Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

A conversation with Chris Payne about his excellent oral history of mainstream emo.

There are already a few books about when emo went mainstream, but Chris Payne’s 2023 oral history, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008, really hits the nail on the head. Released through the Harper Collins imprint Dey Street, it’s told through the perspective of bands, labels, writers, managers, and fans – all from interviews Payne did over the past few years.

I freely admit I had a lot of grievances about emo in the mainstream when it happened. You can read between the lines in the final chapter of my book Post. Some bands I dug, some songs I loved, but I hated many aspects because the overall coverage seemed like a slap in the face to the bands and labels — and especially the underground culture — that came before. 

But Payne’s book helps course-correct the importance of the genre coming from the perspective of someone who digs deep and shares what it was like to be a fan in the early 2000s. Showing the human beginnings of bands like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Midtown, Paramore, Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, and many more, it’s about the people behind the music. 

This book is not an encyclopedia – it’s a lengthy page-turner about the general overview of the scene, with very personal recollections that you can’t get from reading Wikipedia or liner notes.  

I recently chatted with Payne about the book, and he was generous with his story of making this book happen. Where Are Your Boys Tonight? comes out in hardcover on June 6, 2023.

Order the book here.

How did you wind up getting a book deal for this subject?

Good question. I think it’s really important to share stuff about this. The publishing industry is so hard to decipher if you’re not someone who happens to be on the inside of it. When I started working on the book in April of 2020, I had just gotten laid off from Billboard. I was like, “Alright, what am I doing?” I had wanted to do this book for a while, but it wasn’t really attainable when I was at Billboard full-time.

So I started poking around online, seeing what I could find. How-to guides on book proposals, that sort of stuff. I started to put together a proposal and then I just said, “Fuck it, I’m just going to start doing interviews.”

Basically, the route to getting a literary agent – which is the first step in getting this in motion – I started asking people who had had books published that were similar to mine if they could help me out. That is what led to the first two literary agents at major agencies who were interested. Before that, I had been cold-pitching my proposals to a bunch of literary agencies and just getting crickets back. 

A friend put me in touch with Lizzy Goodman, who wrote Meet Me in the Bathroom. I didn’t know her at all. Meet Me in the Bathroom was a huge inspiration for me. She was kind enough to hop on the phone and chat with me for, like, 30-45 minutes. She gave me all this advice, which honestly was so helpful. That phone call was such a big deal for me. She looped me in with a literary agent she knew.

Around the same time, Marissa Moss, who wrote the book Her Country, interviewed me about a Kasey Musgraves show I had covered for Billboard for her book. I asked her, and she was super cool and put me in touch with her literary agent. 

Then the literary agent I ended up going with came out of one of my interviews. 

I had interviewed Matt Galle, whose been MCR and Taking Back Sunday’s booking agent forever. He was like, “You should interview my partner who I’ve worked with forever.” This guy, Mark Marquis, who also worked at this company, Paradigm, at the time. Before we even got to our Zoom chat, he was asking me all these questions about the book. He seemed really interested in the concepts. He told me they had a literary representation agency as part of Paradigm and they could be interested in this. He looped me in with Alyssa Rueben, a literary agent who was at Paradigm at the time. I chatted with her. I wanted to make sure that, because this company also represents some of the big artists in this book, there wasn’t going to be any weirdness or conflict of interest. Fortunately, they were what I was hoping for. They totally got it. They understood the separation of church and state, working with a journalist and working with bands who they represent. I’m really grateful for that. 

I went with Alyssa, and we tweaked the book proposal just a little bit. I had a few too many chapters. We sent it out for auction in early 2021, and I wound up at Dey Street, who couldn’t have been a better home for a book like this. They put out so many great pop culture books, they’ve been in the game for so long, and they did Meet Me in the Bathroom as well. 

As a fellow emo historian, I’m very happy for you. I hope I don’t sound like an old, bitter hag because I had to self-publish my book due to a lack interest at the time, but when your book comes out on a name publisher, it gives the ongoing story of emo a lot more credibility. 

