Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz has been discussing his band’s updated cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. He’s explained the thinking behind the post-1989 events that they included, and also those that they didn’t – most notably the COVID pandemic, which, in a song about significant world events from the last 34 years, you might have thought would feature quite prominently.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Wentz said that the idea to update the song had been “brewing for so long”, but until recently he had been trying to convince other artists that they should do it.
“I’ve been trying to get somebody to do it for four years”, he explained. “And finally Patrick [Stump, frontman] was like, ‘We should just do it’”.
With that decided, then came the task of choosing what to include in the verses. Joel’s original listed 118 people and events from politics, culture, science and sport that were of note between 1949, the year when Joel was born, and the year of the track’s release, 1989. Fall Out Boy’s version sets out to namecheck people and events that have been similarly significant since the original’s release.
Wentz continued: “I remember listening to the original when I was little and I was like, ‘I don’t know what half this stuff is’. And it made me look up a bunch of this stuff. So, it was just interesting thinking about the stuff we would include versus [that which we] wouldn’t”.
“There’s some stuff that was in the original that kind of is lost to the sands of time”, he added. “So yeah, we just did it. We put it together. It’s just a fun, goofy thing. There were things that were in that we kind of bailed on because we thought other things were more important and less important”.
Meanwhile, on the decision not to mention COVID, he explained: “It’s like, that’s all anybody talked [about]. I don’t know. It felt like there were a couple of things that [would have been] a little on the nose. And then there were a couple of things [like] Bush v Gore [where] we needed the rhyme”.
Rhyming, of course, is an issue when you’re putting together a thematic list in song. Especially given that Joel tried to put his list in more or less chronological order, restricting where things can go for the purpose of a rhyme. Though, it’s been widely noted that, unlike Joel’s version, Fall Out Boy didn’t really manage to get their big list in the order that the referenced events happened.
“His is not totally in chronological order, but it’s more in chronological order than ours”, Wentz admitted. “So it’s just a little bit out of order, but it is what it is. Listen, we wanted the internet to still have something to complain about”.
Indeed, perhaps the great contribution here is not creating a historical document, but more fuelling the time-honoured (post-1989) tradition of moaning online. And for that, we must thank Fall Out Boy.
If you want a little whine time today, you can listen to Fall Out Boy’s version of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ here: