Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Hirway.

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Fallout Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001.

Their first album, Take This to Your Grave, was a hit, especially in the punk rock world.

When they put out their second album, though, in 2005, that was on a whole other scale.

That album is called From Under the Cork Tree, and it went double platinum, and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist.

For this episode, I talked to the band singer Patrick Stump about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song Sugar We're Going Down.

Could you just say your name and your role in the band?

I'm Patrick Stump, and I sing and play guitar and a lot of other instruments and write a lot of the music for Fallout Boy.

And who else is in the band?

Pete Wentz, who plays bass, and he writes a lot of the lyrics.

Joe Troman, who plays guitar, and Andy Hurley, who plays drums.

How did you guys get started?

So the band kind of happened by accident.

Both Pete and Andy had pretty serious full-time hardcore bands.

And I'd never sung before.

I'd never played guitar, anything other than drums before in a band.

The kind of gag was we were going to do a pop-punk band, but kind of, it was for fun.

Cause again, these were, everybody had like what we all thought of as real bands, you know.

And then the band started kind of taking off and it was really fun.

And I remember telling my parents, you know, okay, so I think I'm going to take this semester off.

And the whole time my parents like, wait, you sing?

Like, you know,

I'd never sung before in my life, you you know, and they're like, wait, the band where you sing, that's the one you're not going to school.

You know, my parents believed in me, but they were kind of shocked.

Like, that doesn't really sound like you, but okay.

And then we got offered a record deal with Fulbright Raman.

And basically, they said, if you sell 350,000 copies of this record, then, you know, the way this deal is structured, then you might have to talk to like a major label.

And I was like, that has never happened.

But then we got struck by lightning.

And Take This Your Grave, the album Take This Your Grave, did did really well and it sold 350,000 copies.

And now we kind of have to contractually talk to Island Records about making a major label debut.

And that was kind of where we were, was figuring out how to do that.

So we had to make the big record for the big major label.

But then also,

I personally was kind of, I kind of had this very fatalistic take on everything where I'm like, this is going to fail, just statistically, like not even being negative about it.

Like, that's how this plays out.

Every band that I knew that got signed, that's what happened.

One of my favorite bands was this band, the Blue Meanies in Chicago.

And they were like huge locally.

They put out these two records that, you know, it was just this upward trajectory.

And then they got signed to the major label and it tanked and they disappeared.

But there was this part of me, I don't know, this was this very silly part of me that's like, well, what if we don't?

What if it does succeed?

I can imagine being faced with that situation of, you know, now you have to make your big record that for some people, it would be really intimidating and make them, you know, kind of hide away or get intimidated into writer's block or something like that.

But the way that you're describing it, that there's a certainty that this was going to be the last thing, that in some ways it could be really liberating.

Well, yeah, absolutely.

My, my dad is a folk singer, right?

And he kicked around for like 10 years trying to make it, and it didn't really happen.

Did he put out records?

No.

And that was actually a big thing to me was that he'd never put out a record and he never went on tour as a performer.

Yeah.

So I was like, I want to do that.

And there was this extra added thing to it where it was like, it wasn't just for me.

It was like, you know, the people around me had been wanting this exact thing for forever.

And it's like, okay, well, now, you know, the pressure's on.

Did you have an initial sense of how your process was going to have to change from the previous album to this new one you were about to make?

So Take This Your Grave was recorded as three different recordings over the span of like a year.

And at the beginning of it, we were kind of this like pop-punk band side project that I didn't take seriously.

And I was the lyricist.

I was the, you know, songwriter, kind of.

So I was writing the songs all together.

And I was like, I'll just write some pop-punk stuff.

I'll write very kind of like, just, oh, this is a silly, fun pop-punk song.

And so I wasn't going to give us like my good lyrics, you know?

And Pete didn't like that.

It just irked him.

He wasn't like mean about it, but he's like, I just can't.

We need to take this more seriously.

I need to take this more seriously.

Like he would have trusted me to write the lyrics, but it really disturbed him that I would ever half-ass that.

And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, here, this.

And he started sending me lyrics.

The way Pete would write lyrics was not related to a song in any way.

It was just...

words.

It was just one-liners.

