Rick Howard Jr.

25 Years Later. A note from Patrick: When you’re young, particular ages tend to come with certain milestones. 15: You can get your learner’s permit. 18: You can buy cigarettes if you want. 21: You can break edge without breaking the law (Andy is still edge!). 25, I’d always heard was the age at which you could rent a car. There was a time when I literally couldn’t imagine a life past the age of 21 let alone filling out paperwork at the Hertz counter. 25 just seemed so big and far away…like a distant body in deep space so remote that scientists only speculated about its existence based on the way objects around it moved. That’s certainly how I felt floating out in the zero gravity that is age 17. That was the year Fall Out Boy started. Now somehow the band is itself car renting age. How?! How am I 42? How is my band 25? And even harder to believe is the fact that anyone still wants to listen to our silly little band 25 years on. Maybe the surreality of it all is part of those milestones. It feels simultaneously so recent and yet so intangibly distant thinking of the origins of the band. I say this in no way to disparage the contributions of the great people we had in early incarnations of Fall Out Boy (Especially Ben and Mike; Hope you guys are doing well) but I always felt like the band really started when Andy finally agreed to join a little band over a year into it. So maybe depending on who you ask the “Ted’s Pants,” band gets to celebrate the car-rental age again some time in the middle of 2028. But until then, I’ll remain shocked that the four of us continue to enjoy working together, continue to be the same four guys this whole time (the so-called “Hiatus,” doesn’t count, we were very much still a band then no matter how exciting it is to imagine otherwise). Yet here we are. And if the world gives me another 25 years and perhaps another 25 after that, hopefully I will have spent as much of it as possible in the band from that one joke in the It’s Sunny/Abbott Elementary crossover. I couldn’t imagine a life past 21; Let’s see what milestones await the band beyond the cold orbit of social security collection eligibility age.