Fall Out Boy's 'From Under the Cork Tree' at 20

Revisiting Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree 20 Years Later

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Every couple of years or so, I revisit Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree. It’s become a nostalgic guilty pleasure of sorts, becoming reacquainted with songs that were a balm during my preteen years. Each time I come back to it, I leave with a different reaction. Sometimes, I fall in love with it all over again, like I did when I first heard it at 11 years old in 2005, during a time when I was grappling with depression and anxiety for the first time. In other instances, I cringe at Pete Wentz’s songwriting, as he uses vocalist Patrick Stump as a literal mouthpiece for his teenage-like rage.

When From Under the Cork Tree turned 20 on May 3rd, I went back to the album to see how it held up over so much time. While it can never resonate as much as it did when I was merely a child wanting to feel seen during a confusing period, I have a newfound appreciation for the record that turned Fall Out Boy into one of the biggest contemporary rock bands. Before going through my various musical phases—’90s grunge in my early teens, ’70s psych rock at 15 and 16, indie sleaze from 16 and beyond—came my love for Myspace emo. I can trace it back to Fall Out Boy, watching the delightfully bizarre music video for “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” on MTV and becoming instantly enamored with the group. With an earworm that could only be rivaled by the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” which came out the previous year, Fall Out Boy had a hit on their hands and a new fanbase of kids who saw them as messiahs of a depressed, internet-age generation. But the band had no idea what would come with their lead single and second album, preparing themselves for the worst.

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There’s an alternate timeline in which Fall Out Boy never released From Under the Cork Tree and Wentz hadn’t become one of the crowning figures of pop punk. Merely two days before Fall Out Boy’s Europe tour, and three months before their sophomore album was out, Wentz had a mental health crisis and overdosed on Ativan pills in a Best Buy parking lot. After surviving his impulsive self-medicating (which he has denied was a suicide attempt), Wentz temporarily moved back in with his parents in the suburbs of Wilmette, about 30 minutes outside of Chicago, while his bandmates traveled across the pond without him.

Wentz was under immense pressure for Fall Out Boy to succeed. With the release of their 2003 debut, Take This to Your Grave, the band was getting a taste of fame with a growing, fervent following. After tracking their first record, Fall Out Boy was immediately signed to Fueled By Ramen and toured extensively to promote TTTYG—including playing Warped Tour the following year. Being on the road helped spread the word, amassing a young following online, particularly on Myspace. The growing fanbase was big enough to attract the attention of major label Island Records, which saw Fall Out Boy’s potential to be the next “it” pop punk act. But Island Records’ gamble on the Chicago quartet needed to pay off in the long run.

Merely days before his near-fatal experience, Wentz wrote in a LiveJournal entry that making From Under the Cork Tree was “one of the hardest and most important things” he’d ever done. Being so online did more harm than good during this period. During a time when the internet was still novel, Wentz took advantage of the opportunity to speak with fans and share insight into the hardships of his early fame. Unlike current celebrity newsletters, which give the illusion of artists directly communicating with their fans while still being cautious about what personal aspects they reveal, Wentz’s LiveJournal was raw and unfiltered. He had not yet learned the importance of boundaries between his private life and his persona as a member of a rising band. Wentz often communicated on LiveJournal about how challenging being in the public eye was for him, using this platform to defend his artistic choices in an effort not to be misunderstood.

The day From Under the Cork Tree arrived, Wentz immediately went to LiveJournal, addressing critics and harsh internet comments. “No offense to your standards, but I don’t think you got the point of what we were doing,” he wrote. “The lyrics and songs are a commentary on you. You are what is ruining music and what we love…we aren’t writing summer songs and we aren’t writing progressive music. We’re calling you out.” Looking back, it feels a bit foolish for Wentz to jump the gun, thinking that Fall Out Boy’s chances for their big break after signing to Island Records were futile. With MTV constantly playing the video for “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” the single peaked at #40 on the Hot 100, while From Under the Cork Tree reached #8 on the Billboard 200 chart. The irony, however, is that while Fall Out Boy partially owes the album’s success to the iconic “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” video, which came out 21 days after the album, the band initially hated it.

