Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down

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. https://songexploder.net/fall-out-boy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by Tidal. If you're an artist or if you know somebody making music, you should know about Tidal Upload. It's a way to share and sell music without the usual barriers. You can upload your music directly to Tidal at no cost. You decide how you want to release it. You can share it publicly with Tidal listeners, or you can keep it private until you're ready. Or you can sell your music directly through Tidal Upload. Your music will also be considered by Tidal's editorial team for their playlists. And if your track is selected for their spotlight program, you'll get $1,000 bonus and you'll be on one of their marquee playlists. And now, Tidal has dropped its platform fee to 0%, which means you keep more of your earnings there than on any other platform.

• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit tidal.com/songexploder to create an account and start uploading your music for free. That's tidal.com/songexploder for zero platform fees on every sale. Your music, your earnings.

• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thanks to Stio for sponsoring Song Exploder. I took a trip to Iceland this summer, and because it was the summer, I didn't really think about dressing for the cold. Even though I was hiking and I was planning on seeing some glaciers, I thought, "It's August." But then I got there, and I realized I made a huge mistake. Now, though, I have a Stio hometown hooded jacket, and I just wished I'd gotten it before my trip. All of Stio's clothes are designed and tested in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, by locals who live, work, and ski in below-freezing temperatures. I'm headed back out into the cold this winter, but now I'll have my insulated, hooded Stio jacket. Ski season's almost here, so gear up now, the way the locals do.

• 2:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Go to stio.com/songexploder for 20% off your order. That's S-T-I-O dot com slash songexploder. Stio dot com slash songexploder. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole. 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's 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 Going Down."

• 3:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community Could you just say your name and your role in the band?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And who else is in the band?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Pete Wentz, who plays bass, and he writes a lot of the lyrics. Joe Troman, who plays guitar, and Andy Hurley, who plays drums.

• 4:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How did you guys get started?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 gonna take this semester off." And the whole time, my parents like, "Wait, you sing?" Like, you know, because I'd never sung before in my life, 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.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  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?"

• 6:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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, then in some ways it could be really liberating.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:44Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did he put out records?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  So Take This To 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 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 serio- 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

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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 of songs on Take This to Your Grave that by the end of the recording, I had gotten so fed up with the kind of minutia 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

• 8:36Speaker 01

  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, astounding extraordinarily difficult to go through each of these sections of songs that had 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.

• 9:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Was it hard technically or was it hard emotionally?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, both. It was, 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 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.

• 9:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  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, 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 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.

• 10:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  No. He is a closed book about that. I don't think it's 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 Pete was a little bit older than me. He had been in a real band, as far as I was concerned.

• 10:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  So I felt uncomfortable questioning him. You know?

• 10:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So with "Sugar, We're Goin Down," how did that first start?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  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 interrogation. You're not asking all the questions. Get what you heard. This is a dance craze." You know, I have this idea for this slower song. It's 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 Veil or something. I don't know.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  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. "Drop a heart and break your name. We're always sleeping in and sleeping for the routine."

• 12:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  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?

• 13:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And at that point, I kind of had this skeleton of a song, but that verse, it's not in the song anymore.

• 13:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What happened? Why did it go away?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So we were talking to producers. We had recorded with Sean O'Keefe, who produced Take This To 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.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  It was not, he could not have wanted to do something less than doing a Fall Out Boy 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.

• 14:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  More with Patrick Stump from Fallout Boy after this.

• 14:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKid is now offering a new way to start selling merch without dealing with inventory or running an online store. DistroKid Direct automatically turns your existing album artwork into merch products, like shirts and hoodies, posters, totes, all kinds of things. And you choose what to sell, you set your prices, you connect PayPal, and DistroKid handles the printing, the shipping, and the customer support. They don't take a commission, so you keep 100% of your merch sales. It's a simple way to add another revenue stream to your music career without adding more work to your plate.

