Credit: Pamela LittkyFall Out Boy will be enshrined as the first-ever inductees into the "Hall of Wood" at the 2015 mtvU Woodie Awards this Friday. The band received their first Woodie nomination in 2004, and over the past decade, Fall Out Boy has been through a lot personally, including a temporary hiatus after their 2008 album Folie à Deux. Now with the release of their new album American Beauty/American Psycho, as well as their 2013 comeback album, Save Rock and Roll, the band has entered the second phase of its career, though it did not come easily.
"Personally, I was very heavy-handed with the first phase," frontman Patrick Stump tells ABC Radio. "I kind of didn't really leave a lot of room for the band to be a band. Musically I had visions and I was going to make them happen."
In the process of getting the band back together, Stump knew that he needed to open up Fall Out Boy to all of his band mates.
"When we were talking about coming back, I called [guitarist] Joe [Trohman] and pretty much just admitted outright all the things that I had realized I had done wrong, and that was probably one of the biggest ones, was that I didn't really give him any options to write," Stump says. "I didn't really give much space for opinions from the rest of the band. I think that's been a huge change, it's made a much more united front for us. Now we all have a dog in the fight."
Fall Out Boy has changed a lot musically over the years, as well as personally. One of the most notable differences between American Beauty/American Psycho and the rest of the band's catalog is the use of samples of known songs, such as Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" on the hit "Centuries" and the theme song from The Munsters TV show on "Uma Thurman."
As Pete Wentz tells ABC Radio, sampling was just another weapon in the band's arsenal that they wanted to try out.
"It's like not to antagonize people in rock music, and it's not like, 'Has Fall Out Boy gone hip-hop?'" Wentz explains. "We're just trying a different way of creating our art and the next record it will probably be something different."
Wentz thinks that the band's willingness to grow and adapt is part of what has helped it survive.
"I think that one of the things that our band has done, or we've attempted to do, is between every record we kind of try new experiments on the records," he says. "Folie à Deux was a certain experiment, having Jay Z introduce [Infinity on High] was a certain experiment. When we did PAX AM Days with Ryan Adams it was definitely experimental. So we look at every thing, every one, like a new art project that we're going to try something out."
The mtvU Woodie Awards will be streamed live from the South by Southwest Festival via Woodies.MTV.com on March 20 beginning at 5 p.m. ET.
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