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“so many updates. the end of HCT was hard. on tour it becomes like summer camp, you get used to seeing the same faces over and over again.

since then we have still been going non-stop. thanks to everyone who came out to the Today show! nbc said that we broke records with the amount of fans who showed up… pretty insane. then playing live earth was another mindblowing experience- to see all of these people coming together for music and belief all at once gave me chills. we got to hang with some good people like kanye west and john mayer- id recommend both of them as people and artists. i dont know how to explain but it is thrilling to be in the presence of people you know will end up changing culture.

the photos and video dont do the mood of this concert justice. it may not be monterey pop but this was something larger than the sum of its parts. it makes me want to make change in my daily life. thanks for taking part.

off to the lab to work on some new ideas. patrick is making music, producing some new bands. joe is getting his house ready for cribs and andy is busy doing whatever sexy vegetarians do.

this fall we will be playing shows with gym class heroes and the plain white t’s- before then we will be warming up in europe with a few days Decaydance fest— including us panic at the disco, gym class heroes, the academy is and cobra starship. should be a fun family reunion.

“have fun storming the castle” im gonna miss mark saying this to us every night… ”

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One of the many bands that passed through the Live Earth stages around the world Saturday put it best.

“It’s not really important what goes on here tonight, but what happens in the future,” said Pete Wentz of the band Fall Out Boy, who appeared in the New York concert.

For many who participated - as performers or spectators at the massive global music event - it was an inspiring night, perhaps the biggest concert broadcast in history, all dedicated to confronting what organizer Al Gore has called “the greatest threat mankind has ever faced.”

Saturday’s musicians were committed to changing that dynamic, but entertainers as a group have a spotty track record in forcing the body politic into change. Just look at the results of recent US presidential elections, where the entertainment business came down firmly on the side of the centre-left Democrats in 2004, only for George Bush to win a majority.

But Live Earth could be different.

The campaign to raise awareness about the dangers and causes of global warming has already gathered significant momentum. Only the most committed ideologues still dispute scientific evidence pointing to human activity as the cause of the climate threat, and children the world over re as focused on the environment as their parents were on the space race.

The sights and sounds of well-known personalities lending their voices to the cause may embolden people to take the actions demanded by the seven-point pledge offered up from organizers for all participants to sign.

“I think it’s cool that so many people are coming together to support this,” said Ellen Sanchez, 14, who watched the concerts at a big screen erected for the occasion in San Francisco. “It definitely focuses attention on the problem. We can’t ignore it any longer.”

Others already see the mega-gig as just the latest round of unwanted celebrity preaching.

That was certainly the attitude of critics who called Live Earth ”concerts for guilty stars.” They pointed out that many performances had flown to the shows in private jets, and asked how the massive productions with their huge carbon footprints could really benefit the cause. ‘All are guilty’

Perhaps the answer was at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, where some 700,000 people attended a free concert where actress and kid’s show host Xuxa framed the issue: “We are all guilty. We waste paper, water, energy and many other things. … It is not just for Americans. This is a concert for the whole world.”

Or maybe it was in the Netherlands, where thousands gathered by bicycle in an Amsterdam square to watch the shows being broadcast from other countries and hear ideas about how to save energy.

Africa, the underdeveloped continent with the least global-warming emissions but some of the worst potential effects, hosted a concert in Johannesburg. And the Shanghai concert carried great symbolism, as China continues to boom its way toward becoming one of the world’s biggest polluters.

The concerts certainly raised environmental awareness to a new level. Seen by a projected 2 billion people, the concerts featured environmental messages flashing behind the stages. Commercial breaks were filled with infomercials about the cause.

But the greatest benefit could come from the seven-point pledge organizers asked people to sign to limit their own pollution. The pledge calls on governments to sign meaningful treaties to reduce carbon emissions by 90 per cent by the year 2050, and to enact strict limits on coal-burning power stations.

“I’m so proud to be a part of it today, because it’s not about the problem. It’s more about the solution,” said songstress Alicia Keys at the New York show. “So I want you to make that pledge. I’m making the pledge, and I want you to make that pledge right now.”

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Halfway through the year is a good time to reflect on what we’ve seen in pop music so far. These are the 10 best pop albums of the first half of 2007.

In the number one spot? Fall Out Boy. Here’s the review for FOB and Infinity on High:

This is Fall Out Boy’s first truly great album, and it is a landmark in the evolution of punk-influenced pop music. Taking its title from a Van Gogh letter written at a moment of emotional ecstasy, one can’t help but wonder if this is something like the statement the Ramones or Nirvana could have delivered absent the devastating impact of drug and alcohol addictions and with the wind of true support at their backs. Only a band with a tremendous sense of confidence can deliver words like this:

“And I saw God cry in the reflection of my enemies
And all the lovers with no time for me”

Fall Out Boy Fans - You Know Who You Are

If you are part of Fall Out Boy’s intended core audience, you likely know who you are. In case you’ve been hiding out over the past year and don’t know, Pete Wentz spells it out for you in “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race”:

“All the boys who the dance floor didn’t love
And all the girls whose lips couldn’t move fast enough”

You’ve been the target of great rock music in the past, but where Kurt Cobain and Robert Smith wanted you to crawl inside and share their pain and cynicism about the world, Fall Out Boy on Infinity on High want you to dance and sing and celebrate that the world belongs to you, too.

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The pick of the rest of this week’s releases…

As you’ll no doubt know, the once legendary Smashing Pumpkins recently reformed. On “Tarantula”, Billy Corgan’s vocals are as whiney as ever, but the music over which he sings them has somehow transformed into a vicious, fiery, guitar-driven squall with solo’s aplenty. It sounds like Brian May and Robert Page dueling desperately in a “who can be the most self-indulgent axe hero” contest.

One comeback we were all hoping wouldn’t happen is that of Canadian angst-merchant Avril Lavigne. “When You’re Gone” opens with a couple of fairly promising bars of tinkling piano; it’s not long, though, before the plodding four-four beat kicks in and the song turns into the kind of mid-paced, soft rock effort you might have expected from somebody like Jennifer Rush half-way thorugh the Eighties. She may be trying to give herself more gravitas by shaking off the “Sk8r Boi” image, but this is merely exchanging extreme irritation for intense boredom.

New Young Pony Club, “Ice Cream”. Vague elements of punk-funk permeate this slow, lazily cool slice of sultriness. The bassline pulses like a heartbeat, the guitars stab gracefully somewhere low down in the mix, and some shimmering synths add atmosphere to the whole like chrome shimmering in the twilight. It’s alluring, pulse-quickening stuff.

Summer’s here, though it doesn’t really feel like it, and that means it’s time for a beautifully rendered indie-pop single from Swedish harmony purveyors The Concretes. Could “Oh Boy” be that single? I think so. It’s as sugary as the Magic Numbers, but it doesn’t make you feel sick; it’s as catchy as Kylie, and it makes you wanna dance.

Meanwhile, Fall Out Boy drop “The Take Over The Breaks Over“. It’s not the very worst thing the band have ever released; fizzy and energetic and not quite as overtly teen-angst as their previous stuff. It still falls a long way short of making you want to listen to it more than once though. Source.

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The show, hosted by Entourage star Jeremy Piven, will feature performances by Aerosmith, Alicia Keys, Avril Lavigne, Carrie Underwood, Fall Out Boy, Fergie, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, Ludacris, Martina McBride, Santana and Usher.

“The synergy between fashion and music is even more pronounced now than it was when we first created Fashion Rocks™ three years ago, said Condé Nast Media Group president, Richard D. Beckman. “Each year the line between the two becomes increasingly blurred as more musicians launch fashion lines and more designers align themselves with musicians. Fashion Rocks™ 2007 will feature outstanding performers from both worlds who span the spectrum of musical genres and fashion styles and bring to life that special relationship.”

