“The Summer of Like", Petekey, and How Fan Theory Ruined the Love Song
a New Mexico sunset sounds pretty good right about now
“I’m Sorry Every Song’s About You.”
I started writing this article many times and couldn’t figure out how to go through with it. I tried to put it in simple terms to make it clearer to people who were not chronically online or emo as young people, so forgive me if I regress a little back into it.
A few weeks ago, Mikey Way, the bassist of the band My Chemical Romance, played bass for a song at a Fall Out Boy concert.
If you’re thinking “no big deal,” you’re a normal person. Many people (including me) woke up that morning and started screaming at their phones, giddy with delight.
This is probably due to the popular fan theory of a romantic connection between the bassist Way with the bassist and lyricist of Fall Out Boy, Pete Wentz (shorthand, known as Petekey).
For those unfamiliar, there is a theory that Pete Wentz and Mikey Way engaged in a summer-long love affair while their bands performed on the 2005 Vans Warped Tour. Fans have named this summer “The Summer of Like”.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I envy you. You’ve been spared hours of your life on useless web searches and repeated listening of songs to try to find the “deeper meaning” of the lyrics. I wish I could have had my brain at least halfway developed before I started getting invested in the love lives of two adult men.
With our 2023 glasses on, a love affair between two men seems unextraordinary. Literally who cares, right?
Me. I do.
Or, I did.
I was obsessed with the fan theories, I would stay up late nights watching hour-long lecture videos on the topic and reading pages on pages of archived LiveJournal posts. I was a preteen, barely aware of my feelings, completely raptured by the alluring aura of a secret romance. I was a child. Why was it so enthralling?
Was the tantalizing tale of two young hot bassists in some way making my young girl brain go crazy? Was it the decade-spanning hypothetical story of friendship, lust, and “like”? Was every Fall Out Boy song really about a bassist from New Jersey?
I’m not sure.
In retrospect, was the obsession with Petekey creepy?
…yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Let’s just say the theories are real: these two young men engaged in a love affair during Warped Tour in 2005. Cool. Why are we (a very niche but intense group of people) still talking about it?
First, we should get some background based on this romantic speculation.
Pete Wentz, the writer (dare I say, the poet) in the relationship, has a lot of documentation from his perspective. Way, on the other hand, has little to no direct writings from this time. Diaries worth of Wentz’s confessionals and musings can be found online from the summer of 2005. (Talking about this stuff like its archeological evidence is insane.) While these websites have long been forgotten about, you can still read a lot of the posts on archived websites or the iconic Petekey Google Doc, if you care to do so. There’s also this fantastic lecture.
Wentz most famously posted on the site LiveJournal describing the fact that he is “totally back in love” after spending the night looking at an “amazing new mexico sunset” with Way. He also frequently posted poems that would later be converted into song lyrics. But how do we know that any of these cryptic (and incredibly embarrassing) writings are about Way?
Let’s take a minute to think about this. Imagine you were in a discreet summer romance 18 years ago. Maybe you couldn’t talk about it through the media since it might have compromised your career as a moderately public figure. Maybe you weren’t even sure what it classified as. But, you can make art about it and write ambiguous messages on your blog. You pour the messages into your work, and since it’s your art it can mean whatever you want. Maybe it is about the romance, maybe not. It’s your art. Sometimes you don’t even know where it comes from.
Then, for years (a length almost as long as your career) people start interpreting your art in a way that elicits an extreme emotional response - causing a deeper interest in you and your work. No matter if it is true or not, would you attempt to refute the claims, or even acknowledge them?
And even in a world where every conclusion that has been jumped by eager fans is 100% true, does it matter in the long run? Does it improve the quality of the art?
I mean, the songs. It’s impossible to improve the quality of Wentz’s LiveJournal posts:
"July 26th, 2005.
lately i’ve been into believing fictional stories like the ones about me and you being happy. they’ve gotta be science fiction cause how else can you have a monster fall in love with a boy with no heart? actually i’m pretty sure you have a heart, but i’m just as certain it’ll never be mine."
The strongest examples of songs in line with the theory are cited as “Bang the Doldrums” and “The Fourth of July”. Yes, unfortunately, I will revert to my fangirl theory self, but I swear it’s okay.
In “Doldrums”, the narrator describes “best friends/ex-friends till the end/better off as lovers”, possibly referencing the fact that Wentz and Way were friends years before the summer and even publically made up nicknames for each other. They started a two-person gang and called themselves “The Sweet Little Dudes”. Later in the song, the narrator states: “I cast a spell over the west to make you think of me/the same way I think of you”. If you’re standing in Chicago, (Wentz’s hometown area), the west would be New Jersey (Way’s hometown area). Is that right? I mean if you stand a certain way, I guess? Okay, even if it’s not directly the correct direction, the act shows how futile the wish of the other person feeling the same is. The narrator has gone as far as turning to mysticism.
