Fall Out Boy Cover & Change The Lyrics To Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire'

Fall Out Boy have sort of covered the Billy Joel classic, We Didn’t Start The Fire, but there’s a catch: they changed the lyrics.

The Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down rockers have left a 2023 update on the track, originally released in 1989, by tinkering with the lyrics to apply global events from 1989 until now onto their version.

Referencing everything and everyone from Rodney King, Harry Potter, Twilight, deep fakes, Kurt Cobain and Tiger Woods, the modern take on a Billy Joel classic everyone is surprisingly effective.

Vocalist Patrick Stump said about Fall Out Boy’s version in a statement: “I thought about this song a lot when I was younger. All these important people and events – some that disappeared into the sands of time – others that changed the world forever. 

"So much has happened in the span of the last 34 years – we felt like a little system update might be fun.”

You can check out Fall Out Boy’s new version of We Didn’t Start The Fire – and find the updated lyrics – below.

At the time of writing, Billy Joel hasn’t responded to the cover.

In other recent Fall Out Boy news, the US pop-punk outfit will feature on a tracklist that includes Paramore's Hayley Williams on Taylor Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).

Last month, Fall Out Boy guitarist Joe Trohman announced his return to the band after taking a break for his mental health. Trohman's original hiatus announcement recalled Neil Young’s iconic line, “It's better to burn out than to fade away.” But in Trohman’s case, “I can tell you unequivocally that burning out is dreadful,” he wrote.

Trohman briefly departed the group just days after they announced their eighth album, So Much (For) Stardust, in January, released on 24 March. 

Fall Out Boy – We Didn’t Start The Fire lyrics

Captain Planet

Arab Spring

LA Riots Rodney King

Deep fakes

Earthquakes

Iceland volcano

Oklahoma City bomb

Kurt Cobain

Pokémon

Tiger Woods

MySpace

Monsanto GMOs

Harry Potter

Twilight

Michael Jackson dies

Nuclear accident Fukushima Japan

Crimean peninsula

Cambridge Analytica

Kim Jong Un

Robert Downey Jr Iron Man

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

No we didn’t light it but we’re trying to fight it

More war in Afghanistan

Cubs go all the way again

Obama

Spielberg

Explosion Lebanon

Unabomber

Bobbit, John

Bombing Boston marathon

Balloon Boy

War on terror

Qanon

Trump gets impeached twice

Polar bears got no ice

Fyre Fest

Black Parade

Michael Phelps

Y2K

Boris Johnson

Brexit

Kanye West

Taylor Swift

Stranger Things

Tiger King

Ever given suez

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

No we didn’t light it but we’re trying to fight it

Sandy Hook

Columbine

Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice

ISIS

Lebron James

Shinzo Abe blown away

Meghan Markle

George Floyd

Burj Khalifa

Metroid

Fermi paradox

Venus and Serena

Michael Jordan 23

YouTube killed MTV

Spongebob

Golden State Killer caught

Michael Jordan 45

Woodstock ‘99

Keaton Batman

Bush v Gore

I can’t take it anymore

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

No we didn’t light it but we’re trying to fight it

Elon Musk

Kaepernick

Texas failed electric grid

Jeff Bezos

Climate change

White rhino goes extinct

Great pacific garbage patch

Tom DeLonge and aliens

Mars rover

Avatar

Self-driving electric cars

S-S-S-R-Is

Prince and the Queen die

World Trade

Second plane

What else do I have to say?

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

But when we are gone

It will still burn on, and on, and on

And on, and on, and on, and on, and on

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning since the world’s been turning