MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Pete Wentz says talk of Fall Out Boy’s demise has been blown out of proportion — but he isn’t sure when the rock band will performing together again.

Earlier this week, lead singer Patrick Stump told Spin.com that the group was done after Wentz tweeted that he didn’t see a future for the platinum band.

But on Friday, Wentz said band members are just doing things apart and it’s not clear where their future lies.

“We just haven’t had the time to say anything. All I have been able to do is say, ‘Man, I miss doing Fall Out Boy,’ and I got to a better place hanging out with my son,” the bassist said of his infant son Bronx.

“Now I’m OK if Fall Out Boy comes back or doesn’t come back. Like, if it’s fun for everyone to do again, we’re going to do it … I just want it to be authentic when we come back,” said Wentz, in town for Super Bowl festivities.

Though he was at a Venus Williams rooftop party to DJ on Friday afternoon, he said he couldn’t see himself doing music seriously on his own: “I don’t know that I’m really cut out to be a solo artist. It’s never really been an aspiration of mine.”

Wentz said he has e-mailed Stump and the two are still cool with each other.

“We just wanted to talk about how blown out of proportion it’s gotten. It’s to the point where we’re gonna make ‘I Quit Fall Out Boy’ T-shirts, just goofing around about it,” he said. “We don’t want any animosity about it at all.”

Source: Variety

By James Montgomery

Over the past week, Mark Hoppus and Pete Wentz have rekindled their Twitter relationship (the same passionate affair that gave us the famed “Octo-Drive” last year), penning a series of odes to one another that mentioned “crazy-ass sandwiches” and, more notably, some mysterious new songs the two were collaborating on.

The tweets had fans of Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy salivating. With both bands in between projects at the moment (will this be the year we finally get the new Blink record?), speculation was rampant about what the two were up to. Well, we have the answer.

In an e-mail to MTV News, Wentz revealed that he and Hoppus had completed a song for the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s upcoming “Alice in Wonderland,” the same soundtrack that features a new song from All Time Low.

“We did a song for ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ [and we] might do a few more depending on when [Mark] goes in with Blink. [It] sounds nothing like Blink or Fall Out Boy. Mark understands songwriting on a completely different level. It’s awesome to have a chance to sit in a room with him and watch him work out a melody.”

Wentz added that, though he and Hoppus plan to record more songs, this isn’t the beginning of some new supergroup. It’s more like two friends getting together and jamming. After all, both of them have rather open schedules at the moment.

“It’s just for fun. It’s not a band or even a project at this state,” Wentz wrote. “I think between me getting Starbucks on TMZ and him gearing up for a summer of Blink, we have a lot on our hands.”

A spokesperson for Walt Disney Records — who will be releasing the soundtrack — told MTV News that at the moment, no track list has been confirmed but an announcement will be made “in the coming weeks.”

Source: MTV

By William Goodman

Fall Out Boy is on indefinite hiatus, but drummer Andy Hurley is busier than ever!

In addition to the Damned Things, his heavy metal band with members of Anthrax and Every Time I Die, the 29-year-old sticksman is working on another project: Burning Empires, a hardcore quintet featuring Stuart Ross, Ryan Morgan, and Kyle Johnson of Misery Signals, plus Matt Mixon, formerly of 7 Angels 7 Plagues. They’re all Milwaukee natives (and housemates!) with one ambition: to deliver their political message hard, fast, and loud.

Listen to Burning Empires’ new song, “Accomplice,” below.

Like Misery Signals and 7 Angels 7 Plagues, Burning Empires rip out a heavy, furious sound with thundering double kick drums, screeching electric guitars, and Morgan’s vicious screams. But with “Accomplice” — a song off the band’s early 2010 EP, Heirs of the Soil, to be released via their own Fuck City label — there’s an added element: a scathing message about the U.S. government’s war against animal and environmental activists.

Speaking exclusively to SPIN.com, Hurley, a devout vegan and follower of anarcho-primitivism, discussed the new band — and its message:

“This is a band I’ve always wanted to do with these guys, who have been best friends for about as long as Pete [Wentz] has been my best friend — over 10 years,” he said. “Burning Empires satisfies a heavier, more pissed off side of me that has been waiting to come out, and the politics of the band are so important to me. They’re issues for which I’ve wanted to have a musical outlet for years.”

Ryan Morgan agreed: “['Accomplice'] is a song about the guilt of existing in an ecologically destructive system,” from which “there is virtually no escape.”

