Pete wentz fall out boy biography meaning
Thinking Out Loud: Pete Wentz
You don't tour the world with Fall Out Boy without learning a few things along the way...
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In our regular feature Thinking Out Loud, we find out what’s going on in the minds of the great and good. This week, we peek inside the brain of Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz.
“I think Fall Out Boy breaking up was the most important thing we ever did in terms of the band, our career and our friendships – but that’s not to say it was easy. It was very difficult for lots of different reasons. What was hard was that there was no schedule: there was no determined end and there was a chance the break would never end. That was hard to deal with. I think we would have imploded if we’d stayed on the path we were on though. The break gave us all time to grow and to change. You need that stuff to happen or you stay the same. For us, it was the right course and the right progression. But it was hard to do. It was scary, we went into the unknown. It’s not all rosy now, there’s tension sometimes. And there are times you wonder why you’re doing it. We took a prop plane to Hungary to play one show and there are times you think, ‘Man, what the fuck is this?’ You feel burned out. But then you get a moment at a show, or you see that your kid is proud of you, and that makes it all worth it. As far as the relationships, it’s a bit like this. When your brother goes off to college, he comes back a slightly different person. But you’re still brothers, so you figure out a way to massage that relationship. In Fall Out Boy, we know each other very intimately, but a lot of time has passed and we’ve grown up a lot so you have to give people room to be who they are now. It’s a different beast – and while it’s so familiar, it’s different. Having said that
More seriously, Patrick shares that he’s “very nervous” about people hearing the record – he always is, but these emotions right now are next-level.
“It’s just so special,” he smiles of the album. “It was such a cathartic and personal experience, and it’s kind of vulnerable, in a lot of ways, which I don’t tend to do; I don’t like to put too much of myself in work, because every time I’ve done that it’s been kind of a bummer (laughs). To do that again is kind of anxiety-inducing, but I just had to follow it. I like the record too much.”
With that in mind, we’ve one final question to finish up. And just as Pete had a Star Wars reference for us at the beginning of the interview, allow us to go back to a galaxy far, far away…
So, Fall Out Boy, how would you succinctly sum up your So Much (For) Stardust era?
“This is the way,” responds Andy, quoting the catchphrase from spin-off show The Mandalorian.
“Wait,” Pete interjects, gesturing to Andy. “I need you to say that right after the thing I say!”
Pete turns back to Kerrang!, ready to give his answer and await Andy’s punchline.
“I think that so often we’re comparing this album to Infinity On High, or we’re comparing those two eras,” he says. “I personally think that Take This To Your Grave and [2003 EP] Evening Out With Your Girlfriend are separate, and then the first three records after that are a trilogy, and then there’s another trilogy after that. It’s two trilogies. And this is the start of a new thing, I hope. Now you say it…”
“This is the way,” repeats Andy, right on cue.
“This is the way,” concludes Pete.
So Much (For) Stardust is due out on March 24 via Fueled By Ramen. Fall Out Boy will tour the UK later this year with PVRIS and nothing,nowhere.
Before Fall Out Boy broke into the mainstream consciousness, I’d only ever met Pete Wentz once. I was living in Chicago in the late nineties, right after Texas is the Reason broke up, and I’d befriended a group of hardcore kids who all seemed to know each other from growing up in the suburbs. I went to see a band at the Metro with a couple of them, and then afterwards, we wandered into Pick Me Up—a nearby vegan café that seconded as a hangout for wayward straight-edge kids. Pete was already sitting in a booth. I slid in and said hello, but we didn’t really talk that much. No one in the scene at that time would have called Pete shy in the ‘90s—if anything, his membership in bands like Firstborn, Extinction, Birthright, Racetraitor, and Arma Angelus, to name a few, made him almost ubiquitous—but for some reason we both kept to ourselves that night.
Over the next decade, of course, Pete would go on to become the bassist, lyricist, and oftentimes mouthpiece for Fall Out Boy, a 30-million-album-selling stadium act. But behind the trappings of notoriety and fame, almost everyone I knew who had known Pete as a hardcore kid still talked about Pete as a hardcore kid. Mike D.C., who sang for Damnation A.D., told me about taking his kid to see Fall Out Boy just a couple of months ago and hanging out with Pete. My friend D.J. Rose, who was a significant player in building the Syracuse hardcore scene in the ‘90s, told me how Pete really came through for him as a friend not too long ago, at a time when he was going through a rough patch. Overwhelmingly, there was a portrait painted of a person who never lost sight of his friends and of the community that made him who he is—regardless of his life’s many twists and turns. This, too, is hardcore.
The other thing I kept hearing from mutual friends for months is that Pete loved reading Anti-Matter. So 25 years after our first and only meeting, Pete Wentz and I finally managed to get together for a long overdue American musician Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III (born June 5, 1979) is an American musician who is the bassist and lyricist for the rock band Fall Out Boy. Before the band's formation in 2001, Wentz was a fixture of the Chicago hardcore scene and was the lead singer and songwriter for Arma Angelus, a metalcore band. During Fall Out Boy's hiatus from 2009 to 2012, Wentz formed the experimental, electropop and dubstep group Black Cards. He owns a record label, DCD2 Records, which has signed bands including Panic! at the Disco and Gym Class Heroes. Fall Out Boy returned from hiatus in February 2013, and have since released four albums; Save Rock and Roll, American Beauty/American Psycho, Mania, and So Much (for) Stardust. Wentz has also ventured into other non-musical projects, including writing, acting, and fashion; in 2005 he founded a clothing company called Clandestine Industries. He hosted season 1 & 2 of the TV show Best Ink and runs a film production company called Bartskull Films and owned a bar called Angels & Kings in Chicago. His philanthropic activities include collaborations with Invisible Children, Inc. and UNICEF's Tap Project, a fundraising project that helps bring clean drinking water to people worldwide,People magazine states that "no bassist has upstaged a frontman as well as Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy." He is also a minority owner of the Phoenix Rising FC, a USL Championship team. Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III was born in Wilmette, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago. His parents are Dale Wentz (née Lewis), a high school admissions counselor, and Pete Wentz II, an attorney. Wentz is of English and German descent on his father's side and Afro-Jamaican descent on his mother's side. He has a younger sister, Hillary, and a youn Pete Wentz
Early life