Pete Wentz Will Make A Solo Album If We're Locked Down For Six More Months

Following last Friday's release of Pete Wentz and Cheap Cuts' collaboration, Check Your Phone, the Fall Out Boy bassist has revealed he might be eyeing up a future solo record – especially if this coronavirus lockdown continues.

While the Chicago pop-rock titans are yet to make a proper start on a follow-up to 2018's M A N I A, Pete tells NME that it's currently easier to work on his own stuff, given that Patrick Stump and Joe Trohman have "a bunch of kids", while drummer Andy Hurley has "a bunch of bands that are basically kids" to contend with.

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“I have a space in my head that’s always been more of an album," the musician explains. “I have a concept for it, I have a lot of time on my hands and I kinda want to do it. Are we going to be in our houses for another six months? If we are, there’s going to be an album. I also have one other song I want to do with Cheap Cuts. Sonically, it’s an expansion on Check Your Phone but thematically it’s about that first five minutes in the morning when you wake up and you’re in that post-dream state.”

When asked if he'll "be making a Pete Wentz solo album", the Fall Out Boy man responds with a typically Pete pop-culture-referenced analogy:

“There’s this bit in the movie Reality Bites where Ethan Hawke’s character talks about seeing his dad after he found out he had cancer," he says. "They’d talk about life and he gave Ethan’s character a pink seashell to help explain things. He realised the shell is empty and maybe life is pointless. ‘It’s all a random lottery of meaningless tragedy in a series of near escapes,’ he says. That’s why he enjoys the little things in life, like eating a burger or smoking a cigarette. I think there’s a whole record from that perspective, taking part in these little pieces of life without the consequence. It’s important to not forget those little granular moments of life. To me, there’s a record in that pink seashell.”

Sounds rad. In the meantime, stream Check Your Phone below:

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Last year, Kerrang! asked both Pete and Patrick what was next for Fall Out Boy, to which the frontman responded: “We’ve had a lot of talks. There’s two schools of thought. One is that you have a record cycle, you put out records and then you go on tour and blah, blah, blah. That’s a very ‘business’ thing. And there’s the other school, which is you wait to be inspired, you experiment, and you discover. I feel like at this point we have the luxury of choosing, and I’m personally choosing to be inspired. Look, I flat out don’t want to be in my 70s, on a bus playing stadiums – I don’t want to be The Rolling Stones. But if Pete has lyrics that are that compelling, I will. That’s exactly what the interplay is. At this point, I’m kind of waiting around for those kind of songs. And we have the bubblings of them…”

“Really?” replied Pete. “I don’t I want to say we have the bubblings of anything, because I don’t think there are. If there are bubblings, they are known only to Patrick!”

“I mean, they could be many, many years off – I don’t know,” Patrick answered. “I really don’t know what it’s going to take, but I do know that the next record we put out, or whatever we do next, it’s going to be something that we really care about. And it’s something that we’re going to spend a lot of time on.”

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