.

WENTZ: I thought many things were humongous, and they just weren't. They didn't matter one way or another.

"Our Lawyer Made Us Change The (Album Cover)" - That Photo On Take This To Your Grave, 2003

STUMP: The band was rooted in nostalgia from early on. The '80s references were very much Pete's aesthetic. He had an idea for the cover. It ended up being his girlfriend at the time, face down on the bed, exhausted, in his bedroom. That was his bedroom in our apartment. His room was full of toys, '80s cereals. If we ended up with the Abbey Road cover of pop-punk, that original one was Sgt. Pepper's. But we couldn't legally clear any of the stuff in the photo. Darth Vader, Count Chocula…

WENTZ: There's a bunch of junk in there: a Morrissey poster, I think a Cher poster, Edward Scissorhands. We submitted it to Fueled by Ramen, and they were like, 'We can't clear any of this stuff.’ The original album cover did eventually come out on the vinyl version.

STUMP: The photo that ended up being the cover was simply a promo photo for that album cycle. We had to scramble. I was pushing the Blue Note jazz records feel. That's why the CD looks a bit like vinyl and why our names are listed on the front. I wanted a live photo on the cover. Pete liked the Blue Note idea but didn't like the live photo idea. I also made the fateful decision to have my name listed as 'Stump' rather than Stumph.

WENTZ: What we used was initially supposed to be the back cover. I remember someone in the band being pissed about it forever. Not everyone was into having our names on the cover. It was a strange thing to do at the time. But had the original cover been used, it wouldn't have been as iconic as what we ended up with. It wouldn't have been a conversation piece. That stupid futon in our house was busted in the middle. We're sitting close to each other because the futon was broken. The exposed brick wall was because it was the worst apartment ever. It makes me wonder: How many of these are accidental moments? At the time, there was nothing iconic about it. If we had a bigger budget, we probably would have ended up with a goofier cover that no one would have cared about.

STUMP: One of the things I liked about the cover was that it went along with something Pete had always said. I'm sure people will find this ironic, but Pete had always wanted to create a culture with the band where it was about all four guys and not just one guy. He had the foresight to even think about things like that. I didn't think anyone would give a fuck about our band! At the time, it was The Pete Wentz Band to most people. With that album cover, he was trying to reject that and [demonstrate] that all four of us mattered. A lot of people still don't get that, but whatever. I liked that element of the cover. It felt like a team. It felt like Voltron. It wasn't what I like to call 'the flying V photo' where the singer is squarely in the center, the most important, and everyone else is nearest the camera in order of 'importance.' The drummer would be in the very back. Maybe the DJ guy who scratches records was behind the drummer.

"You Need Him. I Could Be Him. Where Is Your Boy Tonight?" - The Dynamics of Punk Pop's Fab 4, 2003

Patrick seemed like something of the anti-frontman, never hogging the spotlight and often shrinking underneath his baseball hat. Wentz was more talkative, more out front on stage and in interviews, in a way that felt unprecedented for a bass player who wasn't also singing. In some ways, Fall Out Boy operated as a two-headed dictatorship. Wentz and Stump are in the car's front seat while Joe and Andy ride in the back.

STUMP: There is a lot of truth to that. Somebody must be in the front seat, no question. But the analogy doesn't really work for us; were more like a Swiss Army knife. You've got all these different attachments, but they are all part of the same thing. When you need one specific tool, the rest go back into the handle. That was how the band functioned and still does in many ways. Pete didn't want anyone to get screwed. Some things we've done might not have been the best business decision but were the right human decision. That was very much Pete's thing. I was 19 and very reactionary. If someone pissed me off, I'd be like, 'Screw them forever!' But Pete was very tactful. He was the business guy. Joe was active on the internet. He wouldn't stop believing in this band. He was the promotions guy. Andy was an honest instrumentalist: ‘I'm a drummer, and I'm going to be the best fucking drummer I can be.' He is very disciplined. None of us were that way aside from him. I was the dictator in the studio. I didn't know what producing was at the time or how it worked, but in retrospect, I've produced a lot of records because I'm an asshole in the studio. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not the nicest guy in the studio. It's a lot easier to know what you don't want. We carved out those roles early. We were very dependent on each other.

MCLYNN: I remember sitting in Japan with those guys. None of them were drinking then, but I was drinking plenty. It was happening there, their first time over, and all the shows were sold out. I remember looking at Pete and Patrick and telling Pete, ‘You're the luckiest guy in the world because you found this guy.' Patrick laughed. Then I turned to Patrick and said the same thing to him. Because really, they're yin and yang. They fit together so perfectly. The fact that Patrick found this guy with this vision, Pete had everything for the band laid out in his mind. Patrick, how he can sing, and what he did with Pete's lyrics - no one else could have done that. We tried it, even with the Black Cards project in 2010. We'd find these vocalists. Pete would write lyrics, and they'd try to form them into songs, but they just couldn't do it the way Patrick could. Pete has notebooks full of stuff that Patrick turns into songs. Not only can he sing like that, but how he turns those into songs is an art unto itself. It's really the combination of those two guys that make Fall Out Boy what it is. They're fortunate they found each other.

"I Could Walk This Fine Line Between Elation And Success. We All Know Which Way I'm Going To Strike The Stake Between My Chest" - Fall Out Boy Hits the Mainstream, 2003

Released on May 6, 2003, Take This To Your Grave massively connected with fans. (Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend arrived in stores less than two months earlier.) While Take This To Your Grave didn't crack the Billboard 200 upon its release, it eventually spent 30 weeks on the charts. From Under the Cork Tree debuted in the Top 10 just two years later, largely on Grave's momentum. 2007's Infinity on High bowed at #1.

WENTZ: I remember noticing it was getting insane when we would do in-stores. We'd still play anywhere. That was our deal. We liked being able to sell our stuff in the stores, too. It would turn into a riot. We played a Hollister at the mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. A lot of these stores were pretty corporate with a lot of rules, but Hollister would let us rip. Our merch guy was wearing board shorts, took this surfboard off the wall, and started crowd-surfing with it during the last song. I remember thinking things had gotten insane right at that moment.

HURLEY: When we toured with Less Than Jake, there were these samplers with two of their songs and two of ours. Giving those out was a surreal moment. To have real promotion for a record... It wasn't just an ad in a 'zine or something. It was awesome.

MCLYNN: They toured with The Reunion Show, Knockout, and Punch-line. One of their first big tours as an opening act was with MEST. There would be sold-out shows with 1,000 kids, and they would be singing along to Fall Out Boy much louder than to MEST. It was like, 'What's going on here?' It was the same deal with Less Than Jake. It really started catching fire months into the album being out. You just knew something was happening. As a headliner, they went from 500-capacity clubs to 1500 - 2000 capacity venues.

WENTZ: We always wanted to play The Metro in Chicago. It got awkward when they started asking us to play after this band or that band. There were bands we grew up with that were now smaller than us. Headlining The Metro was just wild. My parents came.

MCLYNN: There was a week on Warped Tour, and there was some beel because these guys were up-and-comers, and some of the bands that were a little more established weren't too happy. They were getting a little shit on Warped Tour that week, sort of their initiation. They were on this little, shitty stage. So many kids showed up to watch them in Detroit, and the kids rushed the stage, and it collapsed. The PA failed after like three songs. They finished with an acapella, 'Where is Your Boy,’ and the whole crowd sang along.

WENTZ: That's when every show started ending in a riot because it couldn't be contained. We ended up getting banned from a lot of venues because the entire crowd would end up onstage. It was pure energy. We'd be billed on tour as the opening band, and the promoter would tell us we had to close the show or else everyone would leave after we played. We were a good band to have that happen to because there wasn't any ego. We were just like, "Oh, that's weird.' It was just bizarre. When my parents saw it was this wid thing, they said, 'OK, yeah, maybe take a year off from college.' That year is still going on.

MCLYNN: That Warped Tour was when the band's first big magazine cover, by far, hit the stands. I give a lot of credit to Norman Wonderly and Mike Shea at Alternative Press. They saw what was happening with Fall Out Boy and were like, 'We know it's early with you guys, but we want to give you a cover.' It was the biggest thing to happen to any of us. It really helped kick it to another level. It helped stoke the fires that were burning. This is back when bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and No Doubt still sold millions of records left and right. It was a leap of faith for AP to step out on Fall Out Boy the way they did.

STUMP: That was our first big cover. It was crazy. My parents flipped out. That wasn't a small zine. It was a magazine my mom could find in a bookstore and tell her friends. It was a shocking time. It's still like that. Once the surrealism starts, it never ends. I was onstage with Taylor Swift ten years later. That statement just sounds insane. It's fucking crazy. But when I was onstage, I just fell into it. I wasn't thinking about how crazy it was until afterward. It was the same thing with the AP cover. We were so busy that it was just another one of those things we were doing that day. When we left, I was like, 'Holy fuck! We're on the cover of a magazine! One that I read! I have a subscription to that!'

HURLEY: Getting an 'In The Studio' blurb was a big deal. I remember seeing bands 'in the studio' and thinking, Man, I would love to be in that and have people care that we're in the studio.' There were more minor things, but that was our first big cover.

STUMP: One thing I remember about the photo shoot is I was asked to take off my hat. I was forced to take it off and had been wearing that hat for a while. I never wanted to be the lead singer. I always hoped to be a second guitarist with a backup singer role. I lobbied to find someone else to be the proper singer. But here I was, being the lead singer, and I fucking hated it. When I was a drummer, I was always behind something. Somehow the hat thing started. Pete gave me a hat instead of throwing it away - I think it's the one I'm wearing on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. It became like my Linus blanket. I had my hat, and I could permanently hide. You couldn't see my eyes or much of me, and I was very comfortable that way. The AP cover shoot was the first time someone asked me to remove it. My mom has a poster of that cover in her house, and every time I see it, I see the fear on my face - just trying to maintain composure while filled with terror and insecurity. ‘Why is there a camera on me?'

JANICK: We pounded the pavement every week for two years. We believed early on that something great was going to happen. As we moved to 100,000 and 200,000 albums, there were points where everything was tipping. When they were on the cover of Alternative Press. When they did Warped for five days, and the stage collapsed. We went into Christmas with the band selling 2000 to 3000 a week and in the listening stations at Hot Topic. Fueled By Ramen had never had anything like that before.

