Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

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Egan: The morning of the VMAs, I remember thinking we had no shot of winning. It was Dashboard, the Strokes, the Hives, and Norah Jones, all nominated in the same category, for the MTV2 award. Egan: Man, it was exhausting. I can’t imagine what Chris and all the kids were going through. We had to do every song multiple times: a string would break, a bad camera angle, or maybe a camera would fall over. And Chris is a perfectionist; if he didn’t feel the song was right, he’d say we need to do it again. Carrabba: At award shows, they stage a camera near you. I was really aware of the camera. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I remember them announcing the names of the nominees, which included the Strokes and Norah Jones. Norah was sitting not far from me, and I could see the camera on her. The Strokes were a couple rows behind me.

Would recommend to anyone who listened to music from this genre and era. If you didn't, you might not get as much out of it - I would recommend at least familiarizing yourself with some of the key players first. I fully intend on purchasing and rereading some day. <3Greenwald: Alex Coletti was a major voice and tastemaker at MTV. Alex saw Chris live, understood it, and was the person inside MTV championing him. Finally, it's from the perspective of one person who had the help of his networks and whoever could be leveraged to be available for the book, so it won't include everyone, I imagine. It's the people who are willing to talk. If you could include one more song on this list that’s sort of from outside of the timeline of your book, from 2009 to present. What would be the one song, or some of the primary contenders for songs that keep the emo flame burning in the years since? This was truly a behind-the-scenes look at everything that went on in the emo/pop-punk scene during my formative years. I love that this is presented in a real oral history format, with pieces of interviews with SO many people interspersed with one another to give multiple perspectives on each event and phase. Sometimes books like this set high expectations and read just like a really long magazine article synthesized to make the author's point, but this felt more like a retrospective documentary. So many of the artists and other involved in the scene really opened up and this was at times funny, at times informative, and at times eye-opening.

Adkins: It was a frog-boiling-in-water situation. We didn’t realize how big it was getting until much later. None of my complaints about the book are any fault of Chris Payne's and I think he did a fabulous job assembling the heavy hitters of the emo scene. There are plenty of delightful and nostalgic anecdotes in this book, and an overall enjoyable read for any former or current emo kid 3I would be so interested to read more about how this book got made, because it seems like such a massive undertaking and I cannot imagine the work that went into weaving all these interviews together. Overall, I thought this format worked well, and once I got into the rhythm of the book I didn’t have too hard of a time following things. There were some moments where it almost felt like the wrong people were being interviewed. But at the same time, I understand that not everyone is going to have the time (or desire) to be part of a project like this, so given that I think the author did the best they could creating a cohesive story.

Greenwald: The kids who filled the studio at 1515 Broadway that day were essentially the same kids who’d been at CBGB. His people came with him. Cohen: That Jimmy Eat World album got the lead review in Rolling Stone. One of the main talking points was that they played Tom DeLonge’s wedding. Like, that’s their peg? Okay! This was before “The Middle” was big. This was the first thing that made me aware that Jimmy Eat World could be a big deal. Chris Carrabba (front person, Dashboard Confessional): This is when things really started to snowball for Dashboard. When people started to have a real sense of community. Rich Egan (co-founder, Vagrant Records; manager, Dashboard Confessional): When The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most came out in March 2001, we had no setup for it, just because we had to rush it out. We sold 2,500 records the first week. Most records in their second week drop off 70 percent. This went up. It got to about 2,550. And it just stayed there for a year. I remember it was right around a year later when the record hit the 100,000 mark. The kids loved Chris. It wasn’t a press-created thing. The press was reacting to the cultural shift. He was unlike anything before him in our scene. I think people of a certain age. I think maybe people who were seniors in high school in ’02. To them, stuff like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy is maybe something else – it’s a little too pop – and they see emo as being more in touch with punk. Which, y’know, Dashboard is.

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How much of it with Deja Entendu and the unique place that this album holds with fans of this moment is that like, it was about as big as it could get without really crossing over? It feels like an iconic release of its time period, but there were no real hits off the album, it didn’t make it into that larger consciousness – Jesse Lacey wasn’t a pop star – does it feel like kind of the biggest thing that emo kids can still say is entirely theirs? This song was huge. Got huge in a really unlikely way. It was on their album The Papercut Chronicles, which basically sounds like The Roots but emo. It came out just before Fall Out Boy became superstars, in early ’05. And then it was one of those things where the scene gets bigger, Fall Out Boy –who had discovered and put on Gym Class Heroes — they get way bigger. So there’s a bigger platform for their follow-up album. But it’s this old song that catches on with radio. But yeah, you were talking about the river as this separator — and despite how close the suburbs and New York City were, it really does feel like two different worlds in terms of what held influence. And also, some of it was bands who played all-ages shows, stuff that was accessible to kids in the suburbs, versus bands in New York City who played 18+ or 21+ shows. And also it was expensive and took a lot more time than you would think to get to a show in the city at like, Webster Hall or Mercury Lounge, if you were coming from the middle of New Jersey. It's also absolutely wild to read about these bands, who perceive themselves as outside of mainstream, as the counterculture, have rooted origins in just that and eventually becoming part of it. Truly fascinating, honestly, especially the anecdotes about meeting other huge artists of the time - p. 390 or so theres Pete talking about being friends with Christina Milian, and also about knowing Kim K., which is just a weird thing to read about because you can't fathom it? Winning awards at shows and attending alongside and interacting with Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Eminem LIKE? Hard to process for me, and I'm just here reading about it. Arguably, the "emo" label does not cover all of the bands discussed and dissected, and that's completely fair. I'm even inclined to agree! The unifying theme of the book, though, is told with emo's rise as the umbrella, and detailing every excruciating minutiae of genre blends would take away from what this is. It's difficult to make a comprehensive account of anything, much less music, art, and pop culture.

Adkins: We played at Tom DeLonge’s wedding reception. It was a surprise for Tom. He seemed stoked! We played “Episode IV” from Static Prevails, “Call It in the Air,” “If You Don’t, Don’t” from the new record, and probably “Sweetness.” Pryor: Dashboard is its own thing. It’s a unicorn. Chris’s trajectory doesn’t follow any norms you read about in music autobiographies. It’s just a phenomenon. Greenwald: It felt like a rubber band: How far could you stretch this music, which was predicated on a very intimate connection between performer and audience? Could you stretch it around the whole country? Could you stretch it around the whole world without something essential snapping? What happens when a subculture goes mainstream?and eminem starting up a conversation with chris from dashboard confessional and talking about the band and rattling off songs and asking about future projects and then being like “you got a sister, what’s her name” and signing a napkin for her....also legend behavior. Wood: Dashboard was a cultural moment. But in terms of radio, “Screaming Infidelities” did not get that kind of airplay.