Part 1 of my in-studio interview with Joe Trohman of Fall Out Boy, The Damned Things, and With Knives. He talks about what happened towards the end of FOB, the transition to a harder rock based band such as Damned Things, and the freedom he has with writing and singing in With Knives. Trohman emphasized throughout the interview that fans can download With Knives’ new record for free on BandCamp – check it out here.
Listen to part of the interview two here.
Trohman discussed his new project, With Knives;
“Josh [Newton] had been working on what we was actually calling With Knives for a while – and he was just recording these really cool instrumental tracks, really cool 90’s noise rock type stuff. And I loved it. I told him, “That stuff is awesome, what’re you going to do with it?” A couple days after I told him that, he said “…do you wanna do the band with me?” So I was like, “Let’s do it! Let’s do this band!” … we started working on that, and went through so many rounds of demos.
We started working on these demos more and more. I have a studio at home – a little studio. And we’re writing and recording this stuff, and it’s to the point where I’m like, “I guess I’ll start singing over this stuff, just putting ideas to it. The more I work on it, the more it sounds like something decent… and then I just sort of fell into singing for the thing, and it sounds alright… we basically recorded the thing and decided just one day to put it out with any promotion. Again, we’re doing this all ourselves.”
It’s really dark rock ‘n roll, it’s mid-tempo more than anything, and borderlines on psychedelic sometimes, I think. There’s a lot of different things going on, but we like a lot of stuff. It’s funny how many people have tried to describe it by comparing it to other bands… there are so many bands we reference that people probably don’t listen to. We set out to make a record you can’t listen to once and say, “I get it!””
On the topic of Fall Out Boy‘s hiatus, Trohman said;
“We were just like – we don’t want to do it. We were just like, “I’m done doing this, man.” I think there’s a lot of fans of the band that take that so personally… but we were pretty good to our fans, and we still try to be. Try not to take it personally… we’d be doing it for a good decade.”
Later in the interview (part 2), Trohman discussed what the members of Fall Out Boy have been up to;
“That part of my life… I like that part of my life. I think people for some reason think I don’t. I like that part of my life – I’m just moving on, that’s all.
Everyone was able to figure themselves out more. Especially for Patrick and myself – not taking away anything from Pete and Andy – but for Patrick and myself were the youngest guys, 17 years old, when we started Fall Out Boy, we spend a lot of that time just doing Fall Out Boy, we didn’t get a chance to – this sounds so weird – explore. Explore musically… it all happened so quickly.
It’s hard talking about that stuff and not come off that I’m not happy or appreciative and that I don’t have gratitude for all the things we’ve done and the things people have done for us with Fall Out Boy, but you can’t just do something for other people all the time.
The things that some of us want to do, don’t fit into the Fall Out Boy mold. So we had to go and just do it, and hope that people understand. A lot of people get offended – I see people getting offended and they take it very personally. It’s too bad, I wish people would just be stoked.
It’s good, you gotta go out and support what Patrick does, and you gotta go what support what Pete does, and what Andy does – Andy’s in a new band called Enabler, which is awesome. I’d like if people could dig on what me and Josh are doing in With Knives. If you can’t dig it, you can’t dig it – that’s fine.”
Regarding The Damned Things, Trohman said;
“I think the thing that was hardest, was the band was really growing legs, so to speak. There were totally warranted pressures to go back and do the other bands. It had been a while since Anthrax put out a record. Every Time I Die usually does a record a year, and it had been over a year. People are like, “Why aren’t you doing that band anymore?!” Because those dudes are doing their bands! … It’s an honor, and we’re going to do it again one day.”