MOSTOFI: Pete and I used to joke that if he weren't straight edge, he would have likely been sent to prison or worse at some point before Fall Out Boy. Pete has a predisposition to addictive behavior and chemical dependency. This is something we talked about a lot back in the day. Straight Edge helped him avoid some of the traps of adolescence.

WENTZ: I was straight edge at the time. I don't think our band would have been so successful without that. The bands we were touring with were partying like crazy. Straight Edge helped solidify the relationship between the four of us. We were playing for the love of music, not for partying or girls or stuff like that. We liked being little maniacs running around. Hurley and I were kind of the younger brothers of the hardcore kids we were in bands with. This was an attempt to get out of that shadow a little bit. Nobody is going to compare this band to Racetraitor. You know when you don't want to do exactly what your dad or older brother does? There was a little bit of that.

"Take This To Your Grave, And I'll Take It To Mine" - The Legacy of Take This To Your Grave, 2003-2023

Take This To Your Grave represents a time before the paparazzi followed Wentz to Starbucks, before marriages and children, Disney soundtracks, and all the highs and lows of an illustrious career. The album altered the course for everyone involved with its creation. Crush Music added Miley Cyrus, Green Day, and Weezer to their roster. Fueled By Ramen signed Twenty One Pilots, Paramore, A Day To Remember, and All Time Low.

STUMP: I'm so proud of Take This To Your Grave. I had no idea how much people were going to react to it. I didn't know Fall Out Boy was that good of a band. We were this shitty post-hardcore band that decided to do a bunch of pop-punk before I went to college, and Pete went back to opening for Hatebreed. That was the plan. Somehow this record happened. To explain to people now how beautiful and accidental that record was is difficult. It seems like it had to have been planned, but no, we were that shitty band that opened for 25 Ta Life.

HURLEY: We wanted to make a record as perfect as Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. A front-to-back perfect collection of songs. That was our obsession with Take This To Your Grave. We were just trying to make a record that could be compared in any way to that record. There's just something special about when the four of us came together.

WENTZ: It blows my mind when I hear people talking about Take This To Your Grave or see people including it on lists because it was just this tiny personal thing. It was very barebones. That was all we had, and we gave everything we had to it. Maybe that's how these big iconic bands feel about those records, too. Perhaps that's how James Hetfield feels when we talk about Kill 'Em All. That album was probably the last moment many people had of having us as their band that their little brother didn't know about. I have those feelings about certain bands, too. 'This band was mine. That was the last time I could talk about them at school without anyone knowing who the fuck I was talking about.' That was the case with Take This To Your Grave.

TROHMAN: Before Save Rock N' Roll, there was a rumor that we would come back with one new song and then do a Take This To Your Grave tenth-anniversary tour. But we weren't going to do what people thought we would do. We weren't going to [wear out] our old material by just returning from the hiatus with a Take This To Your Grave tour.

WENTZ: We've been asked why we haven't done a Take This To Your Grave tour. In some ways, it's more respectful not to do that. It would feel like we were taking advantage of where that record sits, what it means to people and us.

HURLEY: When Metallica released Death Magnetic, I loved the record, but I feel like Load and Reload were better in a way, because you knew that's what they wanted to do.

TROHMAN: Some people want us to make Grave again, but I'm not 17. It would be hard to do something like that without it being contrived. Were proud of those songs. We know that’s where we came from. We know the album is an important part of our history.

STUMP: There's always going to be a Take This To Your Grave purist fan who wants that forever: But no matter what we do, we cannot give you 2003. It'll never happen again. I know the feeling, because I've lived it with my favorite bands, too. But there's a whole other chunk of our fans who have grown with us and followed this journey we're on. We were this happy accident that somehow came together. It’s tempting to plagarize yourself. But it’s way more satisfying and exciting to surprise yourself.

MCILRITH: Fall Out Boy is an important band for so many reasons. I know people don't expect the singer of Rise Against to say that, but they really are. If nothing else, they created so much dialog and conversation within not just a scene but an international scene. They were smart. They got accused of being this kiddie pop punk band, but they did smart things with their success. I say that, especially as a guy who grew up playing in the same Chicago hardcore bands that would go on and confront be-ing a part of mainstream music. Mainstream music and the mainstream world are machines that can chew your band up if you don't have your head on straight when you get into it. It's a fast-moving river, and you need to know what direction you're going in before you get into it. If you don't and you hesitate, it'll take you for a ride. Knowing those guys, they went into it with a really good idea. That's something that the hardcore instilled in all of us. Knowing where you stand on those things, we cut our teeth on the hardcore scene, and it made us ready for anything that the world could throw at us, including the giant music industry.

[asunflowerana]

a good kind of nuinsance — Suna Rintarou

summary: you have a big project coming up, and to make things even worse, you're forced to work with the most stupid, handsome moron on campus.

genre: comedy, enemies-to-lovers trope.

n/a: not me pretending i'm the best friend haha. also, good reading!

“It will be fine!” She said. “It could be worse, trust me. And it will end soon!”

You wish you could stop believing in your best friend.

College is already a nerve-wracking place to deal with it, increasing even more in junior year. You need to work on your assignments, do presentations, fight yourself everyday to not procrastinate 24/7 or call off sick ‘cause your bed is too appealing; and in the end, you always freak out with your final exams, coffee becoming your best friend and clock your worst enemy.

What you don’t understand though, is why, in such a chaotic atmosphere, you still need to do group work?

And why, of all the people on this big campus, you got paired up with Suna Rintarou?

The struggle is real.

It’s not that you hate him. No, that’s not the case at all. It’s just that spotting his face alone is enough to make you want to change sidewalks even if the traffic signal is green and Formula 1 is happening on the street.

It all started with a single bump on the cafeteria entrance. His unnecessary hard body bumped against you and your hot chocolate cup, making all of your precious drink spill and fall into your previous white All Stars sneakers, staining the fabric and burning your skin to the soul.

And that boy had the nerve to mumble a “Watch where you’re going” before giving you a cold shoulder and leaving in a hurry.

Tables turned and you had your redemption one day later, refusing to lend him your notes of an important assignment, useful for the upcoming exams. It’s not your fault that his bicycle tire got pierced on the way to class, he should have been prepared and woken up early like every poor student in this college.

This “not so pleasant but still fulfilling” war has been going on between you guys for weeks. But unfortunately, his presence became more than a nuisance to you, and you absolutely detest now the way your heart flutters when you see that punk walking on the hall with that stupid, pretty face.

Annoying, handsome, punk.

And since your “so called” best friend knows about your hidden feelings, she decided to come up with a stupid solution for it.

You, her, Suna and Bokuto Koutaro, her adorable but very much ingenuous boyfriend, were supposed to do the group project together at a cozy cafeteria a few blocks from the campus main building, known for their delicious milkshakes and pretzels.

Nowhere to escape, you accept the invite, hoping your friend could take your mind away from Suna’s intruding. That, until Bokuto shouts:

“Shoot, I forgot there was practice today!” So exaggerated, he totally has no vocation to be an actor.

And your bestie had the audacity to join the act, forcing out a grimace. “Sorry guys, but we need to go.” She announces, not sorry at all, Bokuto taking her backpack with him like the doting boyfriend he is. “Please enjoy our milkshakes, we’ll text you later to see what you guys decided!”

“Good dat— I mean…. Bye!” Bokuto takes her hand and storms away from the cafeteria.

You can only sigh, disappointed at yourself for not predicting this might happen.

“Did they really leave us?” Suna asks incredulously, noticing the filled notebooks the couple left on the table. “They even made their parts already!”

You turn your gaze to him, feeling the beginning of a migraine.“Look, I’m not thrilled to work with you either. But the faster we start, the faster we’ll get rid of each other.” You proposed with little patience, taking a sip of your friend’s untouched strawberry milkshake. “Now, take that milkshake and let’s finish this quick.”

He huffs, but your surprise doesn't fight with you on this, and you both start a two-hours circle of working in silence, bickering at each other and working in silence again, making small progress with your parts on the project. You even start to agree with each other, Suna finding your suggestions “smarter than expected”, and you finding his ideas “not so bad for a moron”.

It’s strange, the feeling of being in agreement with Hajime on something, and it's noticeable his efforts of making the process as peaceful as it can be. This friendlier side looks actually cute on him (not that you were checking him out for the past thirty minutes), so you decide to be nice too, for the sake of good grades.

It only lasts a few minutes, and soon you’re arguing again.

“The information needs to be in Z. No one will pay attention if you fill the poster with notes all over it!” He argues one more time, trying to prove his point about the best position to the notes.

“But we need to put all the information we gathered! If we do it your way, we’ll need three more posters , and that's a waste of paper!” You defend your point as well, not wanting to back down from your proposition to the project’s presentation. 

“Well, if you want to really save paper, then you should stop wanting to put everything we wrote down inside a poster, when we don’t have to!”

“We do, if we want good grades in this class. Oh wait, I forgot, you don’t really know what it's like.!”

You’re both staring at each other dangerously, breath heavy and quick, like two bulls ready to strike each other. Thank goodness you’re in a distant booth, or you guys would probably be kicked out by now for the shouting.

Suna runs his hand over his black locks, tired of this unfinished argument. “You’re too annoying , you know that?” He hisses. 

“And you’re so stubborn, argh, I can’t stand you in my head anymore!” You almost shout out your frustration, letting slip the last words by accident, but lucky for you Suna’s too angry to catch what did you mean.

“Well, I wish you could leave mine too, but you’re still there every day!”

You’re shocked. Your heart’s pace fastens and your body suddenly feels numb, completely bewildered by his confession. Suna avoids eye-contact for a few seconds, staring at the table with a terrified look, his face reddening as the seconds go by. Why did he say that to you?

“I—” He clears his throat, trying to come up with a quick excuse to cover his mistake.“ I didn't—”

“What?” But you don’t leave room for excuses. “You didn’t mean you like me?”

His eyes widens. “No! I…. I….” He sighs. “ I didn’t mean to say it like that! But if you really want to know… yes. I like you. " He moves his eyes in your direction, taking your features for a moment. "Even if you get on my nerves every single day, I can’t get you out of my head. And I know we’re not on the best terms, but I can’t just pretend anymore…” He doesn’t need to finish his line. You’re just so overwhelmed with his confession, that staying a few moments in silence makes Rintarou take that as a rejection.

