Pete Wentz Talks Fame, New Fall Out Boy Songs and One Hilarious Emo Gag

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone caught up with Pete Wentz during a stop in New York, hoping just to see what was brewing in the mind of the Fall Out Boy bassist. Among Wentz's insights: Fame means watching where you put your fingers. "I can't pick my nose at stoplights -- which I do anyway," he says. "That's what window tints are for." And while despite his growing stardom, he's feeling pretty tame these days ("In a weird way, I've become domestic. I don't feel the need for everybody to know everything about me"), he's been somewhat inspired by the self-destructive impulses of the Lohans and Spears of the world. The band's upcoming Young Wild Things tour takes its name from a classic kids' book, but "There's also a play on words of the young wild thing idea that everybody has with Hollywood and starlets right now."

Also, Fall Out Boy are working on some "folky sounding" material for their next album. "We just wrote those songs in the back of the bus with an acoustic guitar. I'm not really sure what will happen with them," Wentz says. "There's one about some friends who ended up in crazy strip club in France, which is a cool song." When the subject turned to emo, Wentz, amazingly, didn't challenge us to a fight -- in fact, he sounded pretty good-natured about it. “I get what people are saying with the eyeliner and the girl pants and this and that. Hopefully, [emo] is more than just a T-shirt slogan. Hopefully some of us bands are able to grow and become bigger than emo," the bassist said. Wentz also talked about a visual gag we seriously hope that FOB will still put into play sometime: "For a long time, we talked about playing in front of a giant banner that said 'EMO'. If you're emo, you might as well be in on the joke."

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

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.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter