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The story of Fall Out Boy’s From Under The Cork Tree: “There was outsized ambition that we didn’t even understand we had”
K! joins Fall Out Boy vocalist/guitarist Patrick Stump for a wholesome trip down memory lane – from the band’s iconic emo looks of their From Under The Cork Tree era, to getting experimental in the studio, to achieving a level of success that they could never have imagined…
- Words:
- Emily Garner
- Photos:
- Paul Harries
On May 3, 2005, Fall Out Boy played a special album release day show at New York’s famed 1,200-capacity Irving Plaza. It was notable for a couple of reasons: firstly, it marked the arrival of a record that would change absolutely everything for the Chicago pop-punks: From Under The Cork Tree. But, even more surreally, Jay-Z and Beyoncé turned up.
“That was weird!” laughs vocalist/guitarist Patrick Stump today, reflecting on some of the wildest moments of one of the most exciting chapters of FOB’s career, 20 years on. “We were still basically just out of the basement. I remember in the Sugar [We’re Goin Down] video, I’m wearing this blue T-shirt that says something about Michigan on it. It was just a shirt that I had gotten at the Village Discount underneath our old apartment for, like, 25 cents. I have a picture somewhere of us with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and I’m wearing that shirt. The fact that this shirt was still in rotation means that things really weren’t that far from the period where we were sleeping on couches.”
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime memory that illustrates just how radically the tide was turning for Fall Out Boy – completed by bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley. Their brilliant, now-beloved 2003 debut Take This To Your Grave – they don’t count Evening Out With Your Girlfriend, and neither should you – eventually worked its way into charts almost a year after it came out, and got them in front of rowdy crowds on 2004’s Vans Warped Tour. But it wasn’t until Cork Tree mega-singles Sugar, We’re Goin Down and Dance, Dance landed that FOB truly entered the mainstream, and found themselves as one of the iconic faces of emo and pop-punk in the ’00s.
“It’s interesting because I was there for the ground zero of the whole emo thing,” remembers Patrick, who was proud owner of the scene’s best sideburns at the time. “But I never did the eyeliner. My hair is long right now, but I never did the [swoopy fringe]. There are all these emo signifiers that I wasn’t really aware of. And it was weird because that stuff was Pete’s thing before Fall Out Boy – he looked like that when he was in Arma [Angelus] and when he was in hardcore bands.
“So it was kind of this silly luck, or almost like a parallel evolution where it was all just by coincidence. I don’t think any of us really thought about it all that much – we didn’t think about what our ‘look’ was. But I do remember early on, I didn’t really wear jeans and the band was like, ‘Come on, man. Everybody else wears jeans. You look weird!’ So that was my big thing: that I had to get jeans (laughs). But otherwise, it was just what I showed up in.”
Patrick’s modest wardrobe had an almighty shock when Kerrang! started getting involved. Splattering one of the hottest new rock bands in the world throughout our pages, we’d put the foursome in everything from white suits to dressing gowns, and even just their undercrackers as they had a water-fight for our camera backstage at Warped in Chicago, alongside features describing them as ‘punk’s new superstars’ and noting the ‘hysteria’ that followed them on their first major tour across the pond in 2006. (Happily, Patrick doesn’t cringe too hard when we bring some of these pics up now.)
“When we started going to the UK, there was this funny sussing out of each other,” he describes, fondly. “I think UK press was trying to figure out who we were, and we were trying to figure out what the vibe is. Of course, now it’s second nature, but we did a bunch of photoshoots, and I remember the Kerrang! shoots especially. Later on there was one with ice-cream in my face – all these weird ones! The thing that was so funny about it was we were many shoots in – I can’t remember how many we had done – and the photographer said, ‘God, I love you guys, you just say yes to everything.’ And we kind of looked at each other like, ‘Oh, we could have said no?!’ But I was always pleased with how inventive the ideas were. It wasn’t just, ‘Everybody stand against this wall and sneer and put your hands in your pockets!’”