“I should go.” He begins to rise from his chair, but his movements are interrupted as you quickly hold one of his wrists, preventing him from moving away. He looks at you surprised.

“Would you find it strange if I said that I can’t pretend anymore either?” You can’t say the right words aloud yet, timid of what he might do with your confession, but the growing, pretty and genuine smirk on his face tells you made a good decision by opening yourself to him.

“I guess I own you a hot chocolate, then?”

© asunflowerana 2024 — all rights reserved.

[omegalomania]

people bitching and moaning about fob "turning mainstream" as if that was never the entire point of fall out boy. that's In the goddamn dna of the band, it's baked into the ethos of why the band started in the first damn place. to be accessible to kids and especially to girls, who were often ridiculed and shunted out of the hardcore community. to be a gateway to bands that aren't as mainstream. to comment on the society they live in, as they live in it. people act like fall out boy "turning mainstream" was some kind of "betrayal" when from the start they were seizing on the trends of the time, putting their unique, unhinged fall out boy spin on them, and shooting them back out as a funhouse mirror. take this to your grave capitalized on the pop-punk zeitgeist that was big in the late 90s and early aughts and put their own spin on it: enmeshed catchy choruses with high-dexterity lyrical & linguistic skewerwork. infinity on high was basically a massive critique of the scene they were in - this ain't a scene it's a goddamn arm's race is a fucking thesis statement on what it is to be catapulted into fame in an industry that wants nothing more than a thousand cookie-cutter copycat acts of a successful formula, and fall out boy WAS the formula everyone desperately wanted to emulate. american beauty / american psycho blended sampling and modern hip-hop stylings with polished pop-rock and pointed those songs back at the snapshot of the 2010s we all lived in: commenting on racial injustice and the freeze-frame nature of relevancy. but even then they weren't doing it quite right - because fall out boy never does things quite right, they're never quite conventional, whether it's wentz's darkly confessional lyrics double-bagged in metaphor or stump's distinctive clear tenor or trohman's inescapable rock 'n roll edge or hurley's thunderous hardcore-punk-rock soul.

this band has always been too clever for its own critics, is the thing. but then, they always knew that. they knew they had a thriving fanbase of largely female fans so they were going to be mocked and belittled and ridiculed. they weren't quite right. they weren't quite so easy to market. pete wentz had to have all his hard edges filed off and cut down to size, skin lightened, literally whitewashed ("i feel like a photo that's been overexposed") to hell and back, even as he was marketed as the pretty boy of the band. and the other three members never even bothered with the spotlight: the soft-spoken vegan straightedge anarchist drummer and the wry, wisecracking, whip-clever guitarist who was more concerned with being the connective tissue than anything and the reticent vocalist who sang the words and wrote an awful lot of music but wasn't really the guy fronting the band. wentz's charisma carried the band, because the rest of them were really just some guys and never aspired to be anything else.

fall out boy is too pop. fall out boy is too mainstream. fall out boy isn't the real poster child of the emo movement. other bands are better. even within fall out boy's own narrative, they are repeatedly ignored, sidelined, and belittled, as though they weren't one of the only acts from the big 00s emo-pop movement to successfully not just survive the transition from the aughts to the '10s, and then later from the '10s to the '20s, but to thrive in it without banking on nostalgia. this band was supposed to be a flash in the pan. they weren't supposed to last and they weren't supposed to get big. they started off in joe's parents' attic because joe and pete were sick of how exclusionary and homophobic the hardcore scene was.

i think it's high time that people acknowledge how fall out boy has repeatedly succeeded where most of their other peers failed. cunning, clever, capable, and hyper-aware of the space they occupy in the culture surrounding them. that they are just as powerful, important, and artistic as any of the other bands in the scene that others might deify at their expense. that they deserve a hell of a lot more respect than they get from critics or hardcore punks who think they sold out. i hope one day they get that recognition. because they've earned it, time and time again, and the more i see people pushing back against that, the more certain i become of its inevitability.

[oxygen537art]

istg I luv ur art style so much and also can I get mha smut recommendations (idrc wat ship but mainly bakudeku and dabihawks is wat I'm looking for. shiggydabi is cool too)

Thank you so much for your nice words, I'm glad you enjoy my art! ❤️

I've listed the authors and titles of their works that I once saved in my favorites. I hardly follow updates now, it's been a while since I reread the works listed here, so I rely purely on notes and bookmarks left by past me. Just a reminder that everyone's tastes are different, please read the tags. And check out the authors' other works!

18+, Minors Do Not Interact!

Aphra_After_Dark

The Desk Job

Fight for You, Fighting for Me

how to 69 when both of you have fangs

In For A Penny

Mommy Milkers

Of Corset Is

A Slow Descent

Something New

bluebelle

can I kiss you?

full rack

hard boiled

cozzzynook

“Closer”

"Come on baby bird, show me whose submissive”

“Lace and Feathers”

“Mated” series

“I got you a present birdie”

“I’ll Love you even when you don’t love you”

Self-care is the best care, but with you it’s just better

The sun that stole the moon

“Touya’s Fun Night In”

Cateil

drowning in you

heart and soul

messy

palpable

cellostiel

Maraschino Cherry Juice

Relaxation

The Real Deal

Songbird

So Fucking Electric

DeadBoysWalking

Hyperfixation

Shut Up And Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Good Boy

If Only

Eyes On Me

The Other Way

Wait A Minute, Baby, Stay With Me A While

Turn you inside-out by dorothycanfly

drunkenCharm

As Above So Below

Before I Ever Met You

Begging for Thread

Days of Bloom

Drowning Gods

Good Vibrations

i hold you to my heart's desire

Waiting Game

FeatheredFvck

Bad Behavior

Bet

Breathe

Dickstracted

Euphoria

I'll Do You Two Better

It's A Spring Thing

The One Percent

Unexpected

From flames to ashes by NekoRika (This is a collection of oneshots, but I save the chapters 3, 23, 36, 41, 43)

Neurotoxin

Arrangements

Change Of Pace

Learn To Breathe

Punk Gecko Boi watches Smexy Gaymer and his Goth bf fuck on webcam.mp4

Pixie_Virus

4's a Party

Couch Troubles

Meet-Cute

After Dicking Cuddles by the_pursuit_of_happiness

I'll Make It Fit and Milk Me by paleserendipity

SaltyTomato

Good boy

I hope they have your eyes

Pretty Fingers on Slick Thighs

satan_copilots_my_tardis (I recommend all of their works. Some are only available on Tumblr (18+) @satancopilotsmytardis)

SoenNoAme (TsukkiNoNeko)

Blue Flames, Blue Passion

Captivated By Your Resonating Light

Close To You

Dancing Flames

Diplomatic Approach

Edge of Glory

Glimmer

Heated

Kiss Me Like It's Do Or Die

Play A Little Game

Satisfy the Undisclosed Desires in your Heart

sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie.

Stuck in Repeat

Tears That Drip Sore

until you learn to love yourself

White Camelia

Your Innocence Is Mine

Wind Down by frozenCinders

Primal Instincts and Pretty Things by truthinadvertising

fuck around and find out and End Racism in the OTW- All Dolled Up by unbalancedcentrifuge

VampyrSutton

Be Good For Me

The Cave

Eyes on Me

Good Little Whore

Hate Fuck

How Are You Alive?

How Do You Live Like This?

How the Mighty Fall

Spring Heat

SSD Day 3~Werebeasts~Claiming Bite/Knotting

SSD Day 6~Anthro~Collar

Werewolfnightwalker

All Of Me

The Consequences of Nesting

Down By the Wexford Border

Save a Horse, Ride a Birdboy

Soft

Take Me Apart So Gently

Turn Off The Lights (We Don't Need Them To Dance)

[notthecity]

I have been freaking out on Twitter about the magic 8 ball songs and the medley and tourdust in general but like you don't understand. you don't UNDERSTAND. it's not just the fact we've gotten stuff they haven't ever played. it's not just that they're bringing back deep cuts. it's not just all of that.

it's the fact we're all older. the guys are twenty years older, most people in here have been fob fans for at least a decade. it's the fact that they're not just playing them for the nostalgia factor, they're doing it because this tour is a celebration of two decades worth of this weird little emo band that changed the emo scene forever and became legends to at least two generations of emo kids so far.

it's the fact they've gained the courage to play folie a deux. the album patrick said they would likely never play live again because of the initial reception, the album that got booed whenever they played songs off it live in 2008-2009. it's the fact that headfirst slide went from a very shaky first attempt at a secret show to a setlist regular pat can now sing with a smile every night.

it's the fact that pete wentz, who thought he'd die young, who thought he'd join the 27 club, is now a father in his early 40s playing his bass and having fun with his best friends while they play songs about the time he almost ended it all. it's the fact we've seen him not only heal, but highlight the scars and the beauty in the pain. like kintsugi.

it's the fact andy and joe got exactly what they wanted. joe got a guitar album he loved, he got to focus on himself and take some time off knowing full well the band and the fans had his back, being included in everything from music videos to promotional things, and now he can enjoy his time going on the road again in a better state of mind. it's the fact andy lives for drumming, and he can do what he does best with his favorite song on the album, one that he basically begged to play the entire press run for the album.

it's the fact that the piano medley songs let patrick lay his heart out for everyone to see. it's the fact he's playing golden, what a catch, beautiful songs we haven't heard in so long. it's the fact he's gotten the courage to sing fucking soul punk in front of a crowd that ten years earlier told him they liked him better in fall out boy, to make a new spiritual successor in stardust and sing it too. it's the fact he's lost the fear to do those things, because he's realized there's nothing to fear anymore, people will sing back those songs to him with affection.

it's the fact they're also doing newer stuff. the fact they haven't forgotten about srar, ab/ap, mania. they still affirm those parts of their history, because they are still unashamedly fall out boy.

it's the fact these four guys have all gone through hell and back together, and we're all stronger on the other side. it's the fact we've all grown up together, and now we're all adults in this fucked up world trying to figure ourselves out but we know it will be okay because we made it through all that and we're still standing. it's the fact that they built it, and we came, and we stayed.

it's the fact we're still here.

