FOR a pin-up, Pete Wentz is on the small side: almost poster-sized. Sales-wise, though, Wentz and his band, Fall Out Boy, are very big indeed: their previous album, From Under the Cork Tree, sold more than three million copies, and their latest, Infinity on High, entered the US charts at No.1.
Wentz is trying to articulate the lack of connection he feels between his emotion-spilling lyrics - he is Fall Out Boy's bassist and principal wordsmith - and what his fans feel these say about him.
Never mind the gulf that separates what he puts down on paper and what comes haltingly out of his mouth or rushes round brain that, he says, he has sometimes wished could be turned off.
I'm probably one of the worst people on the planet to have a relationship with,'' the 27-year-old laughs.
I can articulate my thoughts to all these people this way and press a click button, but in person I'm not like that at all. I have stunted emotional ideas. People will come to a meet-and-greet'' - the band are famously approachable and maintain a strong bond with their fans, in person and online - and want you to be 'on', and you want to say, 'If you really read the words, you'd understand that that person is pretty manic and isn't going to be on a lot.
' But people don't pick up on that.''
Wentz uses the second and third person rather than the first a lot, and it's pretty disconcerting: talk about a lack of connection.
Two years ago, shortly before Cork Tree was released, this sense of alienation, of separateness, led him to attempt suicide.
He is better able now, he says, to bridge the chasm, or at least to understand why it's there; and those around him are more comprehending, too.
The lyrics, the ideas themselves, are self-aware,'' he muses, but I didn't care enough to make those changes. I wasn't using them for cathartic purposes.
''
He has since moved to Los Angeles, having lived at home in Chicago with his parents until his mid-20s.
Was that a wise move?
Well, you have a fling with a city,'' he says, and then you kind of slow down.
'' (During the fling period he was photographed about town with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson.)
People don't want to write about you hanging around in the backyard with your dog. I totally get that; I wouldn't want to read that story either.
''
A key problem for Wentz seems to have been his burgeoning status as a lust object: a fantasy come true on the one hand, but not brilliant, on the other (as when nude shots of him appeared on the internet last year), for someone with self-esteem issues.
People come up and shake hands, and they're like, 'Oh my God, you're so hot','' he sighs. Well, that's just how your parents had you.
I mean, you want to look attractive to yourself, but I feel like I'm kind of a weird-looking dude.''
At the show later that evening, Wentz pirouettes, preens and pouts, and the concentration of held-aloft camera phones at his side of the stage is telling.
You're licking guitars and you hear people screaming,'' he concedes of the Fall Out Boy live experience, and you like that because of the showmanship.
But then you think, 'Are you really listening to the words?' You have these 14-year-old girls singing lyrics that are possibly misogynistic and certainly misanthropic: how do you connect those things?''
It's strange: on the page he sounds, as it were, like a bit of a monster, but in person he's manic, for sure, yet he has a vulnerability he can't seem to be bothered to hide.
He suddenly looks like a child.
It's easier to float along,'' he says. Sometimes I know .
.. sometimes I don't.
I'm the most insecure narcissist you'll ever meet.''
Singer and guitarist Patrick Stump, on the other hand, seems perfectly secure. As the vocalist in America's leading emo band, he's content to let Wentz hog the headlines and magazine covers while, as the person who sets the bassist's words to music, he plots a steady, stealthy course away from the jaws of definition that have swallowed many other emo acts.
A self-confessed soul-music nut, the 22-year-old saw Cork Tree's sales figures as a once-in-a-career opportunity to expand Fall Out Boy's base, and grabbed it. The results can be heard, thrillingly, on Infinity on High, which has a complexity and diversity that point, Stump says, to where they want to head. The pop-punk template hasn't been discarded but it was never going to be the whole story, just as their groundings in the hardcore Chicago scene didn't hinder their bid for a broader commercial appeal.
You can look like a sure thing and totally disappear,'' he says from beneath his ever-present baseball cap. For every Norah Jones there is a Jesus Jones. When I look at a lot of rock success, a great many of them have emerged from a genre and moved out of it: the Who were mod, No Doubt were ska, the Police were punk-reggae.
I never really had any problems with the constraints of the emo thing. When I look at My Chemical Romance, us and Panic! At the Disco, who are the three bands on pop radio that get saddled with it more than anybody else, I have the utmost faith that if you give us a good 10 years and we're still in bands, people will have forgotten about that.
''
He's happy, too, to be at the forefront of those pushing towards new frontiers in terms of how music is sold and what the relationship between band and fan means.
Somehow the music industry has evolved into this thing where you have musicians and writers and fans, who really like playing and composing and listening, and an industry that is basically built to prevent them from doing that.''
A more direct bond with fans gives a band room for manoeuvre that, in the normal marketing scheme of things, they might otherwise not have.
The thing I think is really scary, when you're a new band, is that if you're too eclectic on your first record, you don't have any identity, but if you're not eclectic enough by your third, you have too firm a one. I certainly thought about that a lot before making the new album. You know, let's sow the seeds for that now.
''
Stump is in the strange position, nonetheless, of singing words by someone else, in a group he isn't the focal point of. Oh, I'm a frontman for some other band that never happened,'' he deadpans.
Actually, sometimes I think Fall Out Boy are a three-piece: it's Andy, Joe, then Pete and me.
''
Things are calming down, though, even if the alchemy between lyricist and composer does sometimes still cause sparks.
I am so much more methodical than him,'' Stump says of Wentz, and he's so much more about feel, so we've learned a lot from each other. I've learned to trust instincts now, and he's beginning to make little plans.
He used to be completely off the cuff in everything he did, and now, you know, we have a set list.''
On the video for their single Thnks Fr Th Mmrs, Fall Out Boy poke fun at themselves. The setting is the sound stage for a promo shoot, with chimpanzees playing the parts of director, make-up artists and the like.
The chimps give Wentz a particularly hard time, indicating that he's not up to the job, can't kiss the requisite eye candy right and is an all-round idiot. The video ends with the exasperated bassist smashing his microphone and guitar. It works because, though Fall Out Boy are ahead of the joke, it's only by a whisker.
On the surface, you see, they're a pop-punk outfit that has somehow become America's biggest rock band.
And underneath? Tension, lots of it.
It's there in Wentz's lyrics; in his warring instincts between outreach and evasion; in his fear and his recklessness. It's there, too, in Stump, the emo vocalist who wants to be a soul singer; who can't grab the limelight, though he says he doesn't mind.
Yet Fall Out Boy haven't fallen out.
If they can remain a trio rather than a four-piece, things may just stay that way.
Infinity on High is available through UMA.
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