Yeah! I read your book while I was working on it. 

Cool! I appreciate it!

It really helped me fill in the gaps with a lot of the stuff I knew about, but was before my time and stuff I only learned about through Wikipedia pages. 

A direct inspiration that happened early on reading your book was checking out Silent Majority for the first time.

I was so psyched to talk to Tommy [Corrigan], the singer of Silent Majority. He was down for something like this. They’re a band that’s fallen through the cracks, and I’m not sure exactly why. Coming from a celebrated scene – Long Island – and directly influencing Taking Back Sunday, you would think that people would throw their name around a little bit. But there really isn’t much out there, which is such a shame. They just did some reunion shows and they sold out instantly. On Long Island, there is still a fervent following. 

Given your time at Billboard, I imagine you already had a good speaking relationship with a number of the people you wanted to interview for the book. Is that true, or did you have to take another route?

Totally. Although one thing I did learn, once you don’t that @billboard.com email address, it’s a lot harder for people to return your email. [laughs] But being at Billboard on staff for seven years helped immensely with this, being able to talk to some of people who are on the pop industry side of things, like Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy. 

I interviewed Paramore a bunch of times when I was at Billboard, I interviewed Brendon Urie a bunch of times when I was at Billboard. And plenty of people that were below that superstar, emo pop. A lot of these relationships came from an oral history I wrote about the ’05 Warped Tour. Interviewed Underoath and the Starting Line for that. 

The vast majority of the people in the bands were people I interviewed with when I was at Billboard.

I commend you on how you slowly built up the story by getting to know people in New Jersey, like Geoff Rickly and the guys in My Chemical Romance. Also, what is shared is positive in tone. If you get into bitter talk within the first quarter of a book, then it really drags the whole story down. So I wonder, how many oral histories did you read to prepare to write this? Obviously, Meet Me In the Bathroom, but what about Please Kill Me or Live From New York?

I read Please Kill Me and that’s my favorite one. Those core bands – like the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group, the Velvet Underground – the sound of their music has been written and described so many times. Picking up an oral history with so many voices of people who were in the bands and scenesters, the stories are so much more interesting than hearing about what the guitar tones of the Ramones sounded like. 

I tried to bring out the human quality, the often very funny dorkiness of these bands. Please Kill Me told a narrative rather than an encyclopedia. You can only have so many characters in a great narrative. Focus on your characters; bring out those characters. That’s really what I tried to do. 

Another huge one for me was Everybody Loves Our Town, the grunge oral history by Mark Yarm. I love that one for a lot of the same reasons as Please Kill Me. It’s really poetic. It doesn’t feel like reading an encyclopedia or a long Wikipedia entry. Instead of telling the story through album sales or stories everybody has heard before. There are stories about not-famous people’s interactions with Kurt Cobain after a show in early 1991. Things like that feel more like gripping takeaways from the book. 

I also read American Hardcore: A Tribal History. I really enjoyed it. It takes hardcore in the early 80s, which everyone knows was really violent, but the book paints it so poetically. It was so much more dangerous than I ever thought. And it does it with so much detail. 

The stories in the book sound like they were told to someone who experienced this first-hand as a fan and then you sought out a lot of background information. Is that true?

That’s exactly what it was. I grew up in Colonia, New Jersey, which is about 40 minutes north of New Brunswick. I went to school at the College of New Jersey, which is in the Trenton area. Basically, birth through my early twenties, I was extremely Jersey. My high school years were ’02-’06. Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American was the first album I spent my own money on and it changed my life. 

I really got into this stuff in ’03, especially into ’04. Looking back, it’s such a wild time to be a kid into punk rock because the genre was in such a mainstream place then. I knew what vinyl and zines were, but because there was so much mainstream hype surrounding it, it felt like a lot of the roots of it had been ripped away, for better and for worse. I don’t remember many kids my age doing zines. I barely remember any vinyl being sold at shows. What felt exciting was writing for blogs, like Xanga or MySpace. 

