For Fall Out Boy, the years following the 2008 release of their album Folie a Deux were difficult. The album was critically panned and those who had once claimed to be fans booed them off stages when they toured the album. Fall Out Boy had never been faced with such hostility, but for lead singer Patrick Stump, it would only get worse.
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Maybe I’m biased because Folie a Deux is my favorite Fall Out Boy album. Yeah, Infinity On High is good, and there’s nothing like From Under the Cork Tree. But Folie was the pinnacle of Fall Out Boy for me when it came out. Now, there are videos on YouTube doing deep dives 16 years later, titled “Fall Out Boy’s Masterpiece.” Critics are doing retrospectives, writing that it “still holds up” years later. My question is: where were you in 2008? And, more importantly, where were you in 2011 when Patrick Stump released his only solo album, Soul Punk?
Folie a Deux was so vehemently hated that Fall Out Boy went on hiatus. They didn’t exactly break up, as some people thought, but they definitely took a break. In that time, Stump worked on his solo album and lost a ton of weight, feeling happier and healthier than he had in a long time. However, when he put out the album and toured, he was met with a similar vehemence from so-called fans. Some even went so far as to tell him “we liked you better fat.” In 2012, he penned a confessional blog post for Alternative Press that revealed what he had been going through.
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“Fall Out Boy’s last album Folie A Deux was our most critically panned and audiences openly hated it (it was also our poorest selling major label album even if one adjusts for the changing music economy),” wrote Patrick Stump in 2012. “Now, that’s not to say it didn’t have its fans, but at no other point in my professional career was I nearly booed off stages for playing new songs. Touring on Folie was like being the last act at the Vaudville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoodies.”
On his tour for Soul Punk, Stump experienced much of the same. “[W]hen I went out into the world to show off the self I felt like I was happiest and most comfortable being, I suppose I knew there would be the ‘Haters’ (I loathe the clumsy/insufficient word but it seems the most universal); The elitists that would always prove impossible to please. I had always been prepared for ‘Haters,’ because there’s never been a moment since I graduated high school where I haven’t been the guy in ‘That Emo band.’”
However, fans were extremely cruel when Stump went out on tour. He wrote, “What I wasn’t prepared for was the fervor of the hate from people who were ostensibly my own supporters (or at least supporters of something I had been part of). The barrage of ‘We liked you better fat,’ the threatening letters to my home, the kids that paid for tickets to my solo shows to tell me how much I sucked without Fall Out Boy, that wasn’t something I suppose I was or ever will be ready for. That’s dedication. That’s real palpable anger.”
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According to a 2013 report from Rolling Stone, Pete Wentz reached out to Patrick Stump after the blog post. He allegedly told him, “I know what you need – you need your band,” and Fall Out Boy reunited.
In 2013, they released Save Rock and Roll, their pop-punk-adjacent album, which, ultimately, leaned more pop, but brought them back into the mainstream. They were no longer the depressed emo boys of their youth. They’d matured, and their sound matured with them. Five years after the disaster of Folie a Deux, Fall Out Boy gave fans something new once again.
The anger and vitriol behind the reception of Folie a Deux and Soul Punk is a mystery to me, who has been a Fall Out Boy fan since middle school. While I don’t agree with everything they do (I wasn’t a fan of their pop-revival, for example, but So Much (For) Stardust was tremendous), there doesn’t seem to be a reason to react like that to an album, of all things. It’s been 12 years since Save Rock and Roll brought Fall Out Boy back from the dead, and we should just be happy they seem to have let bygones be bygones.
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