My dad had this coffee table book of like Yogi Berra quotes, and it was kind of like that, where it was just like thought, thought, thought, thought, thought.

And there's a couple songs on Take This Your Grave that by the end of the recording, I had gotten so fed up with the kind of minutiae of like changing every individual word that I was like, just give me words and I will write around that.

I had had a song, the opening song on Take This Grave, I had written a completely other lyric to it.

The entire lyric was different.

And that one

made me change the entirety of it from start to finish, which was incredibly difficult,

astoundingly, extraordinarily difficult to go through each of these sections of songs that had, you know, emphasis and syllable structure that was like really kind of stuck now.

But now I had to put somebody else's words into it that didn't even have a rhyme scheme.

And it was incredibly, it was like really, really hard.

The song came out great, the record came out great, but I'm like, I am never doing that again.

Was it hard technically or was it hard emotionally?

Yes.

Yeah, both.

It was hard both emotionally and technically because because emotionally, you know, the ego of like, of like, okay, no, but I am a lyricist.

I know I was giving you my like D material, but like I can write good stuff.

But at that point, it was like, I crashed the car and it's like, well, okay, we're going to take the keys away.

Yeah.

So that really hurt emotionally.

But then structurally, just like logistically, it's very, very, very difficult.

And Pete, he's inspired when he's inspired.

So he's not the guy that you're going to say, okay, I need two syllables that rhyme with family.

And he's like, okay, I would say that.

And then he would send me like six paragraphs, like whatever.

And none of it really ended with a definite E sound.

You know, so it was like, he didn't really work that way.

So going into Corktree, I was like, I'm going to start with his lyrics.

So he started giving me, he would just like rip pages out of his notebook and hand them to me after he had written enough.

And I would grab his lyrics and I'd start just kind of sifting through them and be like, okay, well, this could go here with this, could go here with this.

Did you talk to Pete about the meaning of his words or what was inspiring his words when you would go to build a song around them?

No,

he is a closed book about that.

I don't think it's like intentional.

I think his lyrics are like how he thinks and talks.

He can't explain it anymore.

That's how he would explain it.

And, you know, Pete was a little bit older than me.

He had been in a real band as far as I was concerned.

Yeah.

So I felt uncomfortable questioning him, you know.

So with Sugar, we're going down.

How did that first start?

So sugar was built around this really gentle kind of verse.

Shut your mouth, you know what you'd say.

Besides, I write you better than you write yourself anyway.

This is my interpretation,

and I'm asking all the questions.

Forget what you heard.

This is a dance

You know, I have this idea for this like slower song, this like more mellow song.

So we're on the road and I was just writing.

And in fact, I remember the day that I wrote the chorus of sugar.

It was in like orange or orangevale or something.

I don't know, somewhere in California, this venue.

And there wasn't really a backstage.

There was like an office across the parking lot.

And I was sitting on the floor with Pete's lyrics and somebody's acoustic guitar.

I'm reading his lyrics and just kind of going through it.

And it got to the part of drop a heart, break a name.

And that grabbed me.

And I was like, oh, I like that.

You know, not really thinking about what it actually meant, just I like that it's wordplay.

And drop a heart

and break a name.

We're always sleeping in and sleeping for the old scene.

So I go to the next part, which feels to me like it probably wants to be some kind of chorus.

And I

start kind of singing what's there.

His lyric was, we're going down in the earlier rounds, but it doesn't really fit and doesn't really rhyme yet.

And I kind of said to myself, well, okay, we'll figure out how to fix that.

So you didn't talk to Pete about his ideas of what the meaning was behind the...

the words that he was giving you.

Would you imbue the words with your own meaning?

Like, was there a story that was forming for you?

Well, I mean, I just kind of thought it was a couple kind of falling apart, but, you know, trying as hard as they could to hold it together.

And that was kind of where I was coming from in putting it together, you know?

Yeah.

And at that point, I kind of had this skeleton of a song, but that verse,

it's not in the song anymore.

What happened?

Why did it go away?

So we were talking to producers.

We had recorded with Sean O'Keefe, who produced Take This Your Grave.

And Sean was a big part of us becoming who we were because Sean also, in a similar way to Pete, would not put up with us half-assing it.

And we were really happy with the recording we'd done with Sean.

