Fall Out Boy - MANIA (Jan 19, 2018) Album • Page 168

Folie’s closer is perfect as bookends an album about how hypocritical and self-obsessed the world is with a song that depicts cheating, narcissistic one-liners, and how the education system lets people down. It perfectly matches the energy of the opener and there’s no other way for the album to end imo. Ending it on Donnie would contest the entire point of the album imo, being really the only honest and selfless track on the record.

EDIT: At the risk of jeopardizing my entire argument, I think the album could actually end on Coffee for a similar sense of lyrical closure, with the cool orchestrated finish, but I love WCS’ unrelenting grit.

 

Folie has 3 songs that could close it and that’s why I love it

 

revisited it after this conversation and it’s definitely still one of my favorite albums of all time

 

What A Catch is the best closer that doesn’t close an album that’s not The End.

 

JEW’s Invented

 

everyone sleeping on west coast smoker smh

KNOCK ONCE

 

nah West Coast Smoker is like top 3 on the album for me

 

the main effect this thread has had on me is making me crave new material. i feel like they're poised to do something great after all this time away.

 

I feel like I am the only person who really has never connected with Infinity on High. I don't know why, I was really into their stuff coming off FUTCT and TTTYG but really bounced off IOH at the time. I came back for Folie and really love that album, though.

 

I’m with you totally. I love a lot of IOH but there are a bunch of songs I’m somewhat indifferent to.

Looking back, it’s sort of a transition album to me of two albums that I really really love (Folie and FUCT). But maybe that’s why people like it so much, less of a “transition” but more of a perfect balance of two styles.

 

I tend to think of both IOH and AB/AP as transitions between better albums

 

Folie à Deux is their best album, but Infinity on High is a close second

 

AB/AP is a transition between worse albums.

 

You take that back how dare

 

Mania is the best thing they've made since Folie, quite easily for me

But this band is consistently great so all answers are usually acceptable

 

I appreciate his honesty about MANIA and his personal addiction. I hope we get to hear something from them soon.

 

The bit at the end about FOlie is so sad.

 

it is sad bc it really and truly is self-evident imo how much effort and creativity they put into Folie when you listen to it. it is reaching for the stars.

 

Nooo rolling stone won't let me read it. I wanna know the sad thing

 

In his book, Trohman writes that Fall Out Boy recently started work on a return-to-rock set of songs that could’ve become an album, but he now says they seem to have set them aside. “We were working on some stuff that was guitar-based,” he says. “I don’t know know what’s happening with it. I think it unfortunately went to the back burner. It would be nice to make a record where the guitar is a little more upfront. We did start that way, as a guitar-based rock band, and it’d be cool to go back to those roots. We’d have to find a way to do it that doesn’t sound like Fall Out Boy from 2005. It might be cool for somebody else to do that, but it wouldn’t be cool for us to do it.”

He’s not crazy about Fall Out Boy’s most recent album, 2018’s Mania – and didn’t have all that have much to do with it. Trohman was frustrated with the process, which included scrapping yet another set of more rock-oriented songs early on. “I’d say, ‘I’m gonna extricate myself from this. This is not what I want to do,'” he recalls. “‘When you have some stuff together, give it to me. If you want me to throw some ideas on there or whatever, I’ll do it in my recording studio.’ And I did that a little bit, but overall, I stayed pretty much out of it, more or less. Mania has some cool ideas and interesting stuff in there. But it didn’t work as well, and I can’t say I love it. That’s what leads me, hopefully, to go back to making a record… with guitars, bass, drums, vocal. I love synthesizers, synthesizers that we play. We can play music; let’s play the music. Let’s not go for samples. Let’s not try to reach for singles. At this point, we’ve had so many hit singles. Do we really even need to reach for singles anymore? I think we should just make a cool record.”

His wild stage performances in Fall Out Boy were often a way of exorcising pain from a rough childhood and a rocky relationship with his mother — and almost certainly led to the spinal issues that required a series of back surgeries. “It was me abusing myself because I was made to feel like I should abuse myself,” Trohman says. “And I felt I was good at it. I was good at being an idiot. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that for the rest of my life.”

At the band’s peak and during its hiatus, Trohman was abusing opioids in pill form.“I hid it well from a lot of people until it got really bad,” says Trohman. “I was taking pill-form heroin, but not seeing it as that. I was not being very smart with my youth and I was wasting it away, trying to quell these illogical obsessive thoughts with drugs. that honestly didn’t seem that harmful because they were made in a laboratory and came in a prescription bottle. Well, except some of the ones I would just buy from basically a guy’s hand, but they’re still made in the laboratory. They looked nice!” It was Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, who played with him in the Damned Things, who finally called Trohman out, telling him how visibly unhealthy he looked. At that point, he quit cold turkey. “It took one person that I respected to tell me I looked like a junkie, basically, to make me go, I’m done with this now,” he says. “I quit in a dangerous way, too. You’re not supposed to quit cold turkey on that stuff. It can kill you.”

Fans hated Fall Out Boy’s underrated 2008 album Folie à Deux so much that they booed the band in concert and held up their middle fingers. “People hated it,” Trohman says. “The whole thing was so fucked up. We had pushed so far creatively that our fans at the time felt that we had abandoned the sound of Fall Out Boy.”

 

I love Mania. That is all.

 

Yeah sucks that people hated their best record. I'm not the biggest fan of Mania either and I do hope they change it up on the next record.

 

stump got this super negative fan reaction two record cycles in a row if you count soul punk!!!! fans suck!!!!

 

That’s a very depressing series of paragraphs. Bust out the damn guitars!!!

 

I think Folie a Deux also came out at a time when we were reaching Fall Out Boy exhaustion. They had essentially been on the road all the time from 2003-2007 and, at that point, a lot of people were starting to naturally move on to other genres. If I remember correctly, that tour was playing some of the B-arenas and due the album not yielding a true radio hit (I guess "I Don't Care" came close) it was a perfect recipe for disaster in terms of perception outside of its staunch defenders (which I count myself as).