Fall Out Boy: Babies, Breakups, Bromances!

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While the two pals catch up, Patrick Stump sits in silence, awkwardly picking at his huevos rancheros. Though he’s ostensibly Fall Out Boy’s frontman, Stump inevitably takes a backseat to Wentz both onstage and in real life. Partly it’s good for business: Their well-known division of labor (Pete writes the lyrics, Patrick the melodies) keeps Wentz’s antics front and center, while Stump is largely a blank slate—a golden-throated delivery system for someone else’s emotions, the plain white cracker to Wentz’s cheese. But it’s also a function of personality. A self-described nerd, Stump says he has “terribly low self-esteem” and shuns the spotlight whenever possible. And though he’s a gifted producer who’s been invited to make beats for superstars like Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, he always finds a way to say no. “I’m just a fat white dude from Glenview, Illinois,” he says. “As a hip-hop fan, I don’t want me doing hip-hop.”

According to Wentz, Stump “has this amazing ability to hide in plain sight.” Sometimes, though, it’s unclear whether he’s hiding or just not being seen. Take the night of the presidential election, when both were in New York. Wentz attended a birthday party for Diddy, where he cheered the returns alongside Jay-Z, Ben Stiller and Kenneth from 30 Rock. Stump, meanwhile, watched CNN alone in his hotel room. “Dude, you should have called me!” Wentz says when he hears this news. But it’s clear from Stump’s face that it wouldn’t have mattered.

Still, the two are about as close as friends as can be. Stump was the best man at Wentz’s wedding, as well as the one who “talked him off the cliff” when the penis photos hit the Web. (“Things literally could not have gotten worse,” Wentz says now. “I was just a wingman for my cock.”)

Often, however, the pair’s folie à deux doesn’t leave much room for numbers trois and quatre. The first time I meet Andy Hurley., in his dressing room at the video shoot, he’s feeling suicidal. “If the Packers don’t get this first down I’m going to kill myself,” says the drummer, watching his beloved Packers struggle against the Vikings. When Green Bay’s kicker misses the game-winning field goal, Hurley slams his iPhone onto the table, gets up and, without a word, starts punching the metal door frame, and doesn’t stop for 45 seconds.

Let’s face it: The dude’s a little weird. A self-described “anarcho-savagist,” Hurley believes that civilization is on its way out, and the sooner the better—he opposes conservation, supports ecoterrorism, and plans to use his Fall Out Boy money to buy land in northern Wisconsin and ride out the apocalypse. He shares a house in Milwaukee with four vegan straight-edge buddies, where they play kickball on Thursdays and practice jujitsu every morning. They call it Fuck City. “I don’t really get into that red-carpet stuff,” Hurley says, somewhat unnecessarily. “I like to keep things pretty simple.”