Fall Out Boy: Infinity on High

Three megahit singles. A full-frontal Sidekick fiasco. A snarky beef with the Killers. The ascendancy of protégés Panic! at the Disco. It was a wild 18 months for Fall Out Boy and breakout LP From Under the Cork Tree. Follow-up Infinity on High doesn’t make quite as cool an acronym, but frontman Patrick Stump explains why we should like it anyway.

How much pressure did you feel in following up Cork Tree’s success?

Stump: There could be if you let it be there, but we just ignored it, so it just feels good to me. You only get to make the second major label record once; that’s the last chance you know that somebody’s gonna be fronting the bill for strings and horns and everything, so we just went nuts and had the most fun we could.

There’s definitely a lot of sonic ambition on Infinity on High.

Stump: From song to song there’s a completely different feel, but they all make sense in context. They’ve got a few common points, but overall there’s a lot of different voices and perspectives and styles. When we talk about our favorite musicians, it’s all either hip-hop groups or metal bands; it would be dishonest for us to hold back any of these elements. We’d have to [write] more standard rock music, which just would be lame, anyway. Ultimately people might be weird about it, but I like to think they get what’s honest.

Where does the title come from?

Stump: There was a series of letters that Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother that Pete [Wentz, bassist] was reading, and it’s a quote from one of those. I don’t remember the full quote in context, especially since it’s been translated a couple different ways into English, but one of the translations was something along the lines of “When you stare out at infinity on high, all this life is…” something along the lines of “all this life is almost worth it,” something like that. We like those innocuous titles that can mean a bunch of different things. Some titles just scream out to us, and that was one of them.

How did Jay-Z get on the album?

Stump: Well, Jay-Z’s a friend of ours. We’re huge, huge hip-hop fans; that’s probably our biggest influence. But we didn’t want to do anything contrived. We’re not a hip-hop group, and it would’ve been silly for us to have Jay come in and rap, like, straight-up. We organized it so that he introduced a track, and that felt the most natural and the most reasonable. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to be part of, period. There’s not a lot of living musicians that I respect a lot, and Jay-Z’s on a very short list. So having Jay on there is another level, something really cool.

Check out this article and more in this month’s SNAP Magazine. Available at J&R.

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