[jordanelemus]

ybc musical costume in-depth analysis! 💥🎸🎱

hi! I'm jordan, the costume designer (and also an actor and co-writer) of "the young blood chronicles" musical! i posted this on instagram, but i thought it might be cool to post it here too!

my initial role in “the young blood chronicles” musical was costume design, which, as a fashion enthusiast, i was incredibly excited about. i spent about a month curating a huge pinterest board collection and creating individual moodboards. the show takes place in 2013, but i wanted to take inspiration from both pre and post-hiatus fall out boy looks! here’s an in-depth look :’)

patrick’s main inspo was his “soul punk” era, which lives distinctly in the hiatus. i wanted something that would remind us that years had passed since the last time the band had made music together; something cool and trendy, but a little too dressed up for a long day in the studio. even when not onstage, ybc patrick is performing. clothes can give you power and he knows that. the yellow sunglasses were our way of getting around patrick’s glowing yellow eyes from the music videos, but i really love how it makes it seem like he has a mask on. it makes the end of “miss missing you” even more heartbreaking.

pete’s main inspo came from both his early clandestine drops as well as his more androgynous looks (both pre & post-hiatus). pete really cares about fashion, but he still has a chill la vibe. 2013 pete could often veer more edgy, but i chose to move in a different direction in order to better distinguish pete and patrick’s styles. unless you’re a vixen or patrick, you don’t get a leather jacket! sorry pete! to me, pete’s fashion has always felt so current while still being forward-thinking. ybc pete’s outfit could be from 2006 or 2024 and that was very purposeful!

andy’s looks are mostly pulled from more recent years, but band tees never go out of style. the mesh top under the tee alludes to his tattoos, which make up the extent of his stage looks these days since he typically does shows without a shirt on. celia had this mesh top in her closet and i love the colors on her (it’s the only source of color in the heaven outfits!). andy’s outfit is maybe the simplest of the four on paper, but i think it’s sick. it’s laid back, but super specific and grounded. it makes me want to start wearing basketball shorts.

joe’s looks are pulled from both pre-hiatus and early post-hiatus looks! striped sweaters & cargo pants are things he’s worn before, so i'm lucky i had them in my closet (especially since i wasn’t originally joe!). joe, especially in recent years, really likes wearing dark colors onstage, but, similar to how i avoided leather jackets for pete, i wanted to very clearly differentiate the boys from the vixens. any black piece of clothing on any of the boys had to be broken up with a design or pattern. no all black outfits! sorry joe!

the goal with the heaven outfits was to make the exact same outfits in all white. i wanted the exact same silhouettes as before. i’d say we were pretty successful! we got really lucky when it came to finding these costume pieces.

my vixens! these costumes were a lot more nebulous throughout the process. many of the costume pieces came from the actors’ own wardrobes. it was really important to me that each vixen had her own distinct style. baylee’s vixen (whom she named blair) has a more feminine style, her main costume piece being a lacy leotard. she's sweet with an edge. ava’s vixen is second-in-command & her outfit really screams that. the lingerie top is so killer. alexa’s vixen is almost a mix of baylee’s & ava’s in terms of style. the outfit is sweet, but edgy with the ripped tights & lingerie-style top. lauren’s vixen is a little more utilitarian, actually dressed in a way that makes sense for kidnapping four people. she’s more sporty than the others, but her combat boots are incredibly threatening. hbic is all that and more. her outfit is simple, but powerful. she is terrifying.

tiffany had to feel a bit like an outsider. she’s wearing the vixen clothes, but her jacket has some color on it. it’s a little too big on her. the other vixens really live in & embody their clothes, but for tiffany, it's a bit more like a costume.

here’s how i describe the angels: 1) the hottest girls at the ren faire & 2) like that picture of the angel guiding the two kids that every latine family has in their house. they almost feel out of place; so incredibly fluid in a show that is mostly made up of harsh lines. texture and layers were really the name of the game here, but the angels still have an edge to them. to quote fob: “…angels choking on their halos, get them drunk on rose water. see how dirty i can get them, pullin' out their fragile teeth & clip their tiny wings.”

+ i made pete’s bass machete and tiffany’s/joe’s guitar axe! i don’t have much to say about them, but i loved getting to utilize my cosplay foam skills.

this was my first time ever costuming a show and it was such a dream. the entire cast was so willing to experiment with me and it was such a joy to revisit aspects of 2013 fashion, which i remember from my preteen years, but never got to truly participate in! :’)

- jordan <3

ig: @/jordanelemus

photos: @/cararittner on ig!

[pinksiames]

Me and pookie @clevenhq are on our usual grind with this Emo!Gale and Punk!John AU🔥

Slight trigger warning for this one with mentions of self harm so be warned!!

Gale is a 16 year old high schooler who is the most stereotypical emo you can imagine. The thick black liner under the eyes, hair constantly swept in front of his eyes. He’s got the eyebrow piercing and nose ring but refuses to dye his hair black! He runs a decently popular MySpace page, posting emotional quotes and shitty mirror selfies that still somehow go viral on the website.

His dad is a severe alcoholic and mom does nothing to help, which ends up with Gale earning himself a black eye from the empty glass bottle hitting him in the face. It’s mainly why he wears so much makeup to try and cover up the abuse, but sometimes on the especially bad nights he’s huddled in the bathtub nursing fresh wounds littering his arms, old and new scars on top of each other.

John is a 17 year old who also goes to the same high school!! He’s the local teenage dirtbag of the town, going around and constantly partying, drinking, doing any type of drug that someone was willing to lend to the boy. He was constantly getting into fights, mostly with the authorities in his life, earning him the prize title of rebel punk with his track record with the law!

He was raised in a single parent household, mom trying her best after his dad walked out on them after his sister was born. A lot of his resentment comes from his dad not being there for them, leaving his mom and them to fend for themselves. When he acts out it’s the only time he feels alive, the urge to cause chaos and havoc for their hometown usually ends with him behind bars for the night until his mom comes and gets him.

When they first met it was at the skatepark during the summer, Gale on his peddle bike and John on his skateboard. They were both going down two different ramps but ended up crashing into each other, Gale being the one to apologize profusely since he was the one who knocked John off of his board.

John was about to go off on the boy until he made eye contact with those pretty sky blue eyes, instead only giving him a short “it’s fine don’t worry about it.” Thinking that it would’ve been the last time he’d see the boy. Until he started noticing him coming around the park a lot more frequently, always looking like he wanted to talk to John but not having the courage to do so.

It’s not until a month of seeing each other that Gale finally went up and introduced himself, once again apologizing for their little accident weeks prior. And John can’t help but feel his heart racing at gales obvious social awkwardness. Since then John introduces him to his group of friends, and slowly they start hanging out outside of the park, going and seeing movies as a group, fucking around town and getting drunk. One night while their all wasted John gets the bright idea that Gale needs a lip piercing, both of them drunk off their asses laughing while John’s trying to push a safety pin though gales bottom lip. Somehow the damn thing doesn’t get infected later down the line. It’s the happiest gales been in months, the self harming becoming more and more infrequent until the day gales dad actually puts his hands on him and not just the occasional beer bottle.

he stops showing up to the park, stops hanging out with John and his group to the point most of them are spamming his phone, but he doesn’t talk to anyone until the school semester starts in the fall. And by the time John sees gale again he looks horrible, sickly pale skin, sunken in eyes, clothes falling off his already thin frame. It takes John all day to corner him, demanding to know what happened to him and why he stopped talking to them. And gale just lets it all out.

He spends a good 5 minutes just sobbing, John trying his best to comfort him. And when Gale tells him what’s been going on his blood runs cold, that someone could hurt such a beautiful soul, how someone could look at Gale and willingly lay their hands on him. He makes a vow to not let anyone even think of hurting Gale, convincing his mom to let Gale stay with them.

While gales staying with the Egans he grows even closer to John, lingering touches staying between them at night, sharing John’s bed on bad nights, John tracing and kissing the scars on gales arms. Young love flourishing between them as the school year goes on, sneaking kisses between classes and holding hands in the hallways. It didn’t help that gales dad didn’t even notice his son missing, let alone his son’s belongings slowly getting moved out the house but who are they to complain. John and Gale would trade the world if it meant seeing each other happy.

[preciadosbass]

23/8/24 [draft from friday — key + significant photos at end]

yay i can finally post this!! woke up at 6:30 and said goodmorning to boris. he was inside again, i think because of how cold it is out. i then got dressed as soon as i could so i was completely ready before the time we had to leave to go away. i put on a light gray low cut shirt, but then started freezing alive so i changed into my sleeping with sirens shirt as it was the only shirt out that i hadn’t already packed. i paired it with black ripped skinny jeans, gray + black striped arm warmers, knee high converse, danger days my chemical romance zip up, my kellin quinn necklace, a surfboard shaped wood carved necklace — and no cuffs/bracelets as this outfit is just to be worn for the car ride to the campus and then ill get changed for swimming.

after getting ready, i had a snack and painted my left hand’s nails with black nail polish. i surprisingly did them pretty neatly to how i usually do it and considering how small my nails are. within a few minutes of them being dried, half of my second smallest nail’s polish came off halfway lmao - i was going to put some more on to cover it up, but i was in a rush and i needed to do my teeth, i finished at 7. i then checked on boris again and replaced the pins on my bag. ive needed to ever since i took a ton off to put onto my jacket. all that’s left now is: incubus pin, spider-man pin, the last of us pin, t-rex pin, saliva pin, kittie pin, shark pin, beetle pin, brendon urie pin, chi cheng pin, soulfly pin, collide with the sky [pierce the veil] pin, and a silent hill pin. which sounds like a lot, but because of the way they’re set out, it dosent look like many. at least not compared to what i’m used to.

once i was done [7:18], i packed my bag. i packed: my camera, skeleton gloves, collage scraps, my collage journal, camera charger, headphone charger, extra bracelets, my spiral earrings, battery packs, my hairbrush, my wallet, hand sanitizer, meds, and my phone charger. after doing that and a few other odd bits around the house [turning off switches, making sure i’ve packed everything, etc] i went to see boris properly at 7:40. i told him about everything that’s going to be going on [who’s taking care of him, that she’s not comfortable letting him out, when we’re getting back, things like that] and said goodbye to him. i finished officially at 8:20. i’m gunna miss him so much while we’re away, but i’m excited to see him again afterwards and tell him everything.