The Fashion Rocks™ magazine will also return this year. Slated to reach over 60 million readers and filled with even more editorial content, Fashion Rocks™ magazine will accompany the September issue of 17 Condé Nast titles. Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and Contributing Editor Jonathan Van Meter will again take the helm as editorial director and editor-in-chief, respectively.

New to the scene is OBO, an international fashion production company. OBO will be producing the highly anticipated fashion segments that appear throughout the concert.

OBO most recently produced the 2007 Victoria’s Secret fashion show, as well as shows for Zegna, Marchesa, Tommy Hilfiger, Chloé and Behnaz Sarafpour, among others.

Executive producers of Fashion Rocks™ are Anthony Eaton, executive director and president of Tall Pony Productions and Richard D. Beckman, president of Condé Nast Media Group and Kingdom Entertainment. Mr. Eaton is an award-winning video producer whose roster of accolades includes GRAMMY® Awards, Cable Aces and NAACP Awards. His work has also received numerous film festival honors.

Fashion Rocks™ is sponsored by five key advertisers: Chevrolet, Citi, Revlon, Dillard’s, and Nexxus.
Fashion Rocks™ is a production of Condé Nast Media Group, a unit of Condé Nast Publications which includes corporate sales, marketing, interactive and direct sales efforts for all of Condé Nast’s consumer magazines and websites. Condé Nast Media Group is recognized as an industry leader for its creation and execution of large-scale, integrated, multi-platform advertising programs and events.

Fans looking for more information on Fashion Rocks can log onto fashionrocks2007.tv

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Yet, in today’s consumer-based capitalistic society, music has been sterilized, homogenized, desensitized and, worst of all, commoditized into an entity designed not to enrich the listeners but to make rich the purveyors.

If this sounds highfalutin, then you weren’t at the Tacoma Dome on Wednesday night because this concert was the epitome of what is wrong in music today.

Exhibit 1: Cobra Starship, a band whose claim to fame is the song “Bring It (Snakes on a Plane.)” Yes, from the cheesy action-packed flop of a film starring Sam Jackson. Dear reader, the only thing worse than a stupid song is a song that makes you stupid. For this, Cobra Starship is guilty and should be ejected from Starship Earth.

Exhibit 2: The Academy Is …, a band that thankfully had its name emblazoned on a giant banner, otherwise their power pop, bubblegum rock would not have been identifiable from the 237 other bands that have this exact same sound. Generic? Guilty! Driven by gimmicks and cheesy clichés? Guilty! Send the Academy to the gallows!

Exhibit 3: +44, the band former Blink-182 members Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker formed when Blink went on indefinite hiatus. These are not punk preservationists or even revisionists. No, +44 is simply thieves with guitars who would rather count their money than write an original, that is to say fresh, song. This L.A. band romps through power chord after power chord while Hoppus sings sensitive, surefire lines like, “Baby come on.” The best part of this band is the banter, “(guitarist) Shane Gallagher likes to cut his hair like Britney Spears.” (He’s bald. Har-har.)

Now, the exception to the rule and perhaps our hope for the future: Fall Out Boy, the emissaries of emo who wittingly nabbed their moniker from the Simpsons. (Fall Out Boy was Radioactive Man’s sidekick.) This Chicago four-piece added all kinds of lights, flames, streamers and explosions to a show that could have been just as successful without the hoopla. The reason: The songs are well-crafted, interesting and exciting compositions, topped with ample wit, humor and irony. In other words, the music could stand alone.

“This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” is a perfect example. This infectious concoction is also a stirring anthem; played live or on the radio, it changes the room; it demands fist pumping and shouting; it gets blood flowing.

The same could be said of “One & Only,” a song from “Timbaland Presents Shock Value” that supposedly features Fall Out Boy, but the way FOB plays it, the song its own. To make it even better, bassist Pete Wentz and guitarist Joe Trohman snuck out to the sound stage to play the song while standing on top of a Honda. Of course, the young girls went crazy, sending high-pitched shrieks into the ears of whatever journalist happened to be standing nearby.