In “July”, the narrator describes the person he is singing to as “you are my favorite ‘what if’/ you are my best ‘I’ll never know’”, possibly hinting at the fact that they were never even together, but Wentz yearned for it. Or they never had a chance to be together. They were “fireworks that went off too soon”, they have metaphorically fizzled into the grass, never able to properly be put into the air. They had the fire, but there wasn’t a proper explosion, they weren’t given the privilege to have the spectacle. This is also the song where we derive the pivotal “sorry every song's about you”, a line that has caused many fans to believe that since the song is so obviously about Way, so is the entire Fall Out Boy discography. Even though in my opinion, he does not mean an actual person. I believe he sings about the ideas of all the love that he has lost in his life, whether it be something that he was too scared to pursue or that he once had and lost for whatever reason.
Many people (including myself) might have gravitated to this theory because it puts Wentz at a closer level with his fans. Wentz’s style of writing, especially in the early 2000s, was heavy on hyperbole and emotion (hence, the label of “emo”). One thing in every song (supposedly) written about his relationship with Way is a feeling of something unrequited.
The one thing I know about young people is that they yearn. Or maybe that is just me as a young person. They yearn for people they want and can’t have. Or had once, but never again. Pete Wentz, or the interpreted version of him we get from these snippets of his mind, fucking yearned man he yearned. He was not ashamed of this — he is still writing songs about love that could never be. And his young fans (many of whom had codependent homoerotic friendships at a young age) can relate. I mean, who the fuck hasn’t cast a spell over the West?
Framing Wentz as a fragile man who once had a sweet yearning relationship with another beloved member of the emo community is much easier to digest than a grown man who had his nudes leaked and has made many questionable personal decisions. Way has also had many criticisms and struggles of his own. Romanticizing a long-lost summer love is a willing distraction, especially since Wentz and Way are publically friendly to each other. Why not lean into it? Fans would much rather focus on something that may or may not have happened 18 years ago than accept that their favorite celebrities might not be perfect people.
My favorite thing to come out of this whole situation is Mikey Way’s first MySpace post. In his post introducing what is going on in his life, he wrote: “me and pete wentz aren’t dating. We are both heterosexual males…sort of…maybe…umm…next!”.
He’s being a little playful, or maybe, even he doesn’t know. We don’t know, and the thing is we will only truly know if they both confirm the rumors. But confirming one rumor could open a can of worms.
And really, is assigning personal situations to an artist’s work all that satisfying? Will anyone ever really know the story behind a piece of writing except the person pressing the pen against the paper? And how do we know that there is only one story with every song?
I feel like songwriters have always had this issue when writing love songs or songs of heartbreak, our perverse little brains love when artists are hurt: we want to know when, where, and who did this to them. We want to know every little detail. But that’s not the point of these songs, they’re never about situations, but rather feeling. Art is made to evoke emotion. The songs related to Petekey aren’t my favorite because I believe the story that the pair engaged in a romantic relationship, but because I can relate to the lyrics. I think almost everyone can. I think that’s the point.
As much as I want to believe all of his songs were penned by Wentz as an homage to his former bassist lover, it’s futile to keep guessing. And yes, a bit creepy.
Listen, I’m not saying it’s weird because they are two men. The strange fascination the public has with the specification of art and heartbreak has always confused me.
With the re-recording of Taylor Swift’s albums, we have seen a resurgence of death threats aimed at her more troubling exes. Some of them deserve criticism, but Swift is rerecording these songs to preserve her voice — recontextualizing her work to better suit how she wishes to present herself to the world. She’s not trying to open public wounds, she wants to share her art and her state of mind. She wants her fans to listen to her words and have them connect to them, rather than to connect the dots of her past.
Similar things happened when Olivia Rodgrio released her song "drivers license". The public wants to know why and when and where and, most importantly, who did this to our favorite artists. But, does the song get better once you get the context? Maybe it clarifies some things but it doesn’t make the song inherently better. It’s just like “That makes sense” not like “This is now the best song ever because I know what supposedly happened”. It’s a fantastic song, but it might have been even better if fans didn’t immediately try to look for answers and react to her dating history instead of the artistry of the music.
Have artists lost their ability to express their feeling and create art without fans attempting always to get the “secret meaning”? Do we love artists for their songwriting or do we love the narratives that the public creates around their songs?
Granted, this might be the opposite of the self-deprecating Wentz, who explicitly states in “The Fourth of July” that “my nine to five is cutting open old scars, again and again til I’m stuck in your head”. Does he live off the stories created around his work, or does he truly feel this way? After all these years of songwriting, is all he is trying to do is reach out to a man he once “liked”? Or, is he hyperbolizing for the sake of art? Who can say? People sometimes tell each other things that aren’t true. We tell ourselves things that aren’t true. What is truth in art? Or in life? I fear I’ve gone too far.
So, is it true that “every song” is about Mikey Way? Who knows. I don’t even think Wentz himself does. But that’s the magic of art, isn’t it?
I googled this duo after seeing an Instagram post and this came up as the search result, it didn’t disappoint and I’m truly informed 🫡