Pete Wentz Reflects on Struggle With Fame After Ashlee Simpson Divorce

During that hiatus, Pete was able to focus solely on raising his and Ashlee’s son Bronx, now 14.

“Here’s what it really was: At 31, we’d had all these great years as a band, and then we took time off, and I basically became Mr. Mom,” he said on The Howard Stern Show in 2015. “I had the beard, the flannel shirt. I didn’t know what my identity was. That factored in. When your identity is what you do, it’s hard when you stop doing it.”

But amid his divorce from the “Pieces of Me” singer and the band’s hiatus, Pete confessed he fell into a cycle of depression.

“I think it was a combination of all these factors at once, including being too young,” he told host Howard Stern. “And we were doing this all in the public eye, which as you know, it doesn’t help, because you have people scrutinizing everything you do.”