Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

Where Are Your Boys Tonight? is a music-journalism oral history of the mid-2000s emo boom, when bands like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Paramore moved from regional scenes into the mainstream. Author Chris Payne, a former Billboard staff writer who came up in that scene himself, draws on new interviews with Pete Wentz, Gerard Way, Chris Carrabba, Jim Adkins, and the journalists, managers, and fans around them.

The book follows the genre from New Jersey basements and Long Island VFW shows through the rise of MySpace and Tumblr fan communities, covering acts such as Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, Thursday, Lifetime, and Taking Back Sunday alongside the scene's biggest breakout names.

It also engages critically with the culture around the music: a genre that leaned on punk credibility while chasing mainstream visibility, that gave young fans - especially young women and LGBTQ+ kids - a language for mental-health struggles, and that wasn't always a safe space for the people who built it.