Save Rock and Roll
Save Rock and Roll is the fifth studio album by the American rock band Fall Out Boy, released on April 12, 2013, by Island Records. It was the band's first album in five years after Folie à Deux.
Fall Out Boy took a hiatus at the end of 2009 after extensive touring stints; each member pursued individual musical interests. Conceived as an attempt to reinvent the band's sound, Save Rock and Roll was recorded in secrecy in California, beginning in the fall of 2012. Produced by the band and Butch Walker, the album marked Fall Out Boy's departure from the longtime producer Neal Avron. Combining rock, pop, and R&B styles, Save Rock and Roll features guest vocals from Foxes, Big Sean, Courtney Love, and Elton John. The lyrics address internal struggles of growing up, experiencing love and heartbreak, and dwelling on nostalgia.
The band filmed music videos for every song on the album, which were compiled and released as The Young Blood Chronicles in 2014. They embarked on an arena tour across Europe, North America, and Australia throughout 2013, and co-headlined the North American concert tour Monumentour with Paramore from June to September 2014. Four songs were released as singles, with the lead single "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark " reaching the top 20 on international charts including the US Billboard Hot 100.
Save Rock and Roll peaked atop the US Billboard 200 and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album also peaked at number one in Canada and number two in the United Kingdom and Australia, being certified in the first two countries. It revitalized Fall Out Boy's commercial success and received generally positive reviews, although most music critics were hesitant to categorize it as a pure rock record.
Background
In 2009, following two nationwide tours and the release of a greatest hits compilation Believers Never Die – Greatest Hits, the members of Fall Out Boy decided to take a break. The band's decision stemmed from disillusionment with the music industry and the constant promotion of their fourth record Folie à Deux. For the band's, specifically bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz, every movement had become fodder for gossip in tabloids, and lead vocalist/guitarist Patrick Stump recalled that "We found ourselves running on fumes a little bit -- creatively and probably as people, too." In addition, the constant touring schedule had become difficult for the band due to conflicting fan opinion regarding Folie à Deux; concertgoers would "boo the band for performing numbers from the record in concert", leading Stump to describe touring in support of Folie as like "being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoods." "Some of us were miserable onstage," said guitarist Joe Trohman. "Others were just drunk." Stump realized the band was desperate to take a break; he sat the group down and explained that a hiatus was in order if the band wanted to continue in the future. All involved felt the dynamic of the group had changed as personalities developed.Rumors and misquotes led to confusion as to what such a break truly meant; Wentz preferred to not refer to the break as a "hiatus", instead explaining that the band was just "decompressing". Fall Out Boy played its last show at Madison Square Garden on October 4, 2009. Near the end, Blink-182's Mark Hoppus shaved Wentz's head in a move Rolling Stone would later describe as a "symbolic cleansing of the past, but also the beginning of a very dark chapter for the band." By the time the break began, Stump was the heaviest he had ever been and loathed the band's image as an "emo" band. Drummer Andy Hurley "went through the darkest depression ever felt. I looked at my calendar and it was just empty." Wentz, who had been abusing Xanax and Klonopin, was divorced by his wife Ashlee Simpson and returned to therapy. Wentz recalled: "I'd basically gone from being the guy in Fall Out Boy to being the guy who, like, hangs out all day". Previously known as the "overexposed, despised" leader of the band, Wentz "simply grew up", sharing custody of his son and embracing maturity: "There was a jump-cut in my life. I started thinking – like, being old would be cool."
During the hiatus, the band members each pursued individual musical interests, which were met with "varying degrees of failure." Stump was the only member of the quartet to take on a solo project while Fall Out Boy was on hiatus, recording debut album Soul Punk entirely on his own: he wrote, produced, and played every instrument for all tracks on the record. In addition, he married his longtime girlfriend and lost over sixty pounds through portion control and exercise. Stump blew through most of his savings putting together a large band to tour behind Soul Punk, but ticket sales were sparse and the album stalled commercially. During a particularly dark moment in February 2012, Stump poured his heart out in a 1500-word blog entry called "We Liked You Better Fat: Confessions of a Pariah". In the post, Stump lamented the harsh reception of the record and his status as a "has-been" at 27. Stump revealed that fans harassed him on his solo tour, hurling insults such as "We liked you better fat", and noted: "Whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again." Aside from Soul Punk and personal developments, Stump moonlighted as a professional songwriter/producer, co-writing tracks with Bruno Mars and All Time Low, and pursued acting.
