‘From Under The Cork Tree’: Fall Out Boy’s Breakthrough Album
With its angsty lyrics and anthemic music, it connected with audiences the world over.
All artists who impact on a global scale have to cope with the pressures of fame when they rise to prominence — and that was certainly the situation Fall Out Boy faced with their breakthrough sophomore set, 2005’s From Under The Cork Tree.
In this case, though, the problem came to a head before the band had completed the record. Having settled into comfortable cult status following the release of 2003 debut Take This To Your Grave, the Illinois indie-rock quartet then signed with Island Records prior to making From Under The Cork Tree. The new deal was a major step forward, but it also raised the stakes for the band – to such a degree that bassist and primary lyricist Pete Wentz became ill and ended up in hospital when the weight of expectation simply felt too great.
“I think a lot of it was through not sleeping,” he revealed to U.K. weekly NME in a 2021 interview. “And trying to figure out [the band’s future] and being on the precipice of something fuelled a lot of anxiety.”
Happily, Wentz soon recovered enough to rejoin his bandmates in California for the From Under The Cork Tree sessions. His personal experiences informed the record’s introspective themes (they reflected “the anxiety and depression that goes along with looking at your own life,” he told the NME), but when Wentz’s words were aligned with vocalist and guitarist Patrick Stump’s most accessible set of pop-punk tunes to date, Fall Out Boy had hit on a winning formula.
Produced with power and clarity by Neal Avron (New Found Glory, Weezer), From Under The Cork Tree featured two of Fall Out Boy’s signature tracks. The explosive “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” shot to No. 8 – giving FOB its first U.S. Top 10 hit – while the infectious “Dance Dance” also went Top 10 with help from Alan Ferguson’s MTV Music Video Award-winning promo, based on a brilliant parody of the film Revenge Of The Nerds.
In reality, though, From Under The Cork Tree proffered plenty more of a similar caliber. Its third and final single was the quirky, Molly Ringwald-referencing “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More ‘Touch Me’,” but really the equally anthemic likes of “Of All The Gin Joints In The World” or “Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner” would likely have done just as well. Indeed, even allowing for the underlying melancholy in most of Wentz’s lyrics, virtually all of From Under The Cork Tree’s songs contained an inherent radio-friendliness which ensured that the record couldn’t fail to make an impression in the mainstream.
In keeping with this prediction — and with further help from reviews such as Rolling Stone’s, which praised FOB’s “knack for crafting ginormous, soaring anthems” — From Under The Cork Tree proceeded to become a fixture in the charts. It debuted at No. 9 on the U.S. Billboard 200, going on to move 2 million copies at home and collectively around 7 million copies worldwide. Its success cemented Fall Out Boy’s reputation at home and abroad, and while the band would enjoy sustained success with albums such as Infinity On High and American Beauty/American Psycho, From Under The Cork Tree retains a special place in their hearts.
“This was the album that made it possible to do all the other stuff,” Pete Wentz told NME in 2021. “If this one hadn’t worked or hadn’t connected with people, we wouldn’t have gotten to go to the U.K. and around the world. I have such reverence for these songs because they feel bigger than our band.”