everyone [me, my sister, my parents] got in the car at around the same. unrelated, but i also forgot to mention in yesterdays journal, archie was taken over to my sister’s friends house to be looked after. we set off at 2:30 and i looked through soul punk patrick stump videos along with a few pretty odd era panic! tiktoks. also watched my chemical romance’s song 2 [blur] cover, i don’t know why i haven’t seen this before i’m obsessed. i started journaling at 9:16 and wrote all of the paragraphs above. than at 9:30 i took a break and started listening to some music. [just surrender, fall out boy, gerard way + ray toro, frank iero, falling in reverse, blur, my chemical romance, death of a bachelor panic! at the disco, a static lullaby.]

i had a nap somewhere near 11:30 [on my seal plush] and woke up at around 12:40. i continued listening to music [CKY, HIM, frank iero, darling you should be ashamed, linkin park, lovehatehero, before today, a bullet for a pretty boy [[so underrated]], and sleeping with sirens.] i did so until 1:44 when we arrived at the resort. my dad pulled the car into the drive through place where you get your keycard/folder of leaflets and after driving round to our car park, we started unpacking into the room. on our holiday guide, it said that we could only get in our room at 3, so we were lucky to get in early. as soon as i found me & my sisters room and claimed my bed, and hung up my necklaces on the windows’ handle. along with taking a few things out of my bag + putting cuffs/band bracelets on. we did plan on going to swimming as soon as my extended family arrived, but that ended up not working out as they had to leave late.

i then took out my collage journal and started cutting up the leaflets from the folder into separate letters [etc] to make a collage tomorrow. well i say tomorrow, when i started cutting everything up, i intended for me to put everything together today. [photo at end] but i only got round to collecting the bits of paper i need. i used my stamps to print stars onto a yellow sticky note and took a couple pictures of the leaflets incase we needed anything off them after id cut them up [e.g wifi support]. me, my parents and my sister left for a show and arrived at the venue at 3:12. on the way to the venue, we met up with D [one of my cousins, his girlfriend — L, and her son, W.] we got the time wrong so we thought were really short on time, but it started 20 minutes after we found a table.

first up was a beatboxer, except he made more sound affects than sounds to make into some kind of song. he was also really funny with the way he made and timed the sound affects. it’s impossible for me to explain with unless you were there and saw him, but he was really good. next was four breakdancers, ive never really had much interest in breakdancing, but it was quite cool to watch them. one had come all the way down from japan or something.

after was one of those big hoop acts. there’s not much to say as there’s not much to explain — following on from that, a bmX rider came out and started doing all kinds of crazy tricks. i somewhat remember seeing the show itself around a year ago, but this bmX guy was different than last year. its tricky to explain a bmX show generally, but its even trickier for people to read id they don’t know what it is. so i recommend looking up bmX tricks. once he’d done his thing, a basketballer came onto stage. he was manipulating the ball and circling it around him shoulders etc. behind him was a fake button with “do not push” plastered above it. obviously, it’s a show, he ‘pressed’ the button and everytime another ball would roll out from backstage.

in the end, he was working with 5 different basketballs. it was super impressive. before the show finished, everyone came out and did all their tricks side by side. during the entire show, the beatboxer was singing and making even more sound affects. he actually had a pretty decent voice. at 4:30, after we’d all packed up our stuff and gotten ready to leave and do something else, me, my parents and my sister headed back to our room. D, L and W went off to their rooms aswell. upon getting into our chalet, i went to have a nap but ended up putting on my skates. my sister stuck on hers and we circuited a section of the resort, looking for D’s room. it didn’t take us long before we found it. but during skating around and checking door numbers, i stupidly sped round a corner on the second level of chalets and nearly fell headfirst down a huge staircase.

i assumed that it’d turn and go round the other side, so i could look at the numbers on the other rooms, as a few other of the second story ‘balconys’ or whatever you wanna call them - don’t have stairs and just follow on around the other side. but i was wrong. i slightly toppled down the first two stairs and then grabbed onto my sister’s back. luckily i didn’t make her fall over lmao // at 5:30, all of us [all of my family] went round to our restaurant for dinner. it was a little cheeky of us to even eat together as everyone in the family apart from my parents & sister have reservations for another restaurant.

after dinner, i went back to the room and stayed there for 30 minutes alone before me, my sister and my parents made our way to yet another show. we arrived at the venue and i sat near the front on the floor with my sister. my mum sat on some stairs and my dad stayed standing. it was a magic show, which is quite a complicated thing to explain, especially because i actually didn’t understand how any of the tricks were done, but i enjoyed it. also while the backstage staff were sorting out some more props the start of my generation by limp bizkit played!!

the show finished at 8, and me and my immediate family went round to the rest of the family’s chalets to check them out. i went into the more cousin based one first, the people staying in it were: RY and H, and R and E. i sat on R’s bed and just people watched [mostly] until H offered to paint my right hand’s nails dark purple as id forgotten to paint that hand in black when i was at home. then i went to see the rest of my family’s room. the family members in this chalet are my aunt and uncle, and L/W. when i came in my uncle had a jumper over the radiator and it smelt so bad and was clearly just about to light on fire. i went back into the cousin’s room/s and went to see E and see what she was doing.

she was applying gems to her eyelids with some kind of makeup glue. she asked if i wanted some and i agreed so she sat me down and gently glued the gems onto my face. [photo at end] when she was done and if verified i was happy with it, i went back to my room to quickly get something — i’m not sure what it was as im writing this on the 27th. when i got back at 9:10, we had to leave for another show. we walked across the resort and arrived at the venue to get ourselves some seats. me and E tried taking pictures of our gemmed-up eyelids together but wasn’t able to because of bad lighting. the show was advertised as a ‘rock’ festival, however the music that played was things like lizzo and ed sheeran.

i was kind of disappointed because i thought it’d be punk rock or something else i would be able to sing along to, but it was funny that we were catfished so bad. me and R just sat there making faces for eachother, indicating that ‘this isn’t rock, wtf is this’ - the performance ended at 10:20 and we went straight to another venue to join in with a ‘music dance party.’ as you can imagine, the music was dance music, but i like dance music. i somewhat danced with my grandad, E and R. R spun me around and my sister stayed swaying across the dance floor with my dad. [photo at end]

i haven’t really ever seen my dad dance before, but his favourite ‘party’ track came on and he went mad. he was doing all sorts of weird dance moves but it was cracking me up. if only whoever is reading this saw it in the moment. we parted with the rest of the family and went back to the chalet at approximately 11:30. i started to do a bit of my journal, made a picture collage of the day, and had a little nap. after my nap, i asked my parents questions about boris, said goodnight to boris via a picture of him [the picture in question is at the end] and went to sleep at 1:45.

🗝️ — boris/my cat, archie/my immediate family’s dog, questions about boris/i ask my parents questions about my cat to verify he's okay + will be okay in the morning. its a compulsive thing and i'm hopefully going to be tested for OCD in the future.

have a good day/night O_o

[paradimeshifts7]

All my things, all in one place 🌱 ↴

Twitter | ao3

All my fics, mostly steddie:

Desperado (You better let somebody love you)

Rated E | 164k | Exes to lovers

Twelve years after tire tracks and shattered trust, Wayne's illness brings Eddie back to Hawkins.

Once Bitten (Twice Shy)

Rated E | 22k | Christmas fic

Steve’s relationship with Christmas had always been tenuous, to say the least, but it didn’t help that this was the first Christmas he would be suffering through since his ex-girlfriend had snatched up his self-esteem and taken off running the year before.

He knew it was the intrinsically romantic quality of the holiday season, and nothing more. Just his lonely bones after a year of healing from heartbreak.

But Eddie's arms around him when he needed them most were starting to feel a lot like love.

Silk Chiffon

Rated E | 6k | Library smut

Steve and Eddie visit Robin and Nancy at Emerson, and a casual stroll through the library stacks turns into the best blowjob of Steve's goddamn life.

Tooth and Nail

Rated E | 113k | Punk pop slow burn

Eddie told himself that he was done, because he wouldn’t survive another heartbreak at that boy’s hands. But he really, really needs someone to open for them on tour.

Steve has a fist full of letters by the time he arrives in Los Angeles, but the Eddie Munson he knew is nowhere to be found. Left to make sense of this new version of the friend he once bared his soul to, Steve’s just trying not to fall off the fucking deep end again.

Lover, Come Over

Rated E | 15k | EMT Eddie/Divorcee Steve

Steve Harrington is the last person Eddie expects to see sitting on the curb when he responds to the call, but there he is, looking like absolute hell.

Sometimes, love is right on time.

Apple Pie (Baked Just Right)

Rated M | 4k | Food as a love language

Three times Steve silently says "I love you", and the one time Eddie says it back.

This Little Light of Mine

Rated E | 4k | Dad fic

It begins with a cough.

Just a dry, brittle thing that starts up one Friday morning over rice cereal and apple juice.

One look at Rosie, and Eddie knew she’d pull through just fine. Kids get sick, a simple fact of life. Something Steve, surely, is aware of.

Right?

Star Light, Star Bright

Rated E | 4k | Soulmates, Dreams

Steve swore he never dreamt before the age of sixteen, his nights spent swimming alone through dark, formless slumber until suddenly — he was no longer alone.

At age twenty, he finds himself staring into a pair of familiar eyes.

The Very Thought of You

Rated E | 65k | Jazz AU

The jazz music scene explodes when world-renowned pianist Eddie Munson is spotted getting cozy with a mystery man in New York City. Journalists have managed to link the pretty face to the prestigious Harrington name, an old money family with business all over the globe and a direct link to Diana Harrington, famous jazz starlet. But reports of bad trades and schemes gone wrong are beginning to muddy the waters of this particular love story, and it’s only a matter of time before the real origins of this torrid affair emerge.

The Poem You Make of Me

Rated E | 7k | Touch-starved wlw

“Could I?” She asks, barely a whisper.

“Could you what?”

“Take care of you,” Eddie says, ducking down to press a slow kiss to Stevie’s shoulder, pausing to murmur against her skin. “Make you feel good.”

Soft as Sin (Let Me In)

Rated E | 2k | pwp

Steve Harrington was drunk, although not as drunk as he wanted to be. Definitely not drunk enough to distract him from the fact that Eddie was sleeping no more than six feet away, the curves of his body laid out on the twin bed blurred in the dark. Despite the constant swimming in his head, Steve lay still, having to remind himself to breathe every couple of moments lest he pass out from the sheer apprehension.

