Sometimes when people say that a concert or a band changed their life, they’re exaggerating. When I say that Fall Out Boy’s performance at Wrigley Stadium in June 2023 changed my life and led me directly to where I am right now, writing this article, I’m telling you the absolute truth.

Before that show in June, I’d had a rough couple of years of personal setbacks. While I won’t bore you with the details, I’d completely lost touch with most of my creative passions, and I was struggling desperately to find any kind of purpose or inspiration. I wasn’t making anything creative, I still wasn’t really seeing anyone outside of my family – I’d given up on a lot of my dreams and settled into a soul-sucking job that could pay my bills in the hopes that eventually something would just come to me.

I bought my tickets to the Wrigley show with a friend I’d met online who I’d been to a festival with the previous fall. I’d only recently started going back to concerts in 2022, and Wrigley was going to be the biggest show I’d been to in at least a decade. I was nervous, but excited – seeing Fall Out Boy in Chicago had been on my bucket list ever since I was a teenager, and getting to see them with The Academy Is… opening was really a dream come true.

I spent my months before the show waiting impatiently and planning – which was how I found out online that other fans were planning to make bracelets. While I hadn’t made a friendship bracelet since high school, I thought it might be a fun way to meet new people in line and strike up conversations. I bought a bunch of plastic pony beads and made around 20 bracelets for that first show, with no idea if anyone else would follow through or even want the bracelets I had to offer.

The day of the show, my friend and I got in line around 10 AM, about six hours before doors.

Those six hours were the most fun I had ever had in line for a show.

The joy in the air was palpable. People who lived nearby offered us water and food, hyper aware of how hot it was in the summer sun. I successfully traded bracelets in line, and even gave some of mine away as more people joined in and saw everyone trading. Some folks brought their bracelet-making materials with them, and we sat in circles, bonding over bead choices and the jokes and lyrics we chose for our bracelets.

Somehow, in just the span of six short hours, a small but undeniable community formed right there in line. Everyone looked out for each other – and in fact, some of the people I met in that line are still my friends to this day.

When the time came, we all made it into the venue safely, and we got to enjoy incredible opening performances from Royal and the Serpent and The Academy Is…

In the moments before FOB took the stage that night, I was giddy with excitement and incredibly curious about what this first show on the tour would bring. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what might be on the setlist, but the first show of a new tour means there’s always room for uncertainty.

Myself and several other people I traded bracelets with in line had all decided, since it was Pride Month, to make rainbow bracelets for “GINASFS” — a b-side from Fall Out Boy’s 2007 album Infinity on High. GINASFS had never been played live, and none of us making the bracelets had any reason to believe it would happen that night — but we all thought it would be fun or funny or just incredible if it did happen, so we’d all traded our bracelets and made our little jokes.

I didn’t actually think GINASFS was going to be on the setlist. Mostly, I was hoping they would play another one of my favorite songs, “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet.” I had seen them play it in 2009, but it had been dropped from their setlists for a number of years in between. If I could just hear that one song again, frankly, I thought the trip to Chicago would be worth it. Honestly, even before Fall Out Boy started, I felt like it already was.

I still have a video of the moment the lights went down, and “The Pink Seashell” started to play. Ethan Hawke’s monologue from Reality Bites is set to a beautiful musical score, the lights pulse in tandem, and you can hear as the excitement in the audience starts to reach its peak. Murmurs turn to whoops, which turn into screams. Then the instrumental introduction for Love From the Other Side starts, the band comes out one by one, the lights come up with a literal bang from the pyrotechnics — and my life was never the same.

There’s a moment from my video that truly captures it — “Love From the Other Side” was the lead single from So Much (for) Stardust, so I had more time to listen to it, but even after the rest of the album came out, it was still my favorite song. It was my most listened-to song of the year in 2023 by a landslide, and I knew it would blow me away live — but as the fireworks timed to the drum beats at that first show, and the strings on the track came to a crescendo — I started to jump up and down, and I laughed. I laughed, I still remember so clearly, because I was so completely and utterly stunned by how much fun I was having. Literally right out of the gate, from the moment the band actually started to play, I was filled with a delight I hadn’t felt at a show in years. I felt like a kid again. I felt like I was ten years old at a birthday party watching a magician with no idea how any of the tricks worked — I was awestruck. It was wondrous. So I laughed.

