Idol Chatter

Image credit: Pete Wentz: George Chin/WireImage.com

WENTZ: I was watching South Park maybe a year or two ago, and I remember thinking, That might actually be Robert Smith's voice! But I wasn't sure. I thought it was amazing, because these are two things that I really love, but I remember thinking, This is an arena that I would never see Robert Smith in. That was you, right?

SMITH: Yeah. It's weird because I had only seen a couple of the early South Parks. [Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone] sent me a couple of episodes on video and I pissed myself laughing. I stayed up all night and went into this radio station and recorded my words down a phone line. I had no idea what it was all about. I had one of them on the other end of the line directing me, saying, ''Please sound more like Robert Smith. Come on!'' About six months later I saw it and I was completely thrown by what they had done with it. It was great. When I'm walking off and Stan's saying, ''Disintegration is the best album ever,'' it's one of my greatest moments in life.

WENTZ: Over the years I've always found myself sending people that I loved Cure songs, because they are love songs, but many of them are from such a different perspective — like ''Why Can't I Be You,'' which borders between love and obsession. When you play the older songs now, do they still mean the same thing as they did when you first wrote them? Or do you think, ''That was a snapshot of my life 10 years ago and I don't really feel the same way anymore''?

SMITH: When you're on stage, the real world just drops away for that time. It's pretty intense. Sometimes I'll pick a couple songs we haven't done for a while just so that I can relive that moment... and with most of them, I'm taken back to that time and that place. It can be quite odd, at the end of that song, to suddenly snap back into reality and think, ''S---, that was 20 years ago.''

WENTZ: You've had giant pop hits and these cult favorites. Did it bother you at times when certain songs would be gigantic?

SMITH: We had such an awful long time to get well known. [When] it happened, though, I found it very uncomfortable. For a long time, I didn't like certain songs because I thought, ''You're to blame, you bastard. You made me popular.''

WENTZ: Like ''Friday I'm in Love''?

SMITH: Yes, that's a perfect example. We did an album in '96 [Wild Mood Swings] and we had a song on there called ''Mint Car'' — it was the single, and I thought it was a better song than ''Friday.'' But it did absolutely nothing because we weren't the band at that time. The zeitgeist wasn't right. It taught me that sometimes there's a tipping point, and if you're the band, you're the band, even if you don't want to be, and there's nothing you can do about it.