While denser musically and a little less convoluted lyrically than Fall Out Boy's previous four albums, Folie a Deux isn't much of a departure. The same caffeine-induced hooks that catapulted the group up the pop charts and made it a mainstay on MTV are intact. But the arrangements of Wentz's tongue-in-cheek songs about fame, politics and twisted romance are much grander.
"I don't think we did, like, a 180 on anybody. But at the same time, we wanted to make a bigger record and do bigger things," says Wentz, 29. "Lyrically, it's dense in the way where it's got depth, but it's also dense in the way like, 'Hey, that person is dense, and they don't know what the hell they're talking about.' It's meant to be more concise. In the past, the lyrics have been utter confusion for people. This time around, we wanted to give people a diet version."
Folie a Deux, a reference to the French term for a rare psychiatric syndrome meaning "a madness shared by two," is a more tricked-out Fall Out Boy record.
"Yeah, there's a little different production, and the lyrics are a little different. But it's not like they became a country band. They're still a pop-rock act, and that has sort of stalled a little bit," says Cortney Harding, a staff writer and editor at Billboard magazine. "They're still big. If they're playing Merriweather Post Pavilion, they're not yesterday's news quite yet."
Beyond Wentz's tabloid-fodder life, part of Fall Out Boy's appeal has been its ability to push the boundaries of the emo-punk sound the band has long embraced.
"Though Fall Out Boy's sound may have offended the more polarized punk music fanatics, it has not hurt FOB's popularity one iota," says Ashley Dos Santos, an executive with Crosby-Volmer International Communications, a Washington-based public relations firm, where she specializes in pop and tween social marketing.
Dos Santos says the group's verbose and high-powered approach to typically low-key, navel-gazing emo appeals to the crowd that "can go from seeing the new Hannah Montana movie one night to a punk-rock concert the next."
But we're talking about a fickle bunch whose tastes change like the wind. Given recent spiraling CD sales and the incredibly short shelf life of teen-pop acts, it's a wonder Fall Out Boy has maintained such a high-profile over the past four years, with two consecutive platinum-plus albums. But Wentz's star appeal has certainly been a major factor in the band's success.