Sean was very unproven, though.

He had never done a major label record at that time, but we really fought for him.

The thing that was really funny was we're fighting with Island Records.

We're like, hey, we need to go with Sean.

It needs to be Sean.

And Sean is a dear friend of mine.

So, this is not, he will say this.

Sean really did not want to, he really didn't like pop punk.

It was not, he could not have wanted to do something less than doing a follow-up way record.

It was because we were friends that he did it.

He's a real deal producer, and this was where he was at the time.

He did not want to be doing this band.

I had never sung before.

You know, I sang one album, and now I'm a singer, but I didn't know what I was doing.

I'd never played guitar before.

I've been playing guitar for maybe a year, so we weren't really up to snuff, you know.

And he comes and he sits me down and he goes, Patrick, these songs, these are good.

These are very good.

You are not good enough to play them.

And he's like, I don't want to make this.

I don't want to be the guy that makes this.

And I was like, oh no.

More with Patrick Stump from Fallout Boy after this.

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So now we don't have our producer.

Then the whole thing changed.

And now we had to go meet producers.

And we saw everybody.

We saw every producer that did big major label rock records.

And no one wanted us.

Absolutely no one wanted us because they hear my voice and they think that this is what I sound like.

Not knowing, and by the way, I didn't know either that apparently I could sing better than that.

But we kept sending things around and we did send something to Neil Avron.

And Neil called us and he said, I don't know about your last record, but I really like these songs.

There was a demo.

He's like, I really like this sugar song.

So we talked and we met up.

And right away, I think Pete was impressed with the way that Neil was like very serious about recording.

And I think Neil was like, okay, you know, he saw us live and he was like, I think there's something here live.

I think Patrick can sing.

I think Andy's a really good drummer.

I think Pete has this like energy.

Like, Joe's a great guitar player.

I think there's a thing here.

I can make something out of this.

So we go out to Los Angeles and we do pre-production with Neil.

And it was this very different experience for us because there would be whole sections of songs where he wouldn't say anything.

He'd be like, that's great.

But when it wasn't great, he'd be like, that we need to like take this apart entirely down to the finest details of like, what's the kick-snare pattern here?

What's the guitar accent pattern?

Whatever.

Sugar, we get in and he, he really didn't touch anything except the verse.

He goes, the verse doesn't work.

And I didn't like that.

I was like, really?

This was the whole point of the song to me was this like weird chord.

verse.

Yeah.

He's like, it doesn't work.

He's like, all the rest of the song feels energetic.

The verse feels like you're asleep.

And he's like, I think this song can be something, but it can't be something with this verse.

And he made us try it every different way.

And I think I even kind of like passive aggressively was like, fine, whatever.

At some point, you know, I think I took it kind of hard at one point where I'm like, fine, you know, I'll play whatever you want, you know.

But he was having us kind of just imagine grooves that could go there.

It was really tough.

We have never jammed as a band before or since.

This is like the only time, because that's not really the way that any of us work, but there was this thing that Neil was hitting on where he's like, I want to maintain the energy, but the song really can't change tempo.

So at some point he goes, okay, Andy, why don't you do like a four on the floor or just count?

It's a fairly simple chord structure to the rest of the song.

So

then Pete and I start kind of experimenting with those chords over that groove.

And then Joe came up with that.

I started doing this rhythmic cutting of my volume on my guitar.

So

And with that groove, it really started to lock into place.

Was it just the music that was changing or were the lyrics changing as well?

I think Neil was kind of slow walking that because I think he knew that he wanted the entire thing to change.

I think

I was pretty precious about it.

I was like, I really like this part.

And Neil was like, I think it needs more than that.

So we just recorded us jamming that verse.

And Neil sent me home with that, sent me home to the extended stay apartments in Los Angeles.

And he was like, you see what you come up with.

So I took a bunch of Pete's lyrics and just sat with it and listened over and over again and like saw what I could put where.

But the strange thing was, because of Pete's lyrics, and like I said, they didn't ever fit in the way that

a normal rhyme scheme would.

They don't really read like poetry.

They read like a really strange manifesto or something, you know.

Because of that, this kind of run-on-the sentence nature of it, I started with this kind of nursery rhyme element.

But then I have to fit this next line.