Slightly less pleasing was Fall Out Boy’s first appearance at the 2006 Kerrang! Awards, where Sugar, We’re Goin Down was given the gong for Best Video. Photographed in the green room with the late, great Meat Loaf, a shy and nervous Patrick was definitely still coming to grips with his new life in the spotlight, surrounded by rock stars.
“I remember Meat Loaf was really intense and he kept yelling at me,” he laughs. “It was kind of playful but I didn’t really get the joke. It was one of those things where he was clearly handing the ball to us, like, ‘Let’s be crazy.’ But I’m crazy in the sense that I’ll go into my room and work for 10 hours. It was just incredibly awkward, and I felt like I let him down by not being the right personality!”
Unlike Pete Wentz, who seemingly took to fame much more naturally, Joe Trohman was equally as perplexed by celeb status.
“We didn’t really do the popping champagne thing,” explains Patrick. “[Island Records] once took us out to a really nice dinner and said, ‘Order anything you want.’ I don’t think anyone got anything that crazy apart from Joe, who as a joke ordered the most expensive drink on the menu, which was really nice cognac or something. They brought it over and he shot it, which isn’t what you’re supposed to do! I’m watching the label and their faces drop, like, ‘What did you just do?’ We weren’t good at that kind of traditional schmoozing rock star party thing. I remember one industry party and Rihanna was there, and lots of famous people, and we stood there like, ‘Hey, good to see you,’ and then just left.”
Thankfully – and much, much importantly – where Fall Out Boy shone was in the studio…
Patrick Stump is, by his own admission, “not a very daring person”. But there are a couple of areas in his life in which he will uncharacteristically push the boundaries.
“I’m pescatarian, so I don’t eat that much crazy stuff, but the two places I’m really adventurous is music and food,” he explains. “I’ll try anything once in both of those categories! I’ll get a bold idea – and that’s very unlike me otherwise, because I don’t like upsetting anybody ever. But with music I’m like, ‘Let’s try something. Let’s do something weird.’”
Patrick’s courage and determination to level up after Take This To Your Grave had come from a couple of different places, internally and externally. First, taking the leap from Fueled By Ramen to a major label meant more money, and a gut feeling that, “This is the last time that I might ever get somebody to pay for me to mess around in a studio, so I should really do as much as I can.”
There was also a strong will to seize their opportunity, given how much of a slog it had been getting to that point. Amazingly, Fall Out Boy were initially unable to find anyone to work with them going into Cork Tree – Take This To Your Grave producer Sean O’Keefe declined the job, and it wasn’t the band’s only rejection.
“It was a compliment in a lot of ways, but it was also incredibly harsh!” Patrick laughs of why Sean said no, even after hearing their demos. “He was saying, ‘This material is good and the band has entered into a new place.’ But because the songs were so good, he’s like, ‘You’ll never be good enough to play them!’ I don’t know how to describe it because that sounds really mean, but if you know Sean, you know he means that in a really genuine way, like, ‘This is really good, and it deserves to be played by…’”
Professionals?
“Exactly (laughs). That was what he was getting at. So it was weird because no-one wanted us. Sean was one of the only people that believed in us in the first place. And most of the other ‘name’ producers – and I won’t name anybody because I don’t want to shame them for passing on Fall Out Boy, because I probably would have, too! – that were doing other similar things, they passed on us.”
Eventually, early versions of Sugar, We’re Goin Down and Dance, Dance found their way into the ears of meticulous and “no-nonsense” producer Neal Avron (New Found Glory, Yellowcard), who ultimately discerned something in these songs “that no-one else seemed to hear”.
“I think Dance, Dance was unique enough to him because there wasn’t a lot of stuff that sounded like that,” Patrick says, “and I still don’t know of things that sound like that besides us. There’s moments like that where I’m like, ‘That’s just Fall Out Boy music.’ And no-one has ever really tried to knock it off either. It’s just its own thing, and it’s very much us.”