Wentz formed electronic duo Black Cards with vocalist Bebe Rexha in July 2010. The project released one single before album delays led to Rexha's departure in 2011. Black Cards added Spencer Peterson to complete the Use Your Disillusion EP in 2012. Wentz also completed writing a novel, Gray, that he had been working on for six years outside the band, and began hosting the reality tattoo competition show Best Ink. Hurley ventured farther into rock during the hiatus, drumming with multiple bands over the three-year period. He continued to manage his record label, Fuck City, and drummed for bands Burning Empires and Enabler. He also formed heavy metal outfit The Damned Things with Trohman, Scott Ian and Rob Caggiano of Anthrax, and Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die. Despite this, the members all remained cordial to one another, and Wentz was Stump's best man at his wedding. The hiatus was, all things considered, beneficial for the group and its members, according to Hurley. "The hiatus helped them all kind of figure themselves out", he explained in 2013. "Especially Joe and Patrick, who were so young. And Pete is a million times better."
Composition
Save Rock and Roll is a pop rock album that includes elements of contemporary R&B. "The Phoenix" was inspired by Soviet Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and drum loops, both of which Stump was interested in at one point in the recording process. While listening to the fourth movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, Stump became entranced by a certain string moment and proceeded to build an entirely new song influenced by it. The same orchestral snippet was employed as a sample by German hip-hop artist Peter Fox in his 2008 single "Alles neu" from the album Stadtaffe. Save Rock and Roll has been described to contain "pulsating disco grooves stacked-harmony hair-metal singing." The title track, "Save Rock and Roll", samples a vocal track of "Chicago Is So Two Years Ago", from Take This to Your Grave.Recording
The album's earliest origins lie in unsuccessful writing sessions between Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz. The two met up in early 2012 to write for the first time in nearly four years. Wentz reached out to Stump after he penned his letter, as he too felt he was in a dark place and needed a creative outlet. He was at first reluctant to approach Stump, likening the phone call to reconnecting with a lover after years of acrimony. Wentz told Stump "I know what you need – you need your band", and said: "I think it's kind of weird that we haven't really seen each other this year. We paid for each others houses and you don't know my kid". The duo recorded demos on GarageBand at Stump's personal home studio in Hollywood Hills. The result, "three or four" new songs, were shelved with near immediacy, with the two concluding that "it just wasn't right and didn't feel right."Several months later, the two reconvened and wrote tracks that they felt truly represented the band in a modern form. After writing "Where Did the Party Go", both musicians became excited as momentum continued to grow. The band decided that if a comeback was in order, it must represent the band in its current form: "We didn't want to come back just to bask in the glory days and, like, and collect a few checks and pretend... and do our best 2003 impersonation", said Stump. Afterwards, the quartet held an all-day secret meeting at their manager's home in New York City where they discussed ideas and the mechanics of getting together to record. Trohman was the last to be contacted, through a three-hour phone call from Stump. As Trohman was arguably the most excited to begin other projects, he had a list of stipulations for rejoining the band. "If I'm not coming back to this band writing music then I don't want to", he remarked, and Stump disarmed him: "He said I needed to be writing more."
Save Rock and Roll was recorded primarily at Rubyred Recordings in Santa Monica, California from October 2012 to March 2013. The band's main goal was to reinvent the sound of the group from scratch, creating what Trohman called a "reimagining of the band", which focuses more on pop. Sessions were not without their difficulties, as the band struggled initially to produce new material. Walker had doubts about the band's volatility, feeling the record would not be made following "meltdown after meltdown". When the band members learned that Elton John was a fan of their music, they jokingly suggested that he might want to record with them. John complied, and Stump flew to Atlanta late in production, halting the mixing process, to record with him. He was very positive regarding the album's direction: "He actually spoke up for the album's title. He came in and was like, 'Love the album title. Love where this is going. This is great, said Stump.
The entire album was recorded in secrecy from the music industry, critics, and fans of the band. Stump recalled: "There was a couple times there was paparazzi that got us outside and didn't put two and two together". The decision to keep recording a secret was partially so that the group members had the option to not make the record if the sessions did not work out. Keeping the secret was difficult, especially for a group so visible on social media; Hurley stayed away from Twitter, and all members got as far away from one another in public as possible. Rumors began to swirl in late 2012 after a friend of the band tweeted that the band was in the process of recording new material, though each member of the band was quick to deny any chance of a reunion. The band remained tight-lipped until the very end; when the Chicago Tribune asked Wentz a week prior to the announcement whether a Fall Out Boy reunion was happening, he replied: "It's not." Plans nearly went sideways when Wentz went to dinner with rapper 2 Chainz to discuss plans for the "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark " video. Following the conversation, 2 Chainz posted to Instagram a photo of Wentz and himself with the caption "Fall Out Boyz feat. 2 Chainz?" To the members of Fall Out Boy's surprise and relief, fans of the band denied the possibility, finding the idea too absurd. Stump recalls he wrote "somewhere near 25%" of the lyrics, the most since on Take This to Your Grave.