Sugar’s Sweet (And So Is He)

Rated E | 42k | Sugar baby Steve/lit professor Eddie

The sugar baby!Steve and lit professor/author!Eddie au, wherein Eddie is a disaster at fine dining, and Steve helps him out.

Among the Wildflowers

Rated E | 28k | Steddie BB ‘23

It was easy, letting go. At least, that’s what Eddie told himself as he watched Hawkins fade to a tiny smudge on the horizon, his whole life packed into the van and Wayne’s old truck as they fled the Indiana tree line for the high mountain valleys of Idaho. Amidst the hot, dry air and sweet sagebrush, Eddie’s mind wandered, crawling back night after night under a blanket of stars to the golden boy he left behind and the chasm in his chest that used to house his heart — whistling and waiting, a near eternal ache.

Home came together slowly, and then all at once when Steve Harrington showed up on his doorstep a year later — haggard and worn, searching for something among the wildflowers.

A tale of death, birth, and the promise of green.

Some Kind of Angel

Rated E | 6k | Accidental subspace

The one where Eddie yells at Steve, and Steve accidentally goes into subspace about it.

Strawberry Fields

Rated E | 19k | Small town romcom

So close to earning his Emmy and the life he's always wanted, Steve sets off with a cameraman to the tiny town of Mt. Harding, hoping to catch a glimpse of a winter solstice phenomenon held secret by locals. It’s not exactly the gig he’s always dreamed of, but he’ll make it work. The only problem is that he has to do it with Eddie Munson.

The Moon Doesn’t Mind

Rated E | 14k | Unconventional omegaverse

Stuck in the Upside Down, Steve and Eddie are forced to reckon with what they’ve become, and what they’ve always been.

Monster. Inhuman. Changed.

In the Garden, Under Your Hand

Rated E | 23k | Community garden au

Thrown into community service after a bad run-in with his dad, Eddie is hardly expecting the next few months to be anything of note. That is, until Steve Harrington emerges from behind a patch of sunflowers at the community garden, claiming to be his supervisor.

The Winner Takes It All

Rated E | 32k | Romcom (My Best Friend’s Wedding AU)

Later, as he was sitting on the toilet, he remembered what Steve had said: February. The wedding was in February. Eddie checked his phone, confirming his suspicion.

“Fuck,” he swore softly, and then again, “Fuck.”

A little over two months until Steve said I do, binding himself to a total stranger. Eddie wasn’t about to let his best friend get snatched up by someone who was likely not good enough for him, let alone someone Eddie had never heard of. Steve was too kind to be taken advantage of like that — too special.

How things had ended up as they had, Eddie couldn’t be sure, but one way or another, he was going to get to the bottom of it.

On the Living Room Floor

Rated T | 1k | Stobin minific

The end of the world happens on a Tuesday.

Kalahari Down

Rated E | 11k | Small town country singer Steve/Rockstar Eddie

When his tour bus breaks down just outside of Hawkins, Indiana, Eddie Munson isn’t expecting the tiny town to offer up anything more than a cheap drink and a few side eyes.

He isn’t expecting Steve.

Tempest Entire

Rated E | 20k | Lighthouse/amnesia

The shape loomed dark and odd in the middle distance, flat on the sand like some dead thing, ominous in its unrecognizability. Through the lash of salt, Eddie squinted, walking toward the shape with morbid curiosity. He felt himself pale as he came closer, a knot of dread drawing tight in his stomach, because it wasn’t a seal or any kind of plant-based lump that lay motionless on the beach.

It was a man.

Impossible Not To

Rated E | 2k | Stommy collab with @tone-mariie

Except for Steve, it had always been more than that.

I’ll Show You Hands Ready to Bleed

Rated E | 5k | Vampire Eddie

It was meant to be a casual offer.

“You could drink some of my blood, I don’t mind.”

But the moment Eddie’s pupils began to narrow at the notion, Steve knew there was going to be nothing casual about what happened next.

Evermore

Rated E | 50k | Magic/fantasy au

The blight spread quickly, ravenous in its hunger as it stretched toward the high seat of the royal city, its evil already well-known to the farmlands where the earth lay dry and cracked — where magic and its ruin had no friend.

Steve knew the labor he put forth on his father’s land would amount to nothing, but still he toiled, knowing not what else to do, the oath he’d sworn a noose around his neck.

That is, until a stranger stumbled into his shed and into his life.

Until Eddie.

Come a Little Closer

Rated E | 10k | ren faire, omegaverse

Waylaid by a surprise rut, Eddie is certain he won’t be able to get through the ren faire without making it tragically weird for everyone involved. Steve is convinced he can get him through it — what are his stupid pheromones for, after all? Everything will be fine. That is, if Steve can keep his own feelings in check.

Dollhouse

Rated E | 9k | lingerie, collab with @glitterfang

Forced to house sit for his parents after being kicked out, Steve is thinking he and Eddie are going to watch a movie. Maybe fool around a bit. What he isn’t expecting is how Eddie in a bit of black lace is going to make him feel.

[hp-fanfic-archive]

Remus/Sirius Hurt/Comfort Masterlist | Works With Less Than 5k Words

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last updated: 09/10/24 | links last checked: 09/10/24

And look where it got us by Zoeff [G, 1k]

Sirius pressed his lips together. “I don't want him at school at all to be honest." Remus barked out a laugh. “Excuse me, who are you?” “What!? Look at the track record of this kid! Year one: Willingly fights his way through hundreds of dangerous tasks to end up nearly getting killed by You-know-who in an attempt to save a bloody stone!” “First of all, it was not 'hundreds of tasks' and secondly, that 'bloody stone' happened to be the Philosopher's stone and if I recall correctly you threw Harry a 'Congratulations, you're a badass' – party when he came home.” Wolfstar raising Harry AU in which Sirius worries and Remus has no idea who he is talking to.

Apollonian and Dionysian. by rearwindow [G, 2k]

“Yeah… Well, it’s like I’m light and you are darkness.”

Bad Day by orphan_account [G, 1k]

Professor Remus Lupin's day had been one of the worst. All he wanted was a nice relaxing bath and a few moments to forget. Luckily he's got a very doting husband who can help him do just that.

Boys by oliverdalstonbrowning [G, 2k]

Remus is reminded of the truth and Sirius plays Space Oddity.

Common Cuddles for a Common Cold by LadyAmina [G, 1k]

Most of the student body has fallen ill with a common cold. Sirius is just feeling it a lot louder. But Remus helps.

Flannel by victoria_p [M, 1k]

The knowledge that only two thin layers of flannel separates them is driving Sirius crazy.

Have a BEARY Happy Valentine's Day by Amuly [T, 1k]

Valentine's Day during MWPP's 4th year happens to fall the day after a full moon. But it's Remus and Sirius' first Valentine's Day as a couple, so Sirius is determined to make it memorable.

He Was Theirs by orphan_account [G, 1k, James/Regulus]

Coming home from a frustrating day, James Potter seeks comfort in those who love him most.

*Heat by LadyAmina [T, 2k]

The summer air is too warm. The campfire isn't helping. Neither is Sirius's head in his lap. Neither is the burning blood in his veins. Remus is overwhelmed and something has to give.

Life Affirming by WolfstarPups90 [E, 2k]

Remus just sat there, still shaking, staring at his lover and replaying the scene in his head. Sirius knocking him out of the way. Sirius successfully casting a killing curse to protect him. Sirius falling down, hurt. He needed to feel and taste and smell Sirius surrounding him. He needed the memory of his lover’s body falling lifeless on the ground like a puppet who’s strings had been cut to be wiped away and replaced by memories of heat and passion and love and sex. He needed to know how alive they both were.

My Faithful Handyman by softiejace [T, 1k]

non-magic au in which Sirius gets harassed for putting on make up in the men’s room and Remus defends him

Night: Shadows from Five Billion Trees by Amuly [E, 3k]

Every childhood is filled with magic – school of witchcraft and wizardry or no.

Punk Rock Suburban by GoldandScarlett [G, 3k]

Sirius follows Remus around all summer because he is his screwed up self, James is touring Europe, and no one actually likes Peter.

*Soul Signs by cottonpadenthusiast [G, 1k]

Everyone has a Soul Sign; the Patronus of your soulmate painted on your skin. Everyone is destined to find love. Yet Remus seems destined for someone who doesn't have a soulmate at all.

The Pitch by KinugoshiDofu [T, 1k]

Remus is not into Quidditch at all, but when you have a secret boyfriend that plays, there’s not much to do but watch and pray to Merlin you won’t have to see him crash. And when he does, there’s nothing left to do but kiss the booboos.

Thicker Than Blood by Thistlerose [T, 4k]

James has tried to be reasonable about his best friends’ relationship, but he’s not comfortable with it. Then something happens that helps him put things into perspective. (Sequel to Midnight Conversations #1)

*To Want for Nothing by oxfordlunch [T, 2k]

There are no family members singing, no happy returns. Nobody tells him to make a wish. He thinks of one anyhow. He closes his eyes and pleads silently to whoever could possibly listen that he might be taken away from this. He wishes for red and gold and warm, clean air, and for someone to sing on his birthday.

*Unified Theory by montparnasse [G, 3k]

New Year's, 1982. A house, a bed, a room at the top of the stairs. A lever, and a place to stand. (podfic available)

Where Rain And Smoke Mingle by smallestbird [T, 1k]

It doesn't matter if they've disowned you, they're still your family. It doesn't matter how often you walk away, it still hurts.

Winter and Happier by orphan_account [T, 2k]

Spending a weekend house-sitting for James' parents, the two couples have some plans. But when Remus is given a slight set-back, Sirius is determined to make his boyfriend feel valid, and very loved.