You don’t get to choose when you’re born. When I was growing up, it seemed like older music fans made me think I had missed out on all the great bands – and no younger bands could be as good. That’s not the way to pass down music. It’s like that line from Almost Famous: “It’s too bad you missed out on rock n’ roll. It’s over.”

A positive way of spinning that mindset is where living through something – being at the shows, interacting with the fans and the artists – it gives you an experience that can’t be replicated from having it passed down or reading an article. I really value journalism, recollections by those that were there in the moment. 

I remember when I wanted to go to the Warped Tour in 1997, and I kept that in mind when I reviewed Warped Tours in the 2010s. I didn’t want to shit on young people’s experiences at those because I couldn’t relate to some of the main acts. 

In ’07-’09, those were the years when I started to feel old in the sense I could only relate to a handful of token bands that are there for people in their 20s or older. It’s a funny feeling when you feel that for the first time. 

In cutting off the book at 2008, I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t just doing that because that was when I got old and started to dip out. I’ve come to really appreciate bands like Bring Me the Horizon and the Maine. The year 2008 was when that mainstream peak of the music influencing pop culture started to die down. 

That’s where you get people who broadly proclaim emo – in the mainstream sense – “died.” 

Yeah, I think it’s no accident when a lot of the [emo] revival stuff started. 

Were there any subjects or storylines that you had to give up on that because they didn’t fit with the rest of the book, or were they redundant? 

[laughs] The first proposal I drew up had, I think, 71 chapters. [laughs] To answer your question, yes. Some of it was because I didn’t yet have what would constitute a full chapter. Some were melded into one chapter out of two, three, or four. 

Originally there was going to be a chapter about the Vagrant Across America tour. Even though it was important, it seemed like the events weren’t gripping enough to constitute a chapter. There are a bunch of Warped Tour chapters in the book. There was going to be one on the ’07 edition where Katy Perry was on the tour. But it didn’t really come to fruition. 

I thought about doing an entire chapter on “Hey There Delilah.” [laughs] They’re the only band in this whole book that has a Billboard Hot 100 #1 song. The story of how it got big was really stretched out over three years, in a way that didn’t lend itself too well to the book. 

I commend the book for recognizing the importance of a band like Brand New in terms of influence and popularity at the time but not sweeping the horrible things Jesse Lacey did under the rug.

You really can’t tell this narrative without Brand New. I tried my best to lay it out in my intro. I was transparent in saying my goal with this was to describe where and how Brand New drove the narrative of emo’s mainstream explosion without glorifying Jesse Lacey himself. In a lot of ways, that’s almost impossible because Brand New were so uniquely influential in that scene. Through talking to people, beyond me giving the synopsis of the allegations and Lacey’s response to them, the speakers in the book do the job of painting an accurate portrayal of him. 

Brand New was one of my favorite bands. Their following was so cultish and specific it’s hard to put into words. With the appeal of MCR or Paramore, because they got so popular in a more mainstream way in their time, it’s easier to quantify and describe their fandom. Whereas Brand New, you had to be one of those kids who were a regular on AbsolutePunk.net in 2006 to really get it. They had the numbers. They had the massive fandom. But because they were so contrarian, they never had the radio song. They didn’t even do a video for The Devil and God. They retained a lot of mystique when the mainstream emo fizzled. They connected a lot with fans of the emo revival because they never got super glossy and played the pop game. 

I approached this book knowing that Brand New has to be tackled. I really hope I did it in the best way that brings no further pain to those who he hurt. 

Are you hoping to put out more material in the paperback version?

I would love to! I would love for the book to do well enough to necessitate a paperback version. There’s a lot of stuff that was in the interviews that I could have gone more detail in it. Lots of people need to buy [the hardcover]. [laughs]

Check out Chris Payne’s work. Where Are Your Boys Tonight? is available through Dey Street.