Take This to Your Grave is the debut studio album by the American rock band Fall Out Boy, released on May 6, 2003, by Fueled by Ramen. It was their only album under the label, as they signed to Island Records following its release; the band would return to Fueled by Ramen for their 2023 album, So Much (for) Stardust. Sean O'Keefe had helped with the band's demo, and they returned to Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin to record the bulk of their first album with him. Living on a stranger's floor for part of the time and running out of money halfway through, the band recorded seven songs in nine days, bringing them together with the additional three from the demo.
While lead vocalist Patrick Stump had previously written all of the album's lyrics and took them lightly, bassist Pete Wentz took to the process with considerable seriousness and obsessively picked apart his bandmate's lyrics. The exhausting process led to numerous revisions of single songs and several arguments. The album cover, which shows the four bandmates sitting on a broken futon, features a blue tint reminiscent of jazz records, and was the second choice after the original was rejected by the Fueled by Ramen label.
Take This to Your Grave gradually created interest in the band as they toured across the country, including a five-day stint on Warped Tour 2004. The album produced three singles, including the minor success "Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy", and has often been named as a vital blueprint for 2000s pop-punk, with Alternative Press calling it a "subcultural touchstone" and a "magical, transcendent, and deceptively smart pop-punk masterpiece that ushered in a vibrant scene resurgence with a potent combination of charisma, new media marketing and hardcore-punk urgency". Take This to Your Grave is often regarded as one of the greatest pop-punk albums of all time. In 2017, Rolling Stone placed the album at number 5 on their list of the "50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums".
Background Fall Out Boy was formed in 2001 in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois by friends Pete Wentz and Joe Trohman. Wentz was a "visible fixture" of the relatively small Chicago hardcore punk scene of the late 1990s, performing in various groups including the metalcore band Arma Angelus.Downey, 2013. p. 65 Wentz was growing dissatisfied with the changing mores of the community, which he viewed as a transition from political activism to an emphasis on moshing and breakdowns. With his enthusiasm in Arma Angelus waning, he created a pop punk side project with Trohman. Trohman met Patrick Stump, the drummer for grindcore band xgrinding processx at a bookstore in Wilmette. The band's first public performance was in a cafeteria at DePaul University. The band's only performance with guitarist John Flamandan and original drummer Ben Rose was in retrospect described as "goofy" and "bad", but Trohman made an active effort to make the band work, picking up members for practice.Downey, 2013. p. 68
The band later went to Wisconsin to record a proper demo with 7 Angels 7 Plagues drummer Jared Logan. Uprising Records owner Sean Muttaqi wanted to release half of it as a split extended play (EP) with Andy Hurley's band Project Rocket, which the band viewed as competition. With Logan's help, the group put together a collection of songs in two days, and recorded them as Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend. The rushed recording experience, and underdeveloped songs, left the band discontented. At Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin to record their three songs of a possible split 7-inch with 504 Plan, engineer Sean O'Keefe suggested they record with Hurley who sat in for the session.
The band booked a two-week tour with Spitalfield, and invited Hurley to fill-in for recently departed members, while Stump borrowed one of Trohman's guitars for the trek. The band began to shop around the three songs from their unreleased split as a demo to record labels. In the process, Bob McLynn of Crush Management became the band's first manager.Downey, 2013. p. 72 The band returned to the studio with O'Keefe to record several more tracks to create label interest. John Janick of Fueled by Ramen had heard an early version of a song online and cold-called the band at their apartment, first reaching Stump and later talking to Wentz for an hour. Rob Stevenson from Island Records eventually offered the band a "first-ever incubator sort of deal", in which they gave the band money to sign with Fueled by Ramen for their one-off debut, knowing they could "upstream" the band to radio with the sophomore record. Fueled by Ramen, at the time the smallest of independent labels clamoring to sign the band, would effectively release their debut album, and help build their ever-expanding fanbase before they moved to Island. While the band had secured an investment from the label, they did not see immediate success.
Recording and production
The pre-production phase was completed in a warehouse the band used at night, free of charge, where they discussed how they wanted the songs to sound. Many songs intended for the album did not fit, and though the band originally planned to use the leftovers for future albums, they abandoned the songs instead.
The band again partnered with O'Keefe at Smart Studios in Madison, bringing together the three songs from the demo and recording an additional seven songs in nine days. According to Stump, the band didn't "sleep anywhere that we could shower [...] There was a girl that Andy's girlfriend at the time went to school with who let us sleep on her floor, but we'd be there for maybe four hours at a time. It was crazy."Downey, 2013. p. 73 According to Wentz, "we were lying to our parents about what we were doing, cutting corners. I was supposed to be in school. I didn't have access to money or a credit card. I don't think any of us did." The studio provided the band with soda during the recording process, but the band was hungry: "We were like, 'Could you take that soda money and buy us peanut butter, jelly and bread?' which they did." The group's goal with Grave was to make an album that was as "seamless and good from song to song" as Saves the Day's Through Being Cool.
