Wine and Cheese: Fall Out Boy and Taylor Swift
With their shared penchant for witty wordplay and self-referential commentary on celebrity culture, it’s no surprise that these two once shared a stage. Here’s the case for them sharing one of your playlists, too.
It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.
Written by Audrey Vieira
Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Vena for MTV News
Fall Out Boy have never been afraid of defying expectations. Whereas the majority of early aughts pop punkers sang about hating their towns, Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, and Andy Hurley had nothing but love for their birthplace of Chicago, with Stump singing the city’s praises on even the most bitter of breakup songs. And when the band reunited in 2013 after being on “indefinite hiatus” for three-and-a-half years, they returned not for nostalgia, but to adopt a more polished pop rock sound, demonstrated by the immolation of their pre-hiatus discography in the video for their comeback single “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up).”
Despite their newer work leaning more towards pop than pop punk, Fall Out Boy remained popular figures in the alternative scene, even winning Artist of the Year at the 2014 Alternative Press Music Awards ceremony over the likes of Paramore, Pierce the Veil, and Sleeping With Sirens. Yet when Taylor Swift began shifting to pop in October 2012 with the release of Red, she was criticized for straying from her then-signature country sound. Swift’s ballads about heartbreak came to be mockingly generalized as “songs about exes,” with the New York Times calling her “petulant,” while the Washington Post grossly stated that her emotional age was “16, tops.” Swift's past critics have been, for lack of a better term, cowards — quick to dismiss her as emotional, yet reluctant to praise her poignant prose or acknowledge her emo influences.
If Swift’s critics found Red “petulant,” they should have despised From Under The Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy’s angsty sophomore album, when it came out in 2005. With lyrics such as “So weigh me like a locket around your throat / I’ll weigh you down, I’ll watch you choke,” and “I hope you choked and crashed your car,” From Under The Cork Tree at times resembles the bitter breakup album that Red was wrongfully made out to be. But like Red, From Under The Cork Tree is so much more than a series of songs about exes — it is bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz wearing his heart on his Clandestine Industries sleeve, whether that be by acknowledging the downsides to fame on “Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued” or by opening up about his near-fatal Ativan overdose on “I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea … (Summer Song).” “I want to be known for my hits, not just my misses / I took a shot and didn’t even come close,” Wentz writes on the latter, a double entendre about his hopes to be remembered not only in a positive light, but to be known for his individual self rather than his relationships to others; to be recognized for his music instead of his “misses.”
Like Wentz, much of Swift’s lyricism reflects on her own reputation as well as others’ narrow perceptions of her personal life. “Blank Space,” a satirical single from her 2014 album 1989, sees Swift play the “jilted ex-lover” card she’s been dealt with far more wit and charisma than any of the narrow-minded jokes made at her expense. As she sings, “I’ve got a blank space, baby / And I’ll write your name,” she references both her satirized persona’s “long list of ex-lovers” and her true self’s own awareness of those who perceive her as someone with “nothing in [her] brain,” as she also mentions in 1989’s lead single, “Shake It Off.” Swift continues to play into the serial dater stereotype with her appropriately titled 2017 album reputation, but even when playing the villain, she takes the high road. Instead of namedropping the rapper who called her a “b-tch” the way he namedropped her on his own song, she fires back with “I don’t like your tilted stage,” and “I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams,” on lead single “Look What You Made Me Do,” sending a message without giving the rapper the satisfaction of a direct namedrop.
Fall Out Boy toy with similar ideas on their 2008 album Folie à Deux, which in some ways serves as a precursor to reputation. Both albums testify that all press is good press, as demonstrated by Fall Out Boy vocalist Patrick Stump declaring, “I don’t care what you think as long as it’s about me” on the former’s lead single “I Don’t Care.” The tongue-in-cheek “America’s Suitehearts,” which features the line, “I must confess / I’m in love with my own sins” draws parallels to Swift’s own ode to her villainous alter ego, “I Did Something Bad.” Both albums are also departures from the sounds expected from Swift and Fall Out Boy. reputation swaps the bright synthpop of 1989 for a dark electropop, while Folie strays from Fall Out Boy’s pop punk past to incorporate classical and R&B instrumentals.
Swift may not have released a pop punk album yet, but Fall Out Boy hasn’t been completely pop punk since the late aughts, depending on who you ask, and both artists have proven themselves to be incredible performers both before and after pivoting to pop with the releases of Red and Save Rock and Roll. Both transitions worked because neither Swift nor Fall Out Boy’s evolutions came at the expense of their witty lyricism or powerful stage presences. Their parallel pop journeys even intersected at the 2013 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, when Swift joined the band on the runway for a joint performance of “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark.”
While it may have seemed surprising then to see the two share a stage, Fall Out Boy’s self-described “stadium rock and roll” and Swift’s own stadium pop are more alike than different. Even now, as pop punk has gained more commercial popularity, few can sing like Stump or write like Wentz, and none hold a candle to the fearlessness of Fall Out Boy quite like Taylor Swift.