*denotes personal favorite

[likefolksongs]

fall out boy on absolute radio listening party 3.26.23

[link]

the host asks about the parentheses around for in the album title - pete says it's "a double or triple entendre, everyone's trying to be someone and have their moment but that doesn't fill you up" but "there's something to be said about so much stardust." talks about how we're all just carbon, stardust and still can't get it together. he also just love parentheses!

talking about the album as an art form - patrick says they absolutely consider that and sequencing is important. there are a "few songs" which only made the record because of how well they told the story of the album. also love from the other side was conceptualized as an album opener because patrick felt none of the other songs felt like an opener!

the intro to lftos is patrick playing the same piano part at four different speeds, starting in sync and then falling out of sync as it continues - he says it feels representative of the whole album for him

with hold me like a grudge, pete says when patrick first played it for him the verses sounded like 2000s alternative radio hits but the chorus sounded "distinctly patrick" which was an "interesting blend." patrick: hm. thank you. i think. pete: yeah that was a compliment!

hold me like a grudge was the last song they wrote for the record! pete was second guessing other lyrics and sent patrick new lyrics to possibly replace the ones he was feeling unsure about. patrick read them before driving to the studio and by the time he got there the song was basically written in full.

pete makes a comment about how that's at least two songs "that people really like" that patrick's written in the car (referencing lotro); patrick says he's written a lot of songs in the car and pete jokes they should just toss him the keys

pete says it's the worst when you think of something in the car and are sure you'll remember it but you don't. says now when he thinks of something in the car when he's with bronx he'll tell him to write down words to trigger the whole phrase "but they don't make any sense together. i'll be like write this down and he'll be like '...okay." andy: like dad shut up [giggles]

fake out didn't come together until joe heard it! patrick had most of the lead guitar down but none of the rhythm guitar but "joe came in, gave it one listen, and picked up this acoustic. none of us had really thought about acoustic, he just went into the booth and we pressed record and he did it in one take... that became kinda the whole song."

patrick talks about soul punk briefly, says the most surprising thing about making it was that it was very unsurprising, because all the ideas were already in his head. part of why he enjoys working with the band so much is that they have ideas he never would've thought of.

they discuss changing sound - pete says the first time he had that feeling of like "oh i don't know if this is too different" he was scared of it but he's learned that it's a good thing and that there's always going to be so much of the band's dna on it that it Will sound like a fall out boy song

andy: i think a band can not just be a city it can be a continent. writing these different things is building the map to what the bigger picture is

they bring up queen and bowie as examples of artists that kept changing but now when you hear their songs you just think "oh that's queen" or "oh that's bowie." the host mentions he used to hide liking queen from his friends and patrick says he had to hide liking ska from the band. andy says he's had a really big reggae and ska phase recently and loves being able to talk to patrick about it because "he's a fountain of knowledge."

heaven, iowa is one of andy's favorite on the record and he loved it from the start! patrick reiterates a comment from another interview about how he didn't like it that much at first but knew everyone else did, kept asking joe for any and all ideas because he didn't like how much "space" there was and how naked his vocals felt. andy says he thinks space in music can be magical.

they talk about track sequencing again - patrick says he and pete moved "the meat of the album" around many, many times.

pete talks about the pink seashell interlude and being obsessed with mortality. patrick talks about the process of scoring it and how joe added guitar to the string lines which he thinks brought it all together.

they didn't start out thinking they necessarily had a record - patrick says "we went in with neal for a week to see if we had something and by the end of the week we had half the record.”

patrick's been asking people to tell him fan reactions to the record since he doesn't have social media 🥺 "i know i've been driving everyone nuts... i've been asking everyone 'do people like it? what do people think?'" reiterates the dinner for your family line to explain why this record means so much to him.

pete says making an album is kind of like being a climber standing at the bottom of a rock face trying to find a route up; when you get up the route might seem like it was obvious the whole time but it wasn't. patrick chimes in to agree and add that it feels like the song that was the centerpoint of the album shifted many times.

the host mentions that he really likes and relates to the title of "i am my own muse." pete talks about looking at his four year old and thinking about how "at that age, you Are your own muse. you're like 'i just color, i do what i want, i'm not trying to conform to your idea of my creativity' and welcoming some of that back into your life as an adult or an artist is great.'"

the host mentions that his nine year old son's favorite song ever is "centuries" and the band are appropriately flattered (though patrick does say sorry when the host says he's probably heard it more than any other song ever ajfioenaj).

going back to the discussion of different songs being the centerpoint of the album, patrick says flu game was "one of the first songs to have that spot."

patrick talks about not being the most confident guy but that he's learned to share all of his demos; he thinks he might not have played flu game in the past. pete chimes in to say in the past patrick has tried to throw out some of his best ideas.

patrick says flu game "kind of started the record" because it was the favorite out of the first five songs they made with neal. "this was the one that convinced neal i think." pete notes "this would've been an insane record if [flu game] was the lynchpin."

flu game was originally the lead single! pete: you know how we always talk about how if we were gonna fly in a helicopter that i would have to knock you out like b.a. baracus? patrick, instantly: yes. pete: if we had made this the first single you guys would've had to b.a. baracus me. patrick, protesting: that wasn't my choice!

pete says baby annihilation felt like an authentic way to pay homage to his past spoken word bits and he trusted neal to be able to make it work.

they have a discussion about the distinctions between emo/pop punk/straightedge hardcore and pete talks about how arbitrary the labels that are assigned to musicians often are. pete talks about how fall out boy started as kind of a break from the more hardcore stuff for him that he was doing for fun which allowed it to be more freeing. patrick agrees, talks about how andy and pete were in "real bands" so no one was taking fall out boy completely seriously which allowed them to be looser.

kintsugi kid was one of the songs patrick was mentioning earlier that was almost cut from the record but made it because of the track sequencing. patrick says he always felt very strongly about it and believed in it so was very glad when it made its way back on to the record. pete calls it the little song that could.

the host asks about their songwriting process and pete talks about how the best songs are the ones where he and patrick "clash" just the right amount; songs where one of them dominates over the other don't connect as well.

they discuss the different producers they've worked with; pete says every producer they've worked with has felt like the right person for the job. patrick talks about how working with so many different producers is part of why he wanted to go back to neal.

patrick talks about how important it was for this album to be a single producer album; with mania they had so many different producers and he wanted to get back to just being in a routine with the same person. andy: it's the difference between microwaving and actually cooking. patrick: yeah, i agree with that! andy, jokingly: thanks, i'm gonna leave.

patrick calls what a time to be alive his baby. says every time he played it for someone they would say "really?" pete: patrick was really determined to get this song on the record. i felt like gamora like "is it done? what did it cost you?" pete and patrick in unison: everything [laughter]

patrick says he and pete struck a bargain (pete: i don't remember this). patrick didn't want so good right now to be on the record (he wasn't going to name the song but pete told him to go for it) but pete was really advocating for it. patrick said that if pete let him have what a time to be alive he would green light so good right now.

pete talks about how art only really becomes art when it connects with its audience which is part of why they wanted to do those small shows and host listening parties, to see how people reacted

the host asks how their relationship with fame has changed; pete says they had a year or two where they were super famous "and it was not a great life;" talks about how he looks at kpop groups and boy bands and thinks "god bless that it wasn't that long for us." he says he made a point to rearrange his life to be less famous and prioritize his family and the band. also pete makes a star wars reference and patrick does a yoda impression 😭

the hour wraps up with pete asking the host if he still wants a video for his son and they do a quick video for him 🥺

[omegalomania]

ive got a one free sincere poetical diatribe coupon that expires this week so im cashing it in on waxing lyrical about my favorite band for a minute cause im stupidly sleep deprived and its gonna be a long night so

the thing is this.

the thing is that maybe there isnt quite magic in this world but theres something to be said for the pure unfettered serendipity of a million little things conspiring to have certain peoples paths cross and the way this can change entire worlds. maybe i dont believe in magic but i believe in the unshakable fucking certainty that a 17 year old joe trohman had when he met a 17 year old patrick stump in a bookstore by sheer chance and listened to his demos and Knowing that he should sing despite patrick not being a singer and not particularly wanting to sing. i believe in the stone cold rock solid belief this kid had in this other kids voice to the point where he dragged his buddy over to his house to prove he had the pipes they needed. i believe in pete wentz hearing patrick stump sing in person for the first time and realizing wait, yeah, actually hes our golden fucking ticket. i believe in the last second just before patrick was about to get on the kit to record the drums for take this to your grave, andy hurley comes swinging in fresh from recording an ep with another band and knocking out every drum part damn near flawlessly. i believe in a band of scrappy dumb punk kids who grew up in the suburbs of the midwest and took over the world and didnt plan for any of it to get as big as it did. i believe in this weird fucking band with their weird fucking idiosyncrasies, this band of four guys who dont look like they should be friends let alone making music together: a heavily tattooed vegan straightedge beefcake drummer, the ambitious visionary bassist with the 50-megawatt grin, the tattoo-sleeved lanky guitarist with an inescapable rock 'n roll bent, the pixie-pale and painfully anxious frontman with the voice of a soul singer.

i believe theres a special kind of chemistry that only makes sense with the four of them, together. its the guy with the visuals and the words, this bassist who was supposed to be a lawyer or a star soccer player but instead crafts stories from the narratives he crafts in his head. its this guitarist with his love for the interleaving of sounds and ability to seamlessly jump from front-facing to incredibly restrained and his indelible blues-rock momentum. its this singer who never intended to sing but whose soaring, clear tenor is so utterly distinct that he quickly became one of the most iconic and versatile vocalists in the genre, if not in the world of music in general. its this hardcore drummer who pulls everything together and forms the throbbing heartbeat of the band, whose grit-edged metalcore backbone not even the poppiest of all pop choruses can truly file away.

i believe in this: andy hurley's unshakable faith that the band would reform during the hiatus, despite all evidence to the contrary. patrick stump writing the song that would become "miss missing you" for his solo record but then setting it aside because it didnt feel like it was for him, again, despite every indication that for all anyone knew, fall out boy was done for good. pete wentz, moved by a miserable blog post from his split-up bands singer, reaching out and sparking what was unheard of, especially for bands like them - a renaissance, a successful resurgence, and one of the best comebacks any musical act can say theyve had in decades. joe trohman picking up the phone and preparing to tell patrick stump that he wasn't ready to go back and do the band again if he wasn't going to be writing music, only for patrick to take the words out of his mouth and insist that he should be writing more and he was too talented a writer for them not to allow him space for that.

i believe in the little things. i believe in a band that was never expected to last a summer but has become an indelible part of music history, naysayers be damned. i believe in the unique chemistry of four guys who have no monetary or logistical reason to continue doing this thing aside from the fact that they love it so - they love the process of creating with one another, and they love the car crash hearts whose hearts beat in sync with theirs. i believe in joe listening to the first pass of "fake out" exactly once, picking up an acoustic guitar, and walking into record the instrumentation that ultimately pulled the entire song together in one take without thinking twice about it. i believe in andy simply knowing that "heaven, iowa" would make the final cut of the record despite patricks reticence and his not knowing how to make the song something he could say he was proud of. i believe in pete pouring some of his most vulnerable feelings into his, fearful of how well they will be accepted but making that leap nonetheless, only for the crowds to sing every single word back to him.

maybe theres no such thing as magic or fate and maybe theres no point. but i think of stardust. i think of four guys who poured so much love and time into this record and named it for stardust and i think of them as this: fistfuls of cosmic dust who all sprang from the same etiology. i think of them and its a romantic fucking notion but i allow myself this, i entertain the thought that when the cosmos formed and the detonation of planets and the dissolution of comets created that far-flung scatter of so much (for) stardust, that starry residue liberally dotting the broad span of the black, the four of them all came from the same origin point and like magnets ended up snapping together and thats the way theyve stayed. for years. for decades.

what i guess im trying to say is this: when the universe formed we all came from stardust and we will all return to stardust and i cant help but wonder if those four guys all came from the same stardust too.

like i said. its a romantic fucking notion. i believe in the little things though. and you know what they say about believers (never die).