What followed was a show that never once let up. Every song sounded incredible. Throughout the setlist were scattered older songs that I had been dying to hear for years, and those were accompanied by backdrop changes and pyrotechnics, a flamethrower bass, giant spinning seashells, bubbles, and a giant inflatable dog puppet that I spent several minutes convinced had to be a hologram before Pete walked to the back of the stage and dropped his bass to start moving it around. There was even a real magic trick that involved Pete disappearing from on top of the piano and reappearing in the audience — in that first show, only about a foot or two away from me, down in the area between the barricade and the stage.

The production value was incredible, the songs all sounded amazing — and then the Magic 8 Ball came up on screen.

I think it’s hard now that the Magic 8 Ball segment has become such a known element of Fall Out Boy’s show to really drive home how mysterious it was at first. None of us knew what the purpose really was — if it was just like the magic trick or the dog puppet or another fun element of the stage production. None of us  (not even the band themselves) knew exactly what that 8 Ball would come to represent and how much it would change the way we all interacted with the shows. Pete asked it a few questions and we all laughed, only a little curious. Most of us, I think, expected a song from the new album when he teased that they’d be playing a song they’d never played live before.

Then, instead, Fall Out Boy played “G.I.N.A.S.F.S.”

I’ve heard tales of how everyone who found out online reacted that night, but I can only attest to the reaction in the pit — which was that everyone went absolutely insane. I started the video on my phone so quickly that somehow I didn’t even miss the first line of the song, so the screams are still ongoing while the guitar intro plays. As the crowd shouts the first line in tandem, many of us (myself included) are shrieking or crying so loudly we’re barely in a recognizable pitch, because we’re singing mostly out of muscle memory. It’s a song we all know like the back of our hands, a song we all made and traded bracelets for, but being there for the first live performance seemed like a completely unattainable dream, and then suddenly it was a dream we were all living–together.

Once “G.I.N.A.S.F.S.” was over, I went through the encore mostly in daze, which is probably how I missed Pete Wentz running directly to my section of the barricade until he was right in front of me. He grabbed my hand and hopped up, and then suddenly the crowd pressed in around me as “Saturday” played on.

When the show ended, I knew I was different. Something had changed.

Pete gave a speech at that first show that he proceeded to refine and give a few different versions of all through that first tour, but that first version really hit me, and it never left my brain.

He compared living in the day to day world as living in a game of the “The Floor is Lava.” You can stand on the furniture to stay out of the lava, but you don’t get anywhere that way. You’re stuck on the couch, and eventually maybe you want food or a drink or even just to not be on the couch anymore — so probably mostly through the minds of exhausted parents, “lava boots” were invented. When the floor is imaginary lava — you can put on your imaginary lava boots and walk through the lava to get where you need to go, and they’ll protect you.

In the metaphor, the miserable parts of everyday life are the lava. And making things, making art and being creative, in Pete’s case, making music with his friends — these things are the lava boots. These are the things that protect us from the not-so-imaginary lava, the existential dread that would drag us down.

Lava boots became a kind of shorthand for a lot of us. Even though he stopped using the lava boots metaphor, Pete kept talking about the same idea on the second leg of tour and even at festival shows — that our creative pursuits are what keep us going and give us purpose. That making things is what makes the world worth living in — and I realized he was right. In my dead-end office job, out of ideas, that was exactly what I needed to hear.

I didn’t know, in June 2023, exactly what I wanted to make or do, but I knew then — I needed to keep following the joy I felt at that show wherever and however I could, and I needed to get back to making things.

I made over 150 bracelets on the first leg of Tourdust, and I’ve made over 500 now for various Fall Out Boy shows. I’ve gotten back into writing, I’ve started making beaded necklaces and keychains as gifts for my friends, I’ve created costumes and just DIY pieces of clothing or beadwork to wear to shows – and I can trace it all back to those first 20 plastic beaded bracelets in line at Wrigley Stadium. I wouldn’t have finished this article and you wouldn’t be reading it if it wasn’t for the friends that I’ve made all spiraling out from that first show  – so yes, just on a surface level it was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to – but it is also the show that completely changed my life, and I can never forget that.