“And should someone choose to take action,” he added, “they’re facing a disproportionate and heavy-handed response from the government. The FBI has labeled the animal rights and environmental movements as the ‘No. 1 Domestic Terrorist threat.’ It’s horrifying and it’s bizarre and backwards.”

Source: Spin

By: Daniel Kreps

There’s another new supergroup of sorts on the horizon: two members of Fall Out Boy are using their time away from the band to provide riffs and beats for a new heavy metal side project called the Damned Things. FOB guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley have teamed with Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Rob Caggiano, Every Time I Die’s Keith Buckley and bassist David Karon in the new band, which Ian describes to Rock Sound as “Kyuss meeting Thin Lizzy.”

According to Rock Sound, the Damned Things have already written and demoed 15 songs with the hope of entering the studio in December. “It’s super fun and it’s something that we do totally take seriously because we love the music we’ve created,” Ian said, describing new song “A Great Reckoning” as worthy of “any Thin Lizzy record.” The band’s roots can be traced back to at least October 2008, when the Damned Things’ MySpace page was created. Judging by the comments on that page, a Damned Things song was initially posted there but has since been deleted.

As Rolling Stone previously reported, after years of constantly recording and touring, Fall Out Boy are going on a hiatus — even though Wentz told RS it was more like an indefinite vacation — but Trohman and Hurley won’t be catching up on R&R during the break, instead taking the opportunity to step out of Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz’s shadows. “People think of Fall Out Boy and they think of Pete Wentz and Patrick,” Ian told Rock Sound, “These two guys, man, they’re fucking hardcore dudes. Joe writes some amazing riffs.”

Source: The Rolling Stone

By Kyle Anderson

Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz isn’t just a friend to Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta — he’s also his label boss and friendly rival. As a result, the two have been maintaining a prank war for the past few months, culminating in a recent victory for Saporta.

Paying up on a bet he made a few months ago, Wentz got a new tattoo on his leg — a tattoo of Saporta’s face.

“Well, I promised Gabe if ‘Good Girls Go Bad’ went platinum, I would let him pick a tattoo to put on me,” Wentz said in a statement. “A man with such humble beginnings, of course, chose a self-portrait.” As a result, there is now a permanent mark on Wentz’s calf that features Saporta’s face and the inscription “Gabey Baby Made Me Go Bad.”

This is merely the latest shot in the public prank war that has been going on between Wentz and Saporta for months. Last month at the MTV Video Music Awards, Wentz wore a T-shirt that revealed Saporta’s phone number, and while he was unable to reveal all the digits on the live broadcast, Saporta’s number still got out there, forcing him to change it.

Saporta struck back a few weeks ago at Los Premios MTV, where he announced Wentz’s e-mail address (in Spanish!) during the broadcast.

For those keeping score at home, Saporta is definitely in the lead, though according to Wentz, there may still be more to come. “I held through with the bet,” Wentz said. “But let’s see if Gabe holds through with his end of the bet if Hot Mess goes gold.”

Source:

By Cortney Harding

In this age of oversharing, it seems strange to think that until 10 or 15 years ago the most a fan could hope for in terms of communication from a famous artist was a signed picture from a fan club or a few minutes outside a tour bus after a show.

When Pete Wentz and his band, Fall Out Boy, started making noise in 2003, the band was noted not only for its emo-pop music but also the way it used e-mail and blog postings to forge closer relationships with fans at a time when most acts were still getting online.

Millions of albums later, Wentz and his bandmates stay in touch with Twitter and use the Web to engage fans with such quirky online games as “Fall Out Boy Trail,” a play on the primitive computer game “Oregon Trail,” and viral promotion campaigns like Citizens for Our Betterment, which promoted the band’s latest album, “Folie a Deux,” under the guise of a political organization.

1. HOW DO YOU DEVELOP YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGIES?

Ninety-nine percent of the time we come up with the ideas, like the takeoff on the “Oregon Trail” game or the Citizens for Our Betterment campaign. Obviously we don’t have any programing skills, though, so we don’t do any of the back end. But we go through all the bugs of everything before they come out and speak up if we don’t like the way something is presented. There are times when we are approached by different people or companies. We are open to cool ideas from other people, for sure.

2. FALL OUT BOY WAS ONE OF THE FIRST BANDS TO EMBRACE MYSPACE AND SOCIAL NETWORKING, BUT NOW EVERYONE USES THOSE PLATFORMS. HOW DO YOU KEEP UP WITH NEW AND DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES?