O'Keefe paid for studio time for the band himself. Because of his perfectionist tendencies he pushed the band so that Hurley felt the recording process was more professional. He compared the making of Take This to Your Grave to "going to war", stating that recording with the rest of the band was similar to "being in the trenches together". The process was not without its difficulties: "It's not always happy: There's a lot of push and pull and each of them trying to get their thing. With [the album], we never let anything go until all three of us were happy," said O'Keefe. Wentz recalled that it was "mind-blowing" to see a certification plaque for Nirvana's Nevermind on a wall. The band was shown the microphone used in the recording of that album, but were unable to use it as "they said only Shirley [Manson] from Garbage could use it". The group created a running joke to pick on O'Keefe after he mentioned he had smoked marijuana at least once months before. The quartet was straight-edge then and exaggerated the story to insinuate O'Keefe was a habitual, obsessive user of the drug. The band credited O'Keefe in the album booklet with "like 10 different stoner nicknames - 'Dimebag O'Keefe'", although only several remained after some record executives felt it "excessively ridiculous".
The band received a $40,000 investment from Island Records to create the album, but it was completed for roughly $18,000.
Composition Music The album was categorized as pop-punk, emo, emo pop and scene music. Mani Mostofi, former vocalist of Racetraitor, had held many discussions with Wentz when the band formed about their pop punk sound, which Wentz described as "softcore". Mostofi described Take This to Your Grave as "sounding like Hot Topic," but "feeling like CBGB."Downey, 2013. p. 66
Lyrics According to Johnny Loftus of AllMusic, Take This to Your Graves lyrical content "merges musings on love and youth with healthy amounts of cutting cynicism, savvy popular culture touchstones, and cheeky phraseology". Stump wrote "Saturday" about how he felt like a failure on graduating from high school, and originally kept the song to himself until the group needed additional songs.(2004) "Take This to Your Grave - Director's Cut". Fueled By Ramen. Stump then collaborated with bassist Pete Wentz to complete the song's lyrics. "Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy" deals with jealousy and unrequited love.
Stump, who viewed himself an "artsy fartsy dude who didn't want to be in a pop-punk band," had written most of the band's lyrics to that point, including the songs "Saturday", "Dead on Arrival", "Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy", "Grenade Jumper", and "Homesick at Space Camp". While Stump did not take his lyrics seriously, Wentz had recently re-committed himself to the band and "it felt like he had a list of things in his head he wanted to do right. Lyrics were on that list." Wentz picked apart Stump's lyrics excessively down to syllables and began giving him notes. Stump felt exasperated, remarking to the bassist, "You just write the fucking lyrics dude. Just give me your lyrics and I'll write around them." The duo were new to this process, and they found it exhausting: Stump would write the song, scrap his lyrics, then attempt to fit Wentz's lyrics where his were.
Stump was more concerned with the melodies, including the rhythm, syncopation and alliteration of words, while Wentz felt none of it mattered if the lyrics themselves lacked meaning. The result made the two musicians unhappy: "Man, did we fight about that," recalled Stump in 2013. "We fought for nine days straight all while not sleeping and smelling like shit. It was one long argument, but I think some of the best moments are the result of that." O'Keefe commented on this process: "They would go through 10 revisions for one song. I thought I was going to lose my mind with both of them."Downey, 2013. p. 74
Songs "'Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today'" opens with a telephone dial tone, which Wentz found particularly enjoyable, as it provided stark contrast to the louder instrumentation to follow. The song's chorus was the result of many arguments between Wentz and Stump over the phonetic phrasing of words versus their meaning. Wentz ended up throwing out all of Stump's lyrics for the first time in the recording process, and rewrote them entirely himself - a first. Stump said, "I realized I must really want to be in this band at this point if I'm willing to put up with this much fuss." Lyrics such as "Let's play this game called 'when you catch fire' / I wouldn't piss to put you out," were inspired by Chris Conley's use of bizarre metaphors to prove a point on Saves the Day's Through Being Cool. The song title in itself is a slightly altered quote from the 1998 movie Rushmore. "Dead on Arrival" is among the earliest compositions, dating to before Hurley joined the band. Stump's song "Saturday" marked one of the first times Wentz and Stump collaborated on lyrics. Wentz considered it the best representation of the band at the time. In contrast, both disliked "Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy" during the recording process; Stump particularly disliked the a cappella opening, which was O'Keefe's idea.