I've been dying to tell you anything you wanna hear.

I don't, how would you repeat that even?

You know,

you know, it's just, it never, never repeats anything.

That's just who I am this week.

Lie in the grass next to the mausoleum.

So it's like it started with this very, very simplistic setup, but by necessity, it got really complicated.

But that did it.

That really did it.

That was like where it all came together there.

Neil is really funny.

He's one of the most judicious producers I've ever met, where when something doesn't need anything, he will not add anything, which was not what we had done before with Sean.

We were layering a lot.

Neil was like, I prefer to mix less things.

And so that was much more difficult, honestly, because the more layers of things that you lay in, the more that your little pockets of mistakes kind of get softened out.

So there's not a lot of guitar.

I remember like the biggest musical thing that we added there was the second verse has it's very subtle, you can barely hear it, but there's some piano there.

I sat at the piano, and it was one of those things where I had, in true Patrick fashion, I had much more ornate stuff.

And Neil would pick parts out and go, now just do this.

Now take this out, now take this out, until it was this thing that really just complemented the vocal.

Is this more than you bargained for yet?

Oh, don't money.

I'm watching you tip from the closet.

Wish it to be the friction in your cheeks.

We spent forever on those drums.

Neil was very, very meticulous.

Andy was very meticulous.

And there's a guy, Mike Fisano.

He's set up and tuned drums for Neil on all of the records we've done with Neil.

And he would bring out this collection of drums that he had.

He had this whole case of snares.

And I want to say maybe that snare was the November Rain snare.

He ended up with the snare that was on November Rain.

So I write the song around Pete's words.

But I don't ever clarify what the words are going to be in the chorus because Pete's words are we're going down in the earlier rounds.

But that doesn't sing right.

That doesn't sing the way I want it to.

But any of the things that I can come up with don't mean the thing that he wants it to mean.

So I settled on we're going down, down in an earlier round.

And I managed to get a syllable out of that.

And I thought it was catchy and I liked it.

But that's not Pete's lyrics.

So I didn't really want to confidently say that.

And so I was kind of just mumbling it.

I come come from a long line of mumblers, so I take full responsibility for that.

But it was doomed from the start in that regard because, you know, maybe I don't always enunciate clearly.

Sometimes my accent comes out and I just sort of whatever.

But then, on top of that, I don't know confidently what I should be singing here, verically.

Even as you're going into the actual lead vocal recording.

Yes.

So it was like this perfect confluence of everything where it was just like, yeah, yeah, you know, and i was just like i hope no one notices you know

we're going down down in an early round and sugar will going down swinging i'll be your number one with a bullet

a learning guy complex cock and pull it

and pete didn't mind that the lyrics weren't the most maybe clearly enunciated pete had this interesting way of because he because in hardcore kind of famously you can't always hear the lyrics you know a lot of times it's distorted you're screaming.

So, Pete had had this kind of funny perspective on lyrics where he's like, it doesn't really matter what I sing.

You just write whatever you mean in the lyric sheet.

He was going to fix it in post being the lyric sheet.

There are also some backing vocal parts that happen.

How did those come about?

Like I said, Neil had this kind of idea of not really

doing anything unless we needed it.

We got to the chorus and, you know, he was like, there's, we're missing something here.

It needs to explode in a way that it's not.

And I typically would want to do harmonies and we started trying that and Neil was like, this sounds like a barbershop.

This isn't right.

One of the ways that I ended up working with Sean and becoming a singer in the first place was that there was a band knockout who we were friends with and they asked me to come sing backups on a song.

And this is back before Take This Your Grave.

And one of the things that I found is that I had a pretty big lung capacity and I could just hold out these notes, these belt notes, I could hold for a really long time.

So I'm in the booth doing sugar and Neil and I are trying to figure out what we do to add there to make it erupt when the chorus hits.

And I was like, I could try that.

I could try my big, ah, you know, whatever, and see how long I hold that.

And he's like, okay, let's see.

complex.

Cock it and bullet.

We're going down, down, and early around.

And sugar would go in dad, swinging.

I'll be in never war with the bullet.

So we get through the song, we get to the end of the song.

Now what?

We didn't really have an end to the song.

A friend of ours had said, you know, you guys really can't do a song this slow.