We were lucky in a weird way because we came in at the tail end of the era when bands still had videos on MTV and were still selling records and made money touring, and we had peer-to-peer downloads on MP3.com and MySpace and all of that. So, we had the best of all those things and were able to establish ourselves as a band so that if one platform disappeared, we still had other outlets.

In terms of new stuff, I’m pretty much a total insomniac, and I’m up all night looking around. I follow the kids. My brother was the one who told me to switch everything to Facebook. He was way early on it and he is younger than me. I think that you get into trouble when you stand still. You got to be like a shark.

3. SPEAKING OF NEW THINGS, WHEN CAN WE EXPECT THE NEXT FALL OUT BOY ALBUM?

I think that there’s nothing worse than when you like a band and you get their record and you can totally tell that their music is uninspired and they just felt like they had to put out a record. We have been grinding so much that we haven’t had the time to kind of figure out what we want to do creatively.

4. THERE HAVE BEEN REPORTS THAT FALL OUT BOY IS BASICALLY DONE. THAT’S NOT THE CASE, RIGHT?

We put out a video (“What a Catch, Donnie”) that people can interpret as the final thing or they can interpret it as a celebration of what’s going on or whatever it is.

We are going to stop doing Fall Out Boy when Fall Out Boy stops being fun. I think that the world needs a break from Fall Out Boy as much as Fall Out Boy needs a break from the world. They need to embrace some other bands out there and you can’t always be shoving everything in people’s faces all the time. To that extent, it is calculated.

Maybe we will start recording again in two weeks; maybe it will be three years. I don’t really know. There is no plan in motion at all and no one has said the “H” word (hiatus) no matter how many times people try to get us to say it.

5. BUT YOU WON’T DISAPPEAR FROM VIEW, SINCE YOU ARE SO ACTIVE ON TWITTER.

Yeah, although sometimes (toddler son) Bronx tweets for me. I was on UberTwitter and (my wife) Ashlee (Simpson) came in the room and asked if I could watch him and he just went in on Baby Twitter. It was whatever numbers or letters he put down went out as the tweet. I was like, “That’s pretty cool.”

6. AS MUCH FUN AS IT IS TO HAVE YOUR SON TWITTER, YOU MUST HAVE A BROADER STRATEGY FOR USING IT.

You use Twitter two completely, vastly different ways. It could be the ultimate tool of narcissism. Yesterday I said, “I am using Twitter in its most narcissist way possible. I am tweeting in the mirror while I have another mirror set up so I can read the Tweet forwards.” It can be so narcissist and selfish, but at the same time we used it to get $1 million for an organization called Invisible Children by asking followers to each contribute $1.

One of the greatest things about Twitter is pointing at stuff. For instance, Music Mondays is awesome because you are able to let people hear music that they wouldn’t be able to hear otherwise.

Source: Reuters

By Christina Lee

Reason No. 6 why Fall Out Boy does not suck as much as you may think: “They’re an increasingly rare breed—that is, a massively popular rock band.” And to further classify the band as such a specimen, Fall Out Boy has announced that it will release a greatest-hits album, Believers Never Die.
“This album feels like our high school graduation yearbook,” the band’s statement reads. “Kinda makes us wanna write ‘don’t ever change’ or ‘have a great summer’ here.”

Fall Out Boy began its ascent to rock star status with 2003′s Take This to Your Grave, though in recent months it has fought off rumors of an indefinite hiatus. The band, led by songwriter/bassist Pete Wentz, has taken a few other concepts to their graves in recent months, including the “death of neon” in the latest Clandestine Industries clothing collection and the “death of emo haircuts” during Blink-182′s reunion tour:

Wentz likens this to Jay-Z’s “Death of Auto-Tune,” and considering their reign as kings of pop-punk, the comparison may not be that far off. Devoid of their founding hustle and heartbreak, Jay-Z now calls himself “the only rapper to rewrite history without a pen,” while Fall Out Boy have declared themselves “only good for the latest trend” since 2005. In fact, with little to lament but their own fame these days, Wentz and Hova may as well be neighbors off the same block in Gran Torino. Wentz denies that a hiatus is in the near future, though no set plans have been made either.

“I think that there’s nothing worse than when you like a band and you get their record and you can totally tell that their music is uninspired and they just felt like they had to put out a record,” Wentz told Reuters the day of his ceremonial shaving. “We have been grinding so much that we haven’t had the time to kind of figure out what we want to do creatively.”

Source: Paste Magazine