If the mix of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds acceptable to the present queasy second, there is a good cause for that. So A lot (For) Stardust was conceived within the spirit of 2008’s Folie à Deux, one of the vital ornate and probably divisive entries within the band’s catalog. “There was a sense that I form of wished to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I do not need it to sound something like that document, however I wished to get again to this sense that we had once we have been making it, which was ‘I do not know the way for much longer this’ll final.’”
So A lot (For) Stardust, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether or not on the speedy opener “Love From the Different Aspect” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof refrain that offers its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz’s lyrics are drolly on level, with quotable one-liners like “Each lover’s received just a little dagger of their hand” (on “Love From the Different Aspect”) and “Someday each candle’s gotta run out of wax/Someday nobody will keep in mind me once they look again” (on “Flu Recreation”) scattered all through. At instances, although, they’ve a tenderness to them that belies the almost twenty years he is spent within the highlight, in addition to his elder-statesman standing. “I am my dad’s age after I thought he had all of it found out, and my mother and father are beginning to appear to be my grandparents, and my children are the age that I used to be,” Wentz says. “And this, I assume, is how the world goes on.”
These ideas reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke offers within the 1994 slacker comedy Actuality Bites, which is sampled on the document’s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all of the solutions within the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I assume there aren’t any solutions,’” says Wentz. “There’s the concept nothing issues—and that was a bizarre message for me. I used to be like, ‘I do not assume we are able to bake that into the entire document.’” As an alternative he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia Area of Desires, by which Kevin Costner’s character is guided by the mantra “in the event you construct it, they’ll come.” “He went out and constructed the sector within the grass as a result of he was doing a loopy factor,” stated Wentz. “All of us must be doing stuff like that.”