Part of Fall Out Boy’s spectacularly unique DNA comes from how Patrick and Pete work together. On Take This To Your Grave, the two had butted heads when trying to fine-tune a dynamic that has since gone on to become one of rock’s most magical; Pete was suggesting different lyrics to the ones Patrick had initially written, with the singer then finding it “incredibly difficult to take lyrics and shove them into a different space that doesn’t really fit” within a song. Cork Tree, smiles Patrick, was “much easier” on that front, because he took words, phrases and ramblings from Pete’s notebooks – even if he often didn’t really understand what they meant – and put them front and centre, which would then help inform the music.
“I’m a songwriter and I write lyrics, and for somebody to kind of ask me to set that aside and focus on their thing, it takes a lot of trust and a lot of respect mutually,” Patrick says. “Pete really earned that. He really showed me and demonstrated that it was worth it, you know? It’s weird to me that I seem to be the only person who can do this, but for some reason a lot of other people can’t seem to find the song in Pete’s words. But I read his words and it’s right there. The thing that’s really exciting to me is that I will hear stuff that I never would have heard in my own writing.”
Album opener (and just one of many of FOB’s legendarily wordy song titles) Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued is a prime example. There’s a shuffling, 6/8 time signature in the verses which Patrick feels he probably “wouldn’t have gotten if I wasn’t reading it off the page”. Likewise, the frontman affectionately became known as someone who would “ramble” in songs in order to make Pete’s lyrics work – something Fall Out Boy’s manager reminded him of when going in to make their most recent record, 2023’s So Much (For) Stardust, also with Neal.
“It was like just picking up where we’d left off – which is which I was hoping for,” Patrick enthuses of teaming back up for the fourth time (Neal also did 2007’s Infinity On High and 2008’s Folie à Deux). “We were kind of stupid when we were kids, you know? It was very hard to see the forest for the trees in terms of making music. Everybody’s kind of fighting for their own thing. So I had this hunch. I was like, ‘We’re much, much more mature as dudes and as a band. We’ve learned so much, and it might be really cool to see what this band does with him.’ It had a different kind of energy where it wasn’t the same kind of stress [as on Cork Tree], and it wasn’t the same self-imposed idiocy. We were just nicer to each other. And we were always nice to each other, but it was different. It’s hard to describe.
“It’s funny, because I’ll see things like, ‘Oh, we got into a lot of fights on Cork Tree.’ I’ve read that there were fist-fights and stuff. No, no! We had spirited arguments, but [saying that] ends up sounding more dramatic than it was. And the truth is that we always got along, but I think we internalised a lot of our insecurities and stuff on those records. Cork Tree was a great example. I mean, Neal needed to babysit us in a lot of ways.”
Yeah… about those fist-fights. It’s been reported that during the making of Sugar, Pete put a camera in your face… and you punched it?
“I wouldn’t say ‘punched’!” Patrick exclaims. “I kind of slammed it away, like, ‘Get out of my face.’ The context is we were discussing things back and forth, and there’s a great cheekiness to it on Pete’s part. It wasn’t like he was filming a behind the scenes – it was more like he said something, then I said something, and then the camera comes up real slowly, like, ‘What do you have to say about that?’ It was very antagonistic, but in a playful way. And I was kind of just like, ‘Dude, we’re not doing that right now.’ I didn’t punch anything – that sounds painful!”
Really, tempers and emotions had only risen in accordance with what Patrick calls “outsized ambition that we maybe didn’t even really understand that we had”.
“I wanted to make music up to a certain level of quality compared to records that I grew up with,” he stresses. “But I think that innately, if you’re aiming for that, then you’re already competing for the big stuff – whether or not I knew it. Then the record ended up being a big success and I was caught by surprise.”