[worldsetfree]

Diamond is Unbreakable × F!Reader: Something Comforting

It's not often that you have days like this, but it seems like when things go wrong, boy, does everything go wrong all at once. It starts out small, maybe you woke up late, but then it grows into bombing a presentation, or getting chewed out by a coworker, and then some blonde guy bought the last sandwich at St. Gentleman's before you could get your lunch... In other words, this day has been decidedly not crash. Lucky for you, somebody out there is ready to catch you when you fall, and give you the comfort you need.

(I'm so sorry that this took so long. I have so many drafts, but work has been nuts. I'll try to be better. Feedback always welcome.)

Higashikata Josuke

Expect a strong emotional response when you share your woes with Josuke. He's a defender through and through, and quite literally wears his heart on his shirt.

He's tender af with you, so deeply empathetic. You need soup? A warm bath? He's going to give you what your soul needs.

HOWEVER, he's also the type to get aggro on your behalf. If the source of your mood is another person, expect brute justice.

"What did they just say about my girlfriend?!"

Nijimura Okuyasu

Okuyasu is a surprisingly good listener. He'll cuddle you close and let you cry in his arms, if you need to. No judgement here: this is his job, baby.

Ah, but there's that very angry and frustrated part of him that bursts like a pipe when he thinks he hasn't done enough for you.

From the above, he's prone to wild acts of impulsiveness. Okuyasu is a "do-er" in his own way, and quite the punk.

Expect to find the source of your troubles with a black eye and a busted lip if you see them again. Or a slice missing out of their hair.

Hirose Koichi

The only sane and stable person in this group, tbh.

If you vent to Koichi, the poor guy will become stressed on your half, but listen to every word. He'll hold your hand offer advice.

Is going to help you come up with a plan to tackle your issues, and go the extra mile to help you succeed. Even if you don't see it (he's so reliable).

Will defend your honour if he needs to, but wants to empower you to succeed, first.

Kishibe Rohan

He doesn't care, why don't you grow up? Cares so much it physically hurts him.

So out of his element in what to do, though. What does he do to ensure that this will never happen to you again? You're his, he needs to do something!

Stop him before he does something unhinged like using Heaven's Door to make them act like the worms he knows they are.

You're staying at his place tonight. No negotiation on this.

Kujo Jotaro

Oh fuck, he's so bad at this. Might make things worse by saying the wrong thing. "Why are you sad? This isn't a problem."

Feels like shit when you cry more. He knew as soon as he opened his mouth that he shouldn't have said that. Good grief.

Jotaro's comfort will come in the form of soft touches. He'll hold in his arms and keep you safe. Just stay here. He's gonna take care of it.

Cool on the outside, murder on the inside. You will never know that he fixed this.

[notthecity]

So Much For Stardust: A Summary

Love From the Other Side: violinssss + WHAT WOULD YOU TRADE THE PAIN FOR. IM NOT SURE. + "i'll never go i just want to be invited" well that's just mean isn't it patrick 😢 Heartbreak Feels So Good: ah yes, defiantly nihilistic optimism, my favorite brand of fall out boy + we could CRY A LITTLE CRY A LOT!! + LOOOOOVE, OOOOOOOH, LOOOOOVE Hold Me Like A Grudge: THE BRIDGE AND PRECHORUS??? + the end of the world, the end of the world :D + part time soulmate, full time problem!!! + joe and andy are carrying the vibes, shoutout to them + Y O U P U T T H E F U N I N T O D Y S F U N C T I O N Fake Out: sad tiktok emo song guitars + nostalgic teen coming of age movie vibes all over + the lyrics here??? pete wrote his little heart out + love is iN tHe AiR Heaven, Iowa: immaculate vibes + SCAR. CROSSED. LOVEEEEEEERS FOREVEEEEEER + HALF THE LOOOOOOVE + the way things build up to the second chorus?? THE GUITARS??? + downdowndowndownDOWNDOWN So Good Right Now: man if only crippling depression was this fun all the time + oooooh oh oh woah + you need me to be you need me to be :D + just gives uuuup The Pink Seashell: i feel like i would get this interlude more if i had watched the movie but it has some cool orchestration going on, patrick went all in this album I Am My Own Muse: violins pt.2: electric boogaloo, now with brass instruments! + OOOOH gottothrowthisyearawaywegottothrowthisyearaway + *victoria justice voice* i think we're ALL trying to keep it together Flu Game: last night i dreamt i still. knew. YOOOOOUUUUU + ladadadaladadadaladada + energy injected right into the listener's veins!! i wanna break shit!!! + again on the lyrics, what the fuck pete how dare you speak to me this much + not the type beat outro Baby Annihilation: PETE POETRYYYYYY I AM SO NORMAL ABOUT PETE POETRY + "angel dust" *magic synth* + tension?? dissonance?? The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years): lowlowlowlowlow + TEN YEARRRRS + NOTHIIING. NOTHIIIING. NANANANANANANA + this song is essentially "hey we're all old now, here's a bit of how you used to feel at 13, now you're sad that you'll never be that happy again :)" like how is that fucking fair What A Time To Be Alive: this is soul punk 2020 "patrick screams in horror into a microphone about covid for three minutes" version. this is a soul punk song do not tell me otherwise + everything is here (except my serotonin 🤪) + aLIIIIIVE + to livestream the apocalypse + IVE GOT THE QUARANTINE BLUES BAD NEWS WHAT'S LEFT?? So Much (For) Stardust: PIANO???? ORCHESTRA???? + the little trumpets lmao + SO MUCH!!! FOR STARDUST!!! + thoughtwehaditaAaAaLl + THE CALLBACK. THE CALLBACK (but also nice eeaao reference lmao) + "i used to be a real go-getter, i used to think it'd all get better" ouch. ouch do not talk to me everything hurts

[thereyvan]

pre-hiatus and post-hiatus? nah. these are the real subtypes of Fall Out Boy fans

note: this has been designed to be at least somewhat comprehensible to non-fans and new fans 

type 1: the regulars. these are the majority of FOB fans. whether they joined before, during, or after the late 2009 to early 2013 hiatus, whether they prefer the fandom nickname of Car-Crash Hearts, Overcast Kids, Youngbloods, or Fobbies, these are the fans that make up most of the fanbase. type 1s tend to like most of FOB's output, save for a few songs they're not that fond of. they probably follow the band's socials and maybe the band members' socials. overall, these are the FOB fans you're most likely to meet on the internet or irl. they can overlap with types 5 and 6, but are more on the down-low about it 

type 2: the stans. these are the really obsessive fans. they insist that they like everything FOB has put out and have probably heard the various 2001 demos. they're the fans that make it their life mission to go to as many FOB shows as possible and get barricade each time. a few of them get downright creepy with their stalking. it was a type 2/6 overlap that had a hand in causing Patrick Stump to leave social media. understandably, most other fans are not fond of these. they tend to overlap with type 5, occasionally overlapping types 3 and 4 as well 

type 3: the pre-hiatus gatekeepers(i know i said pre-hiatus ain’t a subtype, but this doesn’t refer to all pre-hiatus fans). usually, these fans joined the fandom between the band's formation in mid-2001 and the hiatus and are self-proclaimed “elder emos.” they put all of FOB's pre-hiatus work on a pedestal and degrade their post-hiatus work. they also tend to look down on anyone who joined the fandom after the hiatus. type 3s are the entitled elitists of the fandom. they tend to cross over with types 2 and 5 and occasionally 4. if they’re also a type 5, they're almost certainly horny for Pete Wentz. the one good thing about them is that the type 2 overlaps are the most likely to spread appreciation of Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley 

type 4: the smol-beanifiers. these are the annoying asses who infantilize the everliving shit out of Patrick. they noticed his adorkableness and introversion and exaggerated those traits to hell and back, justifying themselves by pointing out his endearing nature. i mean, while he is quite the cutie, these people take it way too far. they're the ones who tend to call Patrick a "smol bean" and act as if his sweetness makes him completely innocent, most just flat-out ignoring that that man canonically fucks. those that don't ignore that that man fucks almost always overlap with type 5 and are probably Peterick-loving fujoshis. type 4s were everywhere on mid-2010s Tumblr and Wattpad, but are less common now. most of them matured into type 1s, but some only worsened into type 2s. either way, there’s an all but 0% chance that they don’t overlap with type 6 

type 5: the simps. these are the fans that are down bad for at least one of the boys- some might say they're down colossal. type 5s can overlap with any other type and are the most likely to have an AO3 account. there's really not much else to say about these lil degenerates 

type 6: the Patrick lovers. yes, there's enough of these to get their own type. these fuckers- who can overlap with any other type- absolutely love Patrick. they are the #1 Soul Punk and Truant Wave defenders. notably, a decent chunk of the type 6s on the Fall Out Boy sides of Twitter and Tumblr("fobtwt" and “foblr”) are transmascs who project themselves onto him, relating to his insecurity about his body, the resulting fondness for wearing layers, and him being a measly 5'4". these features have also led a lot of generally insecure fans to attach themselves to him. there's also a lot of neurodivergent type 6s, as Patrick himself has ADHD. he also has asthma, which has led many fans to be even more in awe of his belting ability. a lot of them are also unspeakably horny for this man, seeing him as a certified DILF. i am admittedly one of these people 

EDIT: i didn’t mention the type 6 lesbians because i figured that was just a given