The Price of Fame

Joe Trohman is midsentence when a loud siren bursts to life, his voice swallowed by the deafening sound like a bowling ball dropped into the ocean.

"Sorry, this alarm just goes off. I don't know why," he says, apologetically, from a rock club in Glasgow. "This is the oldest, dinkiest joint in Scotland."

The Fall Out Boy guitarist doesn't sound too annoyed at the interruption -- he seems at ease, relieved even, as if he's conducting the interview in the midst of a warm bath.

Recently ensconced on a European tour, the band played a lot of cities that it had never been to before, and thus its profile was considerably lower than it is stateside, where the band routinely sells out arenas and amphitheaters.

"We're not as known," Trohman says of touring abroad in smaller venues. "So it's real easy for me to go walk around and just enjoy what's around to enjoy."

Walking around. Taking things in. These are simple pleasures that become a shade more complex when your band becomes the poster children for the ever-swelling emo ranks, who are loved and loathed with equal voracity.

Fall Out Boy has come to define the contemporary strain of this punk subgenre, with crystalline, made-for-radio pop hooks, ceaseless buoyancy, a lyrical verbosity that manifests itself in song titles long enough to qualify as snarky novellas, and a nation of teen drama queens and kings singing along.

It's made these dudes rich and famous and a little suspicious of stardom all at once.

Fall Out Boy's latest disc, the chart-topping "Infinity on High," occasionally bristles at the band's newfound fame, eyeing it warily, like some uninvited houseguest who refuses to leave the sofa.

"Make us poster boys for your scene, but we are not making an acceptance speech" singer/guitarist Patrick Stump announces on the album-opening "Thriller," sounding a little self-conscious of his status.

"This bandwagon's full, please catch another," he later adds on the first single, "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race."

The band's tunes are mostly first-person narratives, with bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz fond of metaphorical role playing -- he's a preacher, a painter, an arms dealer -- where he picks at scabs and relates to his audience by dissecting his own celebrity.

"We're the new face of failure," he writes sardonically on "I'm Like a Lawyer With the Ways I'm Always Trying to Get You Off."

All of this is largely a reflection of this bunch coming of age in the spotlight, as Trohman was but 20 years old when the band issued its breakthrough 2005 disc, "From Under the Cork Tree." They've had to try to figure themselves out with everybody watching, and the strain is audible at times on "Infinity."

"It's weird, because sometimes I'm like, 'Crap, dude, I just want some privacy to figure these things out on my own and not in front of everybody,' " Trohman says of growing up in the public eye.

Musically speaking, Fall Out Boy also has grown a lot in recent years. "Infinity" is a diffuse, mammoth-sounding album where the band pushes itself in several different directions at once.

Like a lot of groups attempting to follow up a hit record, Fall Out Boy errs on the side of ambition, fattening things up with dramatic string sections, triumphant-sounding horns, throbbing digital beats and saccharine multipart harmonies that add a layer of ostentation to the band's once waifish sound.

The album ranges from proto-metal gut churners to falsetto white-boy funk to quavering piano ballads, with production by everyone from hard rock hitmaker Butch Walker to urban pop songsmith Babyface.

"The biggest thing that Babyface had to do was take Patrick's vocals and push them to the next level, which was kind of the whole point of working with him in the first place," Trohman says. "He picked these two songs that he wanted to work on, and he loved Patrick's voice, but he wanted to bring the extra vocals, the background vocals, the harmonies, and put them all up there and make it sound crazy, give it that Boyz II Men aspect that he kind of has going on."

The end result is a driving, resonant album as muddled as young adulthood itself.

If success is relative, so is this band's sound.

But they'll figure it out some day, right along with themselves.

"You have to find a semblance of normalcy," Trohman says of his band's evolution into household names and all the attendant distractions that come along with it.

"We just kind of wanted to put it out there like, 'Yeah, we're the same dudes, we're into being the same dudes, and we're not caught up in any of the BS surrounding it," he adds with a pause. "We want to let people know that."