These days, despite having warned listeners in the opening lines of From Under The Cork Tree to ‘put this record down’ because ‘we are bad news’, Fall Out Boy have made fans of everyone from Taylor Swift to Linkin Park. Patrick Stump doesn’t take any credit for that whatsoever, though. He does, however, understand and deeply appreciate what it’s like to go from obsessing over bands to becoming true peers – like FOB themselves did on 2021-2022’s Hella Mega Tour, on a bill that sandwiched them between his own heroes Weezer and Green Day.
“I always feel like it’s a continuum, you know?” Patrick begins. “We’re all here for however long doing our thing. I was talking to an artist one time and they said they were a fan. And then they started going into some really deep-cut stuff. I was really surprised. They referenced a remix that I had forgotten I did – that was something I’d do for a while as a fun thing, and then kind of forget about it. But they were referencing something I did in a remix and I was like, ‘That’s wild.’
“I think about Weezer,” he continues. “I spent all my time and a fair bit of my money on bootlegs. After [1996 second album] Pinkerton, there were all these Pinkerton demos. And when eBay started, I would go on there and buy any bootleg I could. So then to play with them, it’s very surreal and strange. I have a VHS of Green Day’s first show – or it claims to be their first show, anyway. I got that from eBay somewhere, too. So you go from being an obsessed fan to then opening for them, and it’s very strange!”
In typical Patrick fashion, as he still struggles to get his head around the 20-plus-years-long love for his band and where they’re at now, he does hope to inspire fellow artists in a much more human way.
“If they can take anything from us, I hope that it’s to be nice to the people coming up after you,” he smiles, “because there were some bands that weren’t very nice to us. That was a thing that I remember – I was like, ‘Okay, if we ever headline somewhere, I’m never going to be like that.’”
Ever the perfectionist, the musician also has some surprising self-assessments about From Under The Cork Tree in 2025. Even though they earned a GRAMMY nomination off the back of the record and it’s since gone five-times platinum in the States, not to mention making it to second place in Kerrang!’s fan-voted 25 greatest emo albums ever (with only The Black Parade beating it), Patrick believes that as a body of work it’s actually “kind of inconsistent” – though it has “some of my favourite stuff we’ve ever done”.
“It’s one of the more experimental ones, but it doesn’t really get noted as that,” he ponders. “We’re kind of throwing a lot of things at the wall. But there are bullet points on that map that don’t feel like they should be on the same album. That’s more of my thing. Not that it’s bad by any means, but just that there are songs where they don’t make sense to me in situ, as one whole thing. Whereas, this is going to be a crazy one, and I don’t like this album as much by any stretch, but I think American Beauty [/American Psycho, 2015], if you drop the needle anywhere on that record, you’re like, ‘This is the same record.’ I like that about it. I like that probably more than I like any of the songs specifically on that record. But then I say that and that’s someone’s favourite record…
“I think it was Paul Simon who said after you write a song and you put it out, it’s not yours anymore; it’s somebody else’s,” Patrick continues. “It’s the audience’s, and they connect with it, they feel what they feel. So I can hear Cork Tree and be like, ‘Oh, I would have done this differently,’ or whatever. It’s like that temptation to go back and fix something – like George Lucas. But there is no fixing it – that’s part of what people love about it. And so in a lot of ways, my opinion doesn’t really matter. You know what I mean? It’s not really what it’s about. It’s not for me – I don’t go home and listen to me!”
We’ll be honest: having spent the past 3,000 words reflecting on how sensationally special Cork Tree is, that isn’t necessarily the triumphant ending we had planned. But, actually, it’s a very good thing. Because FOB have never been a band to overly revel in nostalgia and dwell on the past. What’s next is forever more important.
“This is such a cheeseball thing – it almost sounds like promotion – but I really do think that Stardust might be my favourite record of ours,” Patrick concludes, finishing up his remarkably critical analysis of Fall Out Boy’s discography. “There’s a couple things in retrospect that I probably wouldn’t have done…
“But that to me says that the next one will be even better, you know?!”
This interview was originally printed in the limited-edition From Under The Cork Tree zine.
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