Pete Wentz has explained why COVID was left out of Fall Out Boy’s updated version of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’.
Last week, the band shared a remade version of Billy Joel’s hit, with references to major pop and cultural landmarks between 1989 and 2023.
The FOB version of the tune gives something of a brief history of the period, mentioning ‘deep fakes, earthquakes’, ‘North Korea, South Korea’, ‘MySpace’ and more.
But what it doesn’t include is COVID, which many have been surprised by given the seismic, once-in-a-century event it was.
And Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz has now explained why the new version of the track omits the event, talking about it with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, where he said:
“It’s like, that’s all anybody talked… You know what I mean?”
“I don’t know. It felt like there was a couple of things that felt like a little on the nose.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Wentz described his and Fall Out Boy’s decision and inspiration to make an updated version of the track, saying:
“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 [what] you wouldn’t. Because there’s some stuff that was in the original that kind of is lost to the sands of time… We put it together. It’s just a fun, goofy thing.”
“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.
“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.”
Fall Out Boy are currently amid the North American run of their ‘So Much For (Tour) Dust’, which kicked-off in Chicago last month.
On Saturday, they brought out My Chemical Romance bassist Mikey Way for a cover of ‘Saturday’.