Speaking with Chris Payne for his pop punk oral history book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight, The Academy Is bassist Adam Siska recalled how Fall Out Boy felt that director Matt Lenski’s concept was “cheesy.” The music video follows a teenage boy with antlers who struggles to fit in until he meets a girl who loves him for who he is. The band braced themselves for backlash and came up with the concept for their next video: taking inspiration from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Fall Out Boy would find the IP addresses of their online haters who complained about their “Sugar” video and beat them up. Fortunately, it was too late to stop the video for their album’s lead single from coming out.

While “Centuries” holds the record for most streams, it’s “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” that is the most universally beloved classic from the band’s catalog. Its theatrical chorus is almost a tongue-twister. It’s wordy and difficult to understand what Stump is singing, even if the melody makes you want to belt it out. Wentz told MTV that the song “went through 30 changes,” until the band ultimately decided to keep it as it originally was written. But together, with their back and forth, Wentz and Stump found sheer pop punk perfection.

“Sugar” is the biggest track on From Under the Cork Tree, but the rest of the album captures much of the same magic. While coming up with the music, Fall Out Boy seemed to have figured out something absolutely vital for this era: how to write songs that make your fans feel like you’re speaking their darkest, innermost thoughts, while making them so damn catchy that strict parents are none the wiser.

Take “Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued”: The band gets away with making a self-harm reference, one embedded in such a chipper pre-chorus that it almost goes over your head. It’s presented in such a delightful way that it would go undetected by your mom while blasting it in the car on the drive to school, too. There’s also “7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen),” a track that appears to be written about Wentz’s self-medicating habits, intentionally misspelling the name of the anxiety drug in its title, most likely as a move of legal precaution from the label. “I’m having another episode / I need a stronger dose,” Stump sings with the bassist’s words in the high-spirited song.

That upbeat sound also allowed Wentz to get away with some of his more controversial lyrics. Much like the band’s contemporaries, Taking Back Sunday and Senses Fail, many of Fall Out Boy’s songs during this era were written as bitter diary entries about failed romances. “Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner,” which was shared as a demo on the 2004 EP My Heart Will Always Be the B-Side to My Tongue before the band released From Under the Cork Tree’s lead single, “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” has Wentz taking an explosive outlook over a tumultuous on-and-off relationship, as he taunts his possessiveness. “So wear me like a locket around your throat / I’ll weigh you down, I’ll watch you choke / You look so good in blue / You look so good in blue.”

When asked by a fan that December on LiveJournal how his bandmates reacted to penning the lyrics, Wentz wrote that the band let him “go wild with the lyrics” and “could tell” the nature of the song was “pretty angry.” He acknowledged that the way he processed his rage could be misconstrued, adding, “We get asked a lot if we are misogynists because of this song I think, but I want to put it on the table: you’re getting it wrong, we don’t hate girls, we hate everyone.”

Wentz’s songwriting about romantic desires reads almost as an addiction, one that he knows is going to be harmful in the long run—either for him or his paramour or both—but the pleasure outweighs the consequences. This comes through strongest in “XO,” which, perhaps controversially, is my all-time favorite Fall Out Boy song. The pulsating guitar feels like the intense heart palpitations you get when you’re inching towards the person whose touch you’ve been craving. But to Wentz, his conquest appears to be merely someone to fill a temporary void: “To hands between legs, to ‘whatever it takes’/ To drinks at the club, to the bar, to the keys to your car/ To hotel stairs and to the emergency exit door, no.” Wentz admits throughout the song that it’s all in his own self-interest, reminding the woman that she’s merely a “tearcatcher” as he uses her to numb down his feelings for someone else. But his songwriting is so strong that even while laying out his depraved intentions, he makes it sound alluring.

Those conflicting and messy emotions captured by Wentz are what make From Under the Cork Tree still resonate with new generations of teens. By the time Fall Out Boy’s second record came out, Wentz was 21, still close enough in age to be in that adolescent-like mentality. He had dropped out of college and found himself back in his small town with aspirations of leaving it behind and making a name for himself. Wentz didn’t write these songs as a calculated marketing move to connect with the band’s newfound young audience. Instead, Fall Out Boy was found by this fanbase because the kids knew they got it.

Tatiana Tenreyro is Paste‘s associate music editor, based in New York City. You can also find her writing at SPIN, NME, PAPER Magazine, The A.V. Club, and other outlets.

Revisiting Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree 20 Years Later

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