‘Miss Missing You’ interpretation
“A breakup song that has nothing to do with romance”
– Billboard’s track-by-track review of Save Rock and Roll.
So today I’m gonna lay out why I interpret* Miss Missing You to be about Fall Out Boy, or perhaps just Pete and Patrick, and specifically, dealing with FOB’s hiatus.
It may sound like it’s a song about a romantic relationship at first, but those romantic overtones can be read in a metaphorical sense — or hell, if you’re a Peterick shipper, the literal sense. But let’s go with metaphorical for now. Pete has compared the band to a relationship before (example 1, example 2, example 3) so it’s not out of character for him to do use a relationship as a metaphor for FOB. So let’s go with the idea that references to love and relationships in the song are references to the band.
The reason the song would be specifically about Patrick and the hiatus is because of this line: The person that you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger.
The hiatus was Patrick’s idea (Pete was originally against it), so he’d be the one “behind the trigger” in this case.
“As the tour slogged on, Stump began realizing the band desperately needed a break. “He sat us down and said, ‘If we don’t take a break we’re going to break up,’” recalls drummer Andy Hurley. “He also said, 'We’ll hate each other and never want to do this again.’ The thing is, I didn’t want to stop.” Wentz was also very resistant to the idea of a hiatus, but Stump knew it had to be done. “Seven years is a long time to never have a weekend,” he says. “Not everybody agreed with me.” – Rolling Stone
And then, about “the person you’d take a bullet for”, there’s these two quotes:
“patrick: probably my best friend in the whole world. we can finish eachothers sentences. its strange cause ive never had a relationship like the one we have with a friend, ever. people try to make a big deal of him and my interactions and relationship. but honestly at the end of the day when the spotlights and flashes go away this kid is still gonna be here, and we’ll still be friends. i could give a fuck what you say, this is one of the only people in the world that i would take a bullet for. and he has more talent in his little finger than i have in my entire body.” – From an old blog entry of Pete’s.
“Pete’s my best friend, I was the best man at his wedding, I love that man to death. I’d take a bullet for him.” – Patrick, AP.net
So, for Pete, “the person you’d take a bullet for” (Patrick) was “behind the trigger” (asking for the hiatus).
There’s also this lyric: “Sometimes before it gets better, the darkness gets bigger”
As mentioned above, Pete wasn’t into the idea of the hiatus at first. From the same Rolling Stone interview: “I went through a really, really dark, weak period, and then at the same time I didn’t have an outlet to express myself. Patrick was still my best friend. I was in his wedding. At the same time, I felt like he needed to get some of that Pete Wentz stink off of him.”
(Also, that last part about “getting the Pete Wentz stink off him? “I know I’m the one you want to forget”)
And as far as the lyric “before it gets better” goes, I can see “getting better” being a reference to the fact that FOB came back from hiatus rejuvenated, or simply that Pete got used to the hiatus and started to enjoy a quieter life:
“I don’t think I really wanted to take a break. Whatever you do, if you’re passionate about it, it becomes part of your identity, and removing that is tough. But then once I did, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna go and try to be a normal adult and kind of process what the last 15 years of my life, or 10 years of my life have been.’ And I would just take my kid to preschool, and get coffee, and do my own laundry and stuff like that. I didn’t personally think I wanted to do it again, because I feel like, when I figured out how to be happy without it, I thought that it would get in the way of that kind of happiness. It really needed to be something compelling and interesting for me to want to do it again, I was not too interested in getting on the churro circuit and playing old hits.” – Pete, KidKraddic
Let’s go through the entire song line by line.
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