Fall Out Boy brings its “honest” music to Tower City Saturday.

Credit: Ben Breier

A couple years ago, Fall Out Boy was an opening act when Mest came to Cleveland. The band is now they are headlining the Nintendo Fusion Tour.

They seemed to gain overnight success, climbing to No. 1 on MTV’s “TRL,” No. 17 on the Billboard chart and have MTV’s third most played video for “Sugar, We’re Going Down.”

Patrick Stump, Fall Out Boy’s lead singer, gives us an inside look into why he thinks people should like the band, the “real” Fall Out Boy and how he feels about Ashlee Simpson.

Erika Kreider: What was it like to go back to the studio after you made Take This to Your Grave?

Patrick Stump: “Well there’s pressure, but it wasn’t the type of pressure where you listen to everyone else. Of course there’s a lot of hype on that record, so there were a lot of people expecting us to be the next big thing, and really we just wanted to live up to our own expectations of making a record that we didn’t hate.

Making a record that we enjoyed listening to and hopefully other people would to. It was really a conscience, ‘We got to make a hit record’ kind of thing. Other emotions … tired isn’t really an emotion, but a lot of that.”

EK: What’s your favorite song on your third release, From Under The Cork Tree?

PS: “It’s really hard to be objective about your stuff. I’m a fairly self-deprecating guy, and I can’t walk in and just be like, ‘I did this, this is amazing.’ I think the one I like listening to the most is the last one on the record. It’s a record, part of it came from my own brain, so I probably like something about all of it.”

EK: Are you done writing songs about girls?

PS: “I think we’re done writing songs that don’t really say anything.”

EK: What risks did you consciously take on From Under The Cork Tree?

PS: “We tried to put a little more actual Fall Out Boy in there rather than trying to think about what someone would want to hear. We really just did something that was honest.

“So some of the songs stretch a little bit, because not all of us necessarily like all one style of music. We wanted to branch out, I mean, it’s not too different. I wouldn’t say it’s totally different. Just little stretches.”

EK: What do you mean by something that is “Fall Out Boy?’

PS: “The record is called From Under the Cork Tree. It’s from a story about a bull who doesn’t want to fight, he just wants to sit and smell flowers, but happens to be a big fight-worthy bull, but it’s just not something he’s into. He just wants to sit under a cork tree and smell flowers.

“Well, we’re not interested in what other bands are doing, we’re not competitive, we’re not in the game. We’re musicians, and we just want to play music.

“If you like us, we want you to like us because you like us. You can call us whatever you want to call us.

“Some people call us emo, some people call us pop punk, we’ve been called all sorts of things. It would be really disappointing if someone didn’t like us because they said we’re emo or something superficial. If you don’t like us, you shouldn’t like our melody, or you shouldn’t like our faces.

“You shouldn’t hate whatever we get lumped into, and that’s the thing. We wanted to make something that was a lot harder to slap one word on, so it was a lot harder to just lump into something. We just didn’t want to pay attention to what other bands were doing, we just did our record.”

EK: How do you keep such a loyal fan base?

PS: “I don’t know. I think part of it is that we’re just normal dudes. I think there’s a shift in music now toward real musicians, real bands and real performers rather than Ashlee Simpson and things like that. People that can’t actually perform. It’s more about substance than style.

“So these kids know that we’re just kids like them who somehow are lucky enough to get where we are. Pretty much anybody can do it. That’s the point, I think, and that’s why kids relate to us a lot.”

Contact ALL reporter Erika Kreider at [email protected].