Nevertheless, for the first 15 minutes, all the musicians wanted to talk about was how, the morning after the Grammys, they managed to catch a short performance by the Police during the press conference announcing that band's summer reunion tour.

"That was unbelievable -- the best thing ever!" 22-year-old guitarist Joe Trohman gushed.

"Joe, [drummer] Andy [Hurley] and I somehow snuck into the line for that press event, and there was [Roots drummer and R&B producer] ?uestlove standing there, so we said to him, 'Come with us!' " recalled singer Patrick Stump, also 22. "None of us were even supposed to be in there, but somehow we got to stand right in front of the stage, and no one came to kick us out. Afterwards, we were eating dinner with ?uestlove, and he was like, 'Wow, man! I can't believe we did that!' And we were like, 'No kidding! But we can't believe we're sitting here with ?uestlove, either!' "

Of course, it isn't all glitz and glamour. "Yeah, but we also went to the Clive Davis [Grammy] party the other night," Pete Wentz reminded his bandmates. "We didn't have enough money for the valet, so we parked four blocks away. We rolled in wearing hoodies, and we didn't stop to think that it was a black-tie event. They let us in, because we bombarded our way through the red-carpet people. But it wasn't long after that that we got asked to leave."

Leave it to the band's 27-year-old bassist, lyricist, designated heartthrob and perpetually brooding poetic soul to keep things in perspective. The four members of Fall Out Boy may now be superstars, with Wentz by far the most recognizable. But one of their charms is that they still have the aura of scrappy punks who've crashed a party where they don't belong, and part of their appeal is that they're taking fans with them.

The story goes that the band didn't have a name when it played its first gig, and it asked the audience to provide one. Somebody shouted "Fallout Boy," after an inside joke on "The Simpsons," where the character is the sidekick of a superhero called Radioactive Man. It stuck, and the quartet recorded its first thoroughly generic and generally lousy album in 2003, "Fall Out Boy's Evening With Your Girlfriend."

Stump was still playing rhythm guitar at the time, and the debut featured a different drummer. The group now erases that disc from its history by saying that the band didn't really start until Hurley came onboard for the second album, "Take This to Your Grave," issued later in 2003.

Here, the Fall Out Boy sound as we now know it began to take shape, with hard-driving rhythms and melodic, anthemic choruses distinguished by Stump's rich baritone and Wentz's witty and literate lyrics. The wordy puns and metaphors are what prompted some critics to brand the band "emo," but that tag never really fit: Though Wentz can be as dark and overly sensitive as any of emo's bedroom bards, he's always had a piercing sense of humor, and the band boasts more speed, volume and melody than the most rambunctious emo band.

Recorded while Wentz was climbing out of the black hole through therapy, and with cover art depicting a van accident that beset the group during its constant touring, "From Under the Cork Tree" is an album about persevering in the face of trying times. The song "7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen)" stands as the most obvious reference to Wentz's overdose, but it was another tune that hit hardest: "Sugar, We're Goin Down." Both that single and the follow-up "Dance, Dance" peaked at No. 6 on Billboard's singles chart at a time when hip-hop, R&B and dance-pop ruled the Top 40.

"I like proving people wrong," Wentz said as we talked in Smart Bar below Metro. "I remember when the label came to us about 'Sugar, We're Goin Down' -- and it was the same with 'Dance, Dance' -- and they were like, 'This is never going to be a hit. This is never going to cross over into Top 40; people will not be able to understand these lyrics.' "

"We didn't have a plan with 'Sugar, We're Goin Down'; it was just a song we liked," Stump said. "We didn't have a plan with 'Dance, Dance; I just really dug that song. So when those records did as well as they did, it was really kind of scary in that all the sudden, people had all of these expectations from us."

"I treated this record like some people treat college: I never wanted to leave, because the rest of it seemed too much like the real world," Wentz confessed. "I kind of got caught up in an Axl Rose thing, where I wanted to keep recording and recording, changing it and changing it. At some point, you have to walk away and say, 'This is the snapshot of a moment; it doesn't have to be your last record or your best record, it's just a snapshot of a moment.' But that was a really hard thing for me to come to grips with."

Nevertheless, Fall Out Boy didn't shy away from taking chances. While most of "From Infinity on High" was produced by Neal Avron, who'd crafted the hits on the preceding disc, the band also reached out to an unlikely collaborator for two tracks, working with superstar R&B producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds.

"I'll tell you the most insane thing: I walk in the door and there's the platinum record from 'The Bodyguard' soundtrack on the wall with, like, 24 million copies sold," Stump said. "I thought I should just turn around and walk out again. This past year has been full of moments where we would walk into places and wait to get kicked out!"

But the band stayed; Edmonds became a fan -- "Patrick is one of the baddest dudes I've seen in a long time. ... He has a great voice, very soulful" the producer said of Stump in Rolling Stone -- and the result was an album that builds on the familiar pop-punk anthems of the past by adding more subtle and nuanced dance grooves, as well as unlikely touches such as strings, horns, grand piano and even a snippet of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

"At this point," Stump said, "I'm much more confident singing his words, because I know that he spent a lot more time on them than I would if I was singing my own words. I'm a rhythm man -- I play drums, that's what I know -- and I know that he doesn't give me words unless he's thought them out. So I don't have to think about that, I can just sing and come up with a melody, and at this point, that's second nature for me. If there is anything I'm really unsure about, I'll tell him about it. But I think we're at a point where there hasn't been a lot that we've turned down from each other."

"We're both like clockmakers who do different parts of the clock," Wentz said. "I don't tell him how he does his job, and vice versa. We have that sense of things with each other, and I don't have that with other people."

"I look at who I am in the mirror and I'm like, 'Dude, it's insane that we have a No. 1 record!' "

Wentz said. "I know who we really are: 'S---ty dudes from the suburbs of Chicago.'"

"Right!" Stump laughed. "That was the first thing that dawned on me when I saw that text message: 'The dudes from Arma Angelus have a No. 1 record? What?' You could have not possibly picked less likely dudes in the world to have ended up ... here, where we are. We're as surprised as you are."