• 15:27Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Artists can learn more and launch a merch store at distrokid.com/direct. This episode is sponsored by the podcast What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus, or a Secret Service agent, or a long-haul truck driver, or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries,

• 16:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  answering questions like, "What do mail carriers learn about us from our mail?" There are so many jobs out there that exist only as titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know, or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be wherever you get podcasts. Thanks to Reddit for sponsoring Song Exploder. One of the best parts of being a music fan is finding other people who love the same music that you do. And one of the things I love about Reddit is that there are so many different places to find that kind of community. If you want to nerd out about shoegaze, there are literally thousands of users on the r/shoegaze subreddit. Or

• 16:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  If you're into 90s hip hop, or opera, or vaporwave, there are subreddits for all of that. Over on r/indieheads, there are hundreds of thousands of indie music fans. And for me, that subreddit is one of the main hubs on the internet to find out about new music. And it's always really exciting to see anyone on Reddit discussing a Song Exploder episode by their favorite band. Every song has a story, and on Reddit, fans are the ones telling that story. Find the details, the deep cuts, and a Reddit community that loves the music as much as you do. Download the Reddit app today.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  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."

• 18:18Speaker 01

  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 alive. 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."

• 19:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  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,

• 20:05Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And then Joe came up with that.

• 20:49Speaker 01

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

• 21:00Speaker 01

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

• 21:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 21:17Speaker 01

  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, well, 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.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  But then I have to fit this next line.

• 22:30Speaker 01

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

• 22:37Speaker 01

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

• 22:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  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 complemented the vocal.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  We spent forever on those drums. Neil was very, very meticulous, Andy 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."

• 25:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  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 lyrically.

• 26:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yes. So it was like this perfect confluence of everything where it was just like, yeah, you know. And I was just like, I hope no one notices. We're going down, down in an earlier round. And Sugarwood going down swinging. I'll be your number one with a bullet. A loaded guy, complex, cock it and pull it.

• 26:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And Pete didn't mind that the lyrics weren't the most maybe clearly enunciated?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Pete had this interesting way of, 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.

• 26:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There are also some backing vocal parts that happen. How did those come about?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  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 barber shop. 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

• 27:56Speaker 01

  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, my big, ah, you know, whatever, and see how long I hold that. And he's like, okay, let's see.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:27Speaker 01

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

• 29:36Speaker 01

  We noticed that it needed to keep building. It couldn't just be this static thing.

• 29:42Speaker 01

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

• 30:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 30:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And what about after the song came out? Was there a moment where you realized that this song had changed things for you?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  So, TRL was a thing that existed and predated us.

• 30:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  TRL, Total Request Live on MTV.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, Sugar got in that way, as one of the, 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.

• 31:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 just like, that was weird. It was a very weird experience to like, suddenly be accidental big shot, you know?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  I just felt the whole time, any minute now, somebody's gonna 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.

• 32:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Am I more than you bargained for yet? I've been dying to tell you anything you ought to hear, 'cause that's just who I am this week, lying in the grass next to the marsalium. I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a lot in a song.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Drop a heart and break a name. We're sleeping in the sleeping for the royalty. We're going down, down, da-da-da-da, around. And sugar, we're going down swinging. I'll be another one with a bullet. A lunatic complex, cocky and pullin'. We're going down, down, da-da-da-da, around. And sugar, we're going down swinging. I'll be another one with a bullet. A lunatic complex, cocky and pullin'.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Is this more than you bargained for yet? Oh, don't mind me, I'm watching YouTube from the closet Wishing to be the friction in your jeans Isn't it messed up how I'm just tired of being?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  I'm just not in your bed, but sure there's a light in the sun Not in your bed, but sure there's a light in the sun Drop her heart and break her name We're sleeping in the sleeping for the wrong team We're going down, down, in a dilly-dally around And sugar will go without swinging I'll be your number one with the bullet A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling We're going down, down, in a dilly-dally around And sugar will go without swinging I'll be your number one with the bullet A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Down, down, in a dilly-dally around And sugar will go without swinging I'll be your number one with the bullet A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling We're going down, down, in a dilly-dally around And sugar will go without swinging I'll be your number one with the bullet A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling We're going down, down

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Down, down We're going down, down

• 35:26Speaker 02

  A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling We're going down, down, in a dilly-dally around And sugar will go without swinging I'll be your number one with the bullet A loaded gun complex cocking and pulling

• 36:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream Sugar "We're Goin Down" and you can watch the music video.

• 36:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode was produced by me, Mary Dolan, Craig Ely, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. 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/shirt. I'm Rishi Keshi-Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Radiotopia.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  From PRX.