Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

An energetic and explosive oral history examining emo’s pop culture takeover from 1999-2008, featuring exclusive interviews with My Chemical Romance’s Mikey Way and Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump, alongside first-hand accounts from music journalist Chris Payne’s interviews with Paramore and Panic! at the Disco.

If Meet Me in the Bathroom traced New York City’s underground indie scene, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? gives the inside story on the turn-of-the-millennium emo subculture that became bigger than anyone thought possible. There was Pete Wentz, the Fall Out Boy leader who launched a litany of scene-stealing bands and preposterous side hustles, and Gerard Way, the wizard behind My Chemical Romance and The Black Parade. Panic! at the Disco and Paramore emerged soon after - a pair of intrepid outsiders who got massive playing by rules uniquely their own. Told from within the scenes that nurtured this big bang, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? follows firsthand accounts of New Jersey basement shows and Long Island VFW hall gigs, where bands like Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, Thursday, the Get Up Kids, Lifetime, and Taking Back Sunday laid the foundation for the explosion of rock’s most polarizing (and addictive) subgenre.

New Jersey native and music journalist Chris Payne experienced much of emo’s mainstream moment from sweaty crowds and mosh pits, and in Where Are Your Boys Tonight?, he reexamines these bands as they come of age within a genre rife with contradictions: avowing punk ethos while walking the VMAs red carpet; building fandoms significantly of young women and LGBTQ+ kids in an environment that was often toxic and unsafe. Set at the unique intersection of regional emo scenes and the rise of worldwide social media communities like MySpace and Tumblr, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? is a deeply personal, uncompromisingly emotional, and occasionally absurd account - featuring interviews with the scene’s biggest bands; journalists like Leslie Simon, Andy Greenwald, and Hanif Abdurraqib; and the producers, managers, and teenage fans who’d go on to redefine the music industry.