You really should do something faster.

So that is the one spot of the song where it picks up.

And just kind of in the outro of that, I had picked up some more of Pete's lyrics and I started doing that.

Take aim at myself.

I started doing that as the lead vocal there.

Take aim at myself,

take back what you said.

Take aim at myself.

And then, as we were doing the bridge, this big held-out part,

we noticed that it needed to keep building.

It couldn't just be this static thing.

And the idea came to like start building in the layers of these vocals too.

Was there a specific moment where it really kind of sank in that you guys had taken a big step in your evolution?

Honestly, the mixing.

When we went to mix the record at Paramount Studios, there was something about being there and hearing it in a real mixing studio, you know, next door.

There were real bands there.

There were real artists there.

They were mixing movies there.

It was like big stuff.

And so we're in the mains at Paramount.

And so you're hearing your stuff come out of that.

And it was like everything.

It was impressive.

It was scary.

It was, you know, weird.

And what about after the song came out?

Was there a moment where you realized that this song had changed things for you?

So TRL was a thing that existed and predated us.

TRL, Total Request Live on MTV.

Yeah.

So Sugar got in that way as one of the, as like the fan vote, vote, right?

And that I was like, okay, well, you know, our fans are just really excited.

They're voting often, you know?

And so we went out to New York and they had us on the show and whatever.

It still felt very much like this probably isn't going to last.

But then Sugar stayed in the chart there.

Then it like stayed at number one for a while.

So they play our video for Times Square, right?

And I remember iTunes had their iTunes chart.

It ended up in the top 10.

And that was like, oh no, you know, I'm not going to college now, am I?

You know, it just like, that was weird.

It was a very weird experience to like suddenly be accidental big shot.

You know,

I just felt the whole time, any minute now, somebody's going to come in and be like, wait a second, not these guys.

They don't belong in here.

We have had a very strange career and we've gotten to be this kind of improbably big band.

And I think the earnestness of that song is a big part of it.

The realness of it, because we weren't trying to do a big hit song.

We just were us.

And now, here's Sugar We're Going Down by Fallout Boy in its entirety.

Am I more than you bargained for yet?

I've been trying to tell you anything.

You ought to hear, cause that's just to I am this week.

Lie in the grass, next to the mercellium.

I'm just not in your bedpills, but you're just a lord in a song.

Drop a

break a name.

We're sleeping and safe

for the role team.

We're going down

in an early round.

The sugar will blow me down, swinging.

I'll be your number one with a bullet.

A loading girl, come back, scarcity, and bullet.

We're going down

in an early year round.

And sugar will go with that.

Swing it, I'll be your number one with a bullet.

A lonely guy, come back, scarcity bullet.

Is this more than you bargain for, yet?

Oh, don't mind me.

I'm watching you tip from the closet.

Wishing to be the friction in your jeans.

Isn't it nice tough?

How I'm just tired of being here.

I'm so nothing you're bad for us, but soon as I light it up.

Trouble

and break a name.

We're always sleeping and stiffing for the wrong team.

We'll go with that

in an early round.

And sugar would go with that, swinging.

I'll be your number one with the bullet.

A loading gun, complex, cock and bullet.

We're going down

in an early round.

And sugar will go without swinging.

I'll be your number one with a bullet.

A loading gun, complex, cockin' new bullet.

Die, double in an early round.

And sugar wood going down, swinging.

I'll be your number one with the bullet.

A lunacy complex, cocket and bullet.

We're going down, down in a near round.

And sugar wood going down, swinging.

I'll be your number one with the bullet.

Lunichard complex, cocket and bullet.

We're going dining.

Daddy.

We're going dinner.

Lunica God complex, cockadem.

We're going dangerous and leaving back.

Sooner than we're going back, sleeping.

I'll be a number one and I'm only on myself.

Loaded God complex, cocket and bullet.

Visit songexploder.net to learn more.

You'll find links to buy or stream Sugar We're Going Down, and you can watch the music video.

This episode was produced by me, Mary Dolan, Craig Ely, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Bisco.

The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.

If you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm watching and listening to and thinking about these days, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website.

You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/slash shirt.

I'm Rishi Ke Shirwai.

Thanks for listening.

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