It was more than these two hits. FOB played a full set of rip-roaring rock ‘n’ roll (”Sugar We’re Goin’ Down,” “The Carpal Tunnel of Love,” “Thnks fr th Mmrs,” to name some high points) that breathed new life into the genre. They even reconstituted Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” That’s food for the soul.

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He’s the heartthrob bassist of pop-punk band Fall Out Boy. Nude photos of him surfaced on the Internet last year. He’s dating wannabe-punk princess Ashlee Simpson. And he wears loads of black eyeliner.

But as much as it would inevitably get tiresome to be the focus of packs of paparazzi and have your life dissected by celebrity bloggers, Wentz is able to be philosophical about it all.

Speaking over the phone from Milwaukee, where he was gearing up for another show on the band’s summer tour - which brings them to Vancouver tonight - Wentz initially criticized celebrity bloggers such as Perez Hilton, but then changed his tune to admit that he’s not all that different from them.

“I guess there’s something to be said for how much of a life can you really have from just making money off of other people’s misery,” he says in a slightly strained and tired-sounding voice. “But then again, when I read the words that I write, I think that’s probably what I do a lot of the time, too, is make money off of other people’s misery.”

Wentz, 28, writes the bulk of the lyrics to Fall Out Boy’s songs and says sometimes the easiest way to generate powerful lyrics is to feed off human despair, much like the bloggers.

“Sometimes it’s easy to gut yourself or gut other people when you’re writing songs and I think that it’s a lot harder to be truly introspective or tell a good story that’s real.”

Wentz is humble and relaxed over the phone. There is little ego or defensive insecurity leaking through. He sounds like a guy who’s had some battles with fame and emerged a little beaten up, but is now able to brush off unwanted attention and mean-spirited criticism.

In early 2005, Wentz took a near-lethal dose of the anti-anxiety drug Ativan while sitting in his sister’s car in a mall parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago, where he grew up. The overdose came a few months before the band released its breakthrough album, From Under the Cork Tree, which landed Fall Out Boy on Billboard’s Top 10.

The band was formed in 2001 when Wentz and his good friend Joe Trohman - lead guitarist - met Patrick Stump, who was still in high school. Stump, 23, initially filled the role of drummer, but soon became lead singer.

Infinity on High was released earlier this year and hit the top spot on Billboard within its first week. The album is a fast-paced, guitar-heavy, angst-filled romp that has elements of punk, metal and pop - a combination that Wentz acknowledges has the ability to both attract and repel listeners.

“We’re one of those bands that’s like a lightning rod for people to love or hate. There’s people who hate to love us and there’s people who love to hate us and I think the new record, if anything, only solidifies that,” he says. “We really have no qualms about wanting to be the biggest rock band on the planet and we have a long way to go.

“There are a lot of bands that are a lot bigger than us right now and have the ability to reach a lot more people and have a greater legacy, or whatever, but at the same time, we wrote this record to be heard in arenas and possibly even one day in stadiums.”

The band is playing at the Pacific Coliseum Thursday night and Wentz says the show will be full of surprises.

“We were trying to put on the biggest rock show that we possibly could and we reached for some things that I think are right at the edge of our grasp but so far they’ve been going pretty well - knock on wood.”

Asked for specifics on those “things,” Wentz suddenly got protective of his show. “I can’t go into too much detail because for the most part we’re trying to keep them as surprises,” he says.

As hints, he says the big idea for the show came after the band watched The Prestige - a film about competitive magicians - and after they saw an old interview with Michael Jackson in which he clarified that the Moonwalk is an illusion rather than a dance move.

While the show might be filled with illusions, Fall Out Boy’s fame and success has little to do with smoke and mirrors. Wentz realizes his public image is something of a caricature of himself, but he wisely says that as long as he can keep a sense of humour it won’t get to him.

“Anyone can become a parody of themselves … I think that it’s better when you can start laughing about that before other people do.”

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This is quite a different interview from the norm. While it is still Pete-based news, I found this satisfying to read. But is he sincere?

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