On the Tour Bus with Fall Out Boy, The Academy Is and Cobra Starship

In our ongoing efforts to tell you how emo guys really live, we caught up with Fall Out Boy, the Academy Is and "Snakes on a Plane" dudes Cobra Starship at the New York stop of the catchily-named Honda Civic Tour. Not all emo bands are created equal -- some get two buses, and some get a couch with holes in it; some get master bedrooms and others get closets. But that didn't stop any of the bands from cramming as much as they could fit onto their buses for the two-month trek with +44 and Paul Wall.

Check out the photos to find out which band member gets gifts of cereal, which band finds alcohol behind every door and whose closet is full of dresses here.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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