(or: “chicago” is a funny way to pronounce “patrick”: the album)
first of all, i would like to thank fall out boy for the best gift ever: three love songs to my hometown released on my birthday. three love songs with peterick overtones. I listened to this album four times through on my run this morning and loosed a single giant, ugly sob out in public to the morning air. (there was also a LOT of fist pumping and slamming my foot into the pavement on the downbeats, but let’s not make a full catalogue of everything embarrassing about me this morning, thanks)
let’s dive in, cuz i’ve got FEELINGS
(and what is the lake effect but excess, but overstated, amped-up reactions to changes in the seasons, the weather, the heart??? HOO BOY LET’S GO)
the year: 2008. the song: a hopeful starry-eyed rising-fame chicago kid anthem, starting with a verse about how touring and the band’s success is literally heaven, and the nostalgic annoyance of van days, joe’s old van that only ran with the heat blasting. the prechorus places us squarely in 08 with pete’s LA isolation and growing pharmaceutical dependence ((boxed blondes have less fun breaks my heart for every reason. pete writes SO MANY lyrics about blonde & fake vs. golden & true, and someday i will write a post about it))
the chorus—boomerang my head into the city i grew up in / again and again, forever a lake effect kid—speaks to how, no matter how far they travel and where fame takes them, chicago is always home. the skyline runs in their veins like blood. summer love on a gurney with a squeaky wheel is hospital-room desperation, a sweaty boys-in-vans affair that, from this angle, seems doomed from the start… because remember 2008 is when the petericks and the band are falling apart.
(that they re-recorded it now, in the modern era? tells us that what he felt, he still feels. that these sentiments are always and have always been true.)
and this is my thesis, honestly, of the ep. these are love songs about chicago, yes. about themselves and the band and their history. but they are also love songs about the person who is chicago to pete. they are love songs to patrick.
love songs to the person pete will come back to, again and again and again and again and again.
this fucking track. We’ve got a peculiar Infinity/SRAR blend, sonically, where it opens with sounds of IOH and rises to an anthemic SRAR feel by mid-song. it’s the happiest, most optimistic song on an EP that is all about home, belonging, and true love, and in it pete writes I LOVE YOU CHICAGO because that’s easier and safer and more allowed than saying the thing he also means, I LOVE YOU PATRICK STUMP. this is a dual-layer song, with a hometown reading and a truelove reading, and i think both are valid and intended.
right away, it opens with the plea of a boy who moved to LA and can’t stop looking back: take me home, take me home. You make me feel so summer fling adds to a long and lustrous history of describing patrick and their tryst in terms of summer, especially in the context of summer tour: summer is a season outside of time, where there are no consequences and anything is possible. summer isn’t real life. summer is you but better than real, blood more vibrant, ribcage more cavernous, heartbeat more vital and raw. You know that i know that i owe you everything feels like love to the chicago music scene as well as something that pete and patrick might both say, and mean, to each other. without patrick’s voice, FOB as we know it wouldn’t exist. that nightmare-magic truest kind of love wouldn’t exist.
the rush of having no tomorrow, love that was doomed from the start, outrunning your doom… and patrick being the one thing pete’s found that’s worth holding onto…
this bit is so incredibly pete, and the heavy punch on stuck reminds me powerfully of novocaine, a song originally demoed for SRAR: you charged me up, charged, charged me up. I was something they forgot to label “fragile”, now I’m stuck. And you know too much. You’re the one true thing, you’re the one.
that is not a verse about a place. that is a verse about a person. In novocaine, stuck/numb means hopeless in love and unable to get out, even if you want to. this verse is about falling in love so hard you break yourself and can never reassemble. can never be the same. it’s about patrick being the type of love that you don’t believe exists until you have it--the ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’ kind of love.
we get the homesickness, these two boys who bleed chicago but now live in LA, these boys who spend so much time on the road that they don’t even recognize home when they’re there, in the next verse: and i’m just living out a suitcase. watch me now, watch me as i drive away. I’m supposed to leave you at the end of the season but i’ll stay. two layers to this: the feeling of leaving your hometown at the end of the holidays or summer vacation, and the feeling of leaving patrick at the end of a tour cycle. and saying to both the person and the place: i’ll stay. in my heart, in my soul, i will stay. you’re the one true thing, you’re the one.
this motherfucking solo patrick / MANIA blend with the sunshine riptide-esque lyrics and the hiatus feels, this fucking soul punk/batman theme outtake, this fucking song about loving someone so much it makes you sick and you’re furious, this song about who gets your bones vs your soul, who you sleep beside vs who is your ultra and forever love—
I love every fucking line of this song.
it doesn’t sound like classic FOB the way the first two tracks do. this is something else, the way Y&M was something else. this is classic FOB feelings and sentiments turned on their heads and made into nightmares. this is about the dark side back end of love, the wrong side of reality. this is about fucking up and scraping raw and emptying out and loving, loving, loving so stupid it’ll kill you. it sounds like the hiatus. it sounds like always making the same mistakes.
it sounds like always making them with the same person.
it’ll never happen again til tonight, i’m so sorry. My love isn’t lost, it’s all i got. pours out of me, the shape of you. sorry.
IF THIS ISN’T ABOUT TRYSTING AND ADDICTION AND DEPENDENCE AND THE WHOLE PETERICK CYCLE, then nothing is. this feels like a song about a time when they’re supposed to be broken up but their bodies keep coming together anyway, even when they hate themselves, especially when they hate themselves. my love isn’t lost, it’s all i got.
((can we talk about the romantic / filthy line there’s a hole inside me the shape of you?? because UM))
i feel too much unless i’m riding the super fade is so pete, so MANIA, so bipolar, so folie, so getting fucked up to get out, so in love with your best friend even when you’re trying not to be, so self-medicating to the point of obliteration just to cope with your life.
I should’ve known better. I should’ve tried to sing about anything but you. I should’ve tried to go to sleep thinking about anything but you. Anything else in the world but you. you know the world can get my bones, but chicago gets my soul.
h o l y f u c k i n g s h i t
okay so. I’m sorry every song’s about you, but. this is about loving patrick, right? It’s about chicago-as-a-metaphor-for-patrick getting his soul. it’s about the futility of trying to get over the only thing that’s ever really completed him. It’s about tearing my fucking heart out.
the second verse is very much hiatus to me, about trying to fill that hole left by a love-that-isn’t-lost but is out of reach, with anything, anything. I’m surfing on the dopamine high, i’m someone you gotta institutionalize is peak pete, esp hiatus pete. And the echo chorus of sorry, i’m so sorry? jeezus fucking christ, just kill me, just absolutely kill me.
patrick gets my soul. the world can have my body and bones, but you get my soul.
IN CONCLUSION, this is a gay and glorious EP on a gay and glorious day, happy birthday to me, thank you for coming to my tryst theory TED talk. more meta soon, and hit up my ask box in the meantime!
