Song Exploder - Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Fall Out 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’s singer, Patrick Stump, about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/fall-out-boy.

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 Rishi Kesh Hirway. Fallout Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001. The 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 Fall Out 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. Because 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 never sung before in my life, you know,

and they're like, wait, the band were 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 Fuel by Ramen. 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 to your grave, the album, Take This to Your Grave, 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 Blumenies 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 is 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 getting 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, then in some ways it could be really liberating. Well, yeah, absolutely. my dad was 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 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 songwriter, kind of. So I was writing the songs altogether. And I was like, I'll just write some pop punk stuff. 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 serious 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-assed that and he was like 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, Pete, 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, you And it was incredibly, it was like really, really hard. The song came out great. The record came out great. 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 emotionally, you know, the ego of like, of like, okay, no, but I am a lyricist. I know I was giving you my like de-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. So it was like, he didn't really work that way. So going into cork tree, 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 him to me after he had written enough. And I would grab his lyrics and I'd start just kind of sifting through him 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.

side to ride you better than you write yourself anyway. This is my interrogation questions. I forget what you heard. This is a dance craze. 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 orange veil 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 so I go to the next part of all we're sleeping in and sleeping

for the heart 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 that. So you didn't talk to Pete about his ideas of what the meaning was behind 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 it. He really didn't like pop punk. He could not have wanted to do something less than doing a follow-up 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 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 play guitar before i've been playing guitar for maybe a year so we weren't really up to snuff you know and he's 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. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible. incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. Rishikesh.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploter.net slash live. Thanks.

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 soon.

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 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. It 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, I start kind of experimenting with those chords over that groove. And then Joe came up with that da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I started doing this rhythmic cutting of my volume on my guitar.

And with that groove, it really started to lock into place. Was it just the music that was changing or 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, 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, like, you know, 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. Nah, da da da da da da da da da da. Am I more than you bogging for? Yeah. But then I have to fit this next line. I've been dying to tell you anything you ought to hear. I don't, how would you repeat that even? You know, it's just, it never repeats anything. That's just too 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. Am I more than dying to tell you anything you ought to hear? Because that's just two. I am this week lying the grass next to the mausoleum. I'm just a knotting your bedpost, but you're just a lot in a song. 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, of guitar. I remember like the biggest musical thing that we added there was the second verse has that 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 like, now just do this, now take this out, now take this out, until it was this thing that really just complimented the vocal. Is this more? We spent forever on those drums. Neil was very, very, very meticulous. and he was very meticulous and there's a guy Mike Fasano 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 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, furically. 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, yeah, you know. And I was just like, I hope no one notices. We're going down down in an early around. And sugar will go in down swinging. I'll be your number one with a bullet.

A loaded guy complex, cocked and pulling. 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. Yeah. So Pete had had this kind of funny perspective on lyrics where he's like, it doesn't really matter what I sang. 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 he was like, 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 he 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 to 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, you know, whatever, and see how long I hold that. And he's like, okay, let's see. 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 it 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 a Matt myself, I started doing that as the lead vocal there. 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. A lonely god complex, cock it and pull it will go with...

And sugar, who will go with dad's bringing. Helping a level of a lot of complex, cocking it and pull it. 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 fans, as like the fan vote, right? And that, I was like, okay, well, you know, our fans are just really excited. They're voting often. Yeah. 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, I'm not going to college. Now am I?

You know, it's 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. 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 assistants from Tiger Biscop. 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 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-Kesh, Your Way. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.