- 2023-06-29
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MUSIC
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Fall Out Boy Covers Billy Joel's “We Didn't Start The Fire”
American rock band Fall Out Boy, consisting of Patrick Stump (vocals/rhythm guitar), Joe Trohman (lead guitar), Pete Wentz (bass) and Andy Hurley (drums), released a cover of American singer-songwriter Billy Joel's “We Didn't Start The Fire” on June 28, 2023.
The original version of the song was released by Billy Joel in 1989. The track lyrics include brief references to 118 significant political, cultural, scientific, and sporting events between 1949 and 1989, in mainly chronological order.
The band replaced the original lyrics with standout events from where the song left off in 1989 to 2023.
The band shared on social media, “I thought about this song a lot when I was younger. All these important people and events- some that disappeared into the sands of time- others that changed the world forever. So much has happened in the span of the last 34 years- we felt like a little system update might be fun. Hope you like our take on it...”- “Dude, honestly, this idea has been brewing for so long. I've been trying to get somebody to do this for so long because it just seems so perfect,” the band bassist Pete Wentz told Zane Lowe of Apple Music. “30 years later... I've been trying to do it. So we're 34 years later, I think. And so I've been trying to get somebody to do it for...four years. And finally Patrick [Stump] was like, 'We should just do it.' And listen, this song was just a... 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 you wouldn't. Because there's some stuff that was in the original that kind of is lost to the sands of time. So yeah, we just did it. We put it together. It's just a fun, goofy thing.”
He continued, “Listen, we did our best. It's very, very, very difficult. His is not totally in chronological order, but it's more in chronological order than ours. We just wanted the JFK blown away line, and clearly, I think that the World Trade one was a little more... that was probably... People probably felt a similar way. You remember where you were or whatever. 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.” -
He added, “There were things that were in that we kind of bailed on because we thought other things were more important and less important. The thing I liked about the original is that it's just kind of a time capsule, so it's just got things in it, but there's no judgment on it or whatever. It's just of like, 'Here are these things that happened.' There's triumphant characters and there's despair and it's just kind of the tapestry of human existence. And so, I think we kind of tried to do that. As to why no COVID? It's like, that's all anybody talked... I don't know. It felt like there was a couple of things that felt like a little on the nose. And then there were a couple of things where it was like... Bush V. Gore, we needed the rhyme.”
Photo by Pamela Littky - source : Apple Music
