Chris Payne Interview
Chris Payne is the author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008. Chris worked for Billboard from 2013 until he was laid off in 2020 during the pandemic. Soon after, he began work on the book.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
It all started with this local New Jersey paper The Home News Tribune—they had a weekly teen section called Teen Scene that I wrote for in high school. Teen Scene had monthly after-school meetings at the paper’s office in New Brunswick, which is where I first learned to pitch stories. I started with general interest stuff (including a trend piece on MySpace in 2004!) and eventually became the music reviews guy (my first was Death Cab For Cutie's Plans).
At the College of New Jersey, I actually started off as a journalism major but switched majors a couple months in. I wasn’t really connecting with my Journalism 101 class because I was really interested in writing about culture and writing for the internet, and this class was all about like, CNN and reading All the President’s Men. Also, I was really young for a college freshman (still 17, December birthday whuddup) so I feel like I was a little in-over-my-head and idealistic.