Members of American alt-rock band Fall Out Boy, from left: Joe Trohman, Pete Wentz, Patrick Stump and Andy Hurley. (Universal Music Canada)

With the possible exception of Britney Spears — who parlayed a pity party into a successful marketing campaign for her latest album, Circus — nobody wants to listen to platinum-selling pop stars feeling sorry for themselves. So it’s tempting to roll your eyes upon realizing that Folie à Deux, the new album by chart-topping rock act Fall Out Boy, has discontentment splattered all over it.

The album includes pouty excoriations of the paparazzi (Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes), hand-wringing laments about the pop idol as mascot (Coffee’s for Closers) and ruminations about how touring makes drugs more alluring (20 Dollar Nose Bleed) — in other words, the trials and tribulations of the extremely famous.

"It’s a ton of responsibility to handle someone else’s lyrics. It’s like you’re babysitting – you’re screwed if you drop that kid. I have to look after [Pete Wentz's] lyrics and not feed them ice cream for dinner and make sure they get to bed on time."

—Patrick Stump, Fall Out Boy

And yet there’s something curiously affecting about these tunes, which are as epic as they are angst-ridden. Perhaps it has something to do with the way bassist Pete Wentz acknowledges his own part in becoming tabloid fodder; after all, when you get hitched to a deposed pop princess and then name your firstborn after a Jungle Book character, the headlines write themselves. Wentz handles the lyrical duties, while singer/guitarist Patrick Stump composes the music. Though his tabloid status is nowhere near that of his bandmate, Stump also struggles with maintaining artistic integrity in a culture that seems hell-bent on dissolving the boundaries between celebrities’ public and private lives.

“It can taint your art,” Stump says, somewhat sheepishly, in a recent phone interview. “I guess what I’m getting at is that the more you know about [an artist], the less interesting their art seems, to me at least. One of the things that bugs me about pop culture right now – about the so-called blogosphere – is that there’s so much information. I can’t stand that. I can’t stand it when I play a show and see camera phones out there – not because I hate getting my photo taken, ’cause I don’t f---ing care – but because it feels like the only reason kids are there is to get things to post on YouTube or Facebook. I feel like everyone’s so busy documenting the cool things that have happened to them that they’re too busy to actually experience cool stuff.”

That be-here-now ethos inspired the title of Fall Out Boy’s last album, Infinity on High (2007) – the phrase was allegedly borrowed from a letter written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. Infinity On High, the band’s fourth record, debuted at number one in the U.S. and spawned a number of hits, including the stuttering lead single, This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race, which topped the Billboard charts, and Thnks fr the Mmrs, a convoluted mash-up of swooning cabaret arrangements with broad, alt-rock hooks that made it into the Top 10. Both songs were considerably more daring than the singles on From Under the Cork Tree (2005); the band’s breakout hit, Dance, Dance, stuck pretty close to crunchy pop-punk fare.

There are few traces of pop-punk on Folie à Deux, which was originally slated for a Nov. 4 release, to coincide with U.S. election night. But as the moment of reckoning drew near, the members of this pro-Obama band worried that by putting out a record on the day of what they dubbed “the most important election of our time,” Fall Out Boy would be “leeching” off the political buzz. It was a thoughtful, mature move by a band that’s never been shy about stumping; Wentz even helped organize a pro-Obama rally.

(Universal Music Canada)

“It’s weird, because on the one hand, we have all this [fan] attention and we know we should do something good with it,” Stump says. “That works for a little while, but when you get tagged as an artist who uses his position to say things, the audience expects you to only do that, and then you’re merely preaching to the converted. I mean, at this point, a major percentage of U2 fans are, like, world citizens who worry about what’s going on in Africa and are engaged with helping change all the things the band’s been railing against for so long.”

As lead singer, Stump should be the face and voice of the group, but it’s Wentz who has consistently popped up in the press. In part, it’s because he’s prone to making controversial comments: he’s spoken openly about his suicide attempts and struggles with bipolar disorder, and once told the gay magazine Out he considers himself bisexual in theory (though he doesn’t care for male genitalia). Fans and writers also fixate on Wentz because he’s the man behind the lyrics.

Stump postulates that their tag-team effort is one reason that Fall Out Boy is able to experiment with genres, a tendency that has become increasingly pronounced. Though Stump insists that they were never fully embraced by emo kids in their hometown of Chicago, Fall Out Boy’s earlier work fell closer to the punk-pop end of the spectrum. The tunes on Folie à Deux, however, are all over the map, hopscotching from guitar licks reminiscent of the Who’s Baba O’Riley (on Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes) to the less successful, pallid R&B of What A Catch, Donnie, a ballad that features a cameo from Elvis Costello.

“Pete and I have an interesting dynamic,” Stump explains. “If one of us was wholly responsible for writing songs, I wonder if one part – the lyrics or the music – would suffer, because the whole songwriting process would become so compartmentalized. It’s a ton of responsibility to handle someone else’s lyrics. It’s like you’re babysitting – you’re screwed if you drop that kid. I have to support and look after his lyrics and not feed them ice cream for dinner and make sure they get to bed on time.

“For me, it’s like, ‘What’s the right kind of music for this specific lyric?’ That’s why we’ll ask Elvis Costello to work on a song, and on the same album, we’ll put Lil’ Wayne on a different track, because it suits him.”

Stump allows that the slew of high-profile guests on Folie à Deux – which also include Debbie Harry and Panic at the Disco’s Brandon Urie – doesn’t hurt in the marketing department: “Yeah, that makes one bitchin’ sticker to put on the album.” Still, Stump insists that Fall Out Boy don’t take commercial success into account when they’re crafting songs.

Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz performs at the Rock the Vote Ballot Bash in Denver, Col. on Aug. 26, 2008. (Matt Sayles/Associated Press)

OK, maybe once. Stump confesses that a particular tune – he’s cagey about which one – was written in the hopes of satisfying the record label’s need for a chart-topping single, thereby giving Fall Out Boy the freedom to experiment on other tracks.

“With that one cheesy single – which wasn’t even one of our bigger songs – I remember thinking, I’ll write this and then I can afford to do whatever I want. But nobody really liked it, probably because it was really dishonest. I mean, there are stock, pre-packaged pop hits out there, but for the most part, someone was inspired in some way when they were writing those songs.”

Stump sighs. “You find yourself in this position where you’ve scored a big hit on the radio, and then there’s a mad dash to perpetuate that, when [making hits] wasn’t your intention in the first place.”

Folie à Deux is in stores now.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.