Rock Music Review’s Liz Burke had a chance to sit down with Fall Out Boy who is currently on board this summer with the annual Vans Warped Tour. They have just released their sophomore effort, From Under the Cork Tree, and had a few minutes to talk to us about their new found success and music trends in general.

RMR – One of my friends always makes the comment “genre is gone-re,” meaning that there are a lot of bands who don’t necessarily fit into a certain genre. Fall Out Boy is a great example of one of those bands because you’re not really pop, you’re not really punk, and you’re not really emo. Why do you think that music is heading this way and what do you see for it in the future?

Pete: Why is music losing its labels?

RMR – Yeah.

Pete: I don’t think that it necessarily is, I think that a lot of times music takes a sharp turn to trends and it just takes people a while to rename it and they’ll combine two terms like spazz-metal or whatever. I think the more interesting thing is that human beings have a problem receiving information and understanding it without compartmentalizing it. You can’t really look at a band and not say, well this is this kind of band, and they play this kind of music, and they wear these jeans and white belts and have black hair. People need to put all kinds of labels on it.

Patrick – At the moment we don’t have a label but in retrospect I’m certain we’ll have one. They’re going to give us something and we’ll be in some section of the record store that we may or may not be excited about.

RMR – On the new album the four of you were more involved in the writing process than before where it was mainly the two of you [Pete and Patrick]. What are the most difficult and rewarding parts of the four of you writing more together?

Patrick – Well it was kind of like that. The four of us definitely did everything. It was more compartmentalized where one guy would be doing one thing and one guy would be doing another thing. I wrote the music [Pete] wrote the lyrics. Obviously Andy and I would sit and work out rhythms and Joe would try to ornament things to make them more his own. I would say the most rewarding this is just productivity. It’s much easier to finish a song that way than it is to sit and argue with a dude in a room for an hour and a half about one syllable of one word. We got a lot more done that way and it made everybody happier about recording those songs.

Pete: We wrote so many songs.

Patrick: We really wrote so many songs that when we heard the record for the first time it really was like hearing it for the first time.

RMR - Okay my final question, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before but just for the record; What was the name of the song before your lawyer made you change it?

Pete: It was called "My name is david ruffin.... And these are the temptations."