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They say anxiety is built-up energy, so I keep moving. Past men selling street food from plastic carts, past women laughing too loudly on fire escapes, past prayers spoken in languages I don’t know but feel anyway. I move with the city, through it, inside of it.

I want it all—the noise, the hunger, the overlapping lives—to take what’s broken inside of me and remind me that broken isn’t quite the same as the dreadful feeling of empty.

I want to know you. And you. And him. And her. The vendor counting change with tired hands, the kid with headphones too big for his head, the elder waiting for the light to change, the woman walking her poodle, the man in the trench coat who smells like cigarettes and rain. I want their minds to brush against mine, to collide, to leave something behind.

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Let’s Talk About Patrick Stump’s Solo Career: Soul Punk Is An Underrated Classic

Patrick Stump of the pop-punk band Fall Out Boy is my favorite vocalist of all time. I’ve had to think about that for many years, because there are tons of amazing singers out there from all genres. Rob Halford, Sam Cooke, Frank Sinatra, and many more are great singers, but Patrick Stump has always stuck out to me. His voice started off relatively rough around the edges on their early material, but you can hear the makings of a killer vocalist on 2003’s Take This To Your Grave. Throughout the next few years, his vocals would get better and better. They would finally culminate on 2007’s Infinity On High and 2008’s Folie A Deux, where he could show the world that he’s the best pop-punk vocalist and his vocals were frankly better than the genre. That’s why when Fall Out Boy went on hiatus in 2009, Stump pursued a solo career that a lot of people were somehow surprised by, but they shouldn’t have been surprised if you were paying attention – R&B, soul, and funk. Fall Out Boy’s last couple of albums before their hiatus had traces of R&B, soul, and funk, but Stump’s solo career went full-fledged into it. I wanted to talk about Stump’s brief solo career, because I’ve been going back to some Fall Out Boy records, and his solo material is something I haven’t heard in a long time. I just talked about 2008’s Folie A Deux, as well as posted a ranked episode of their albums that’s updated for the year of our lord 2025, but I kind of wanted to post retrospectives of almost everything. I’ve talked about Infinity On High a million times, so I don’t know if I’ll talk about that one again, but I’ve got From Under The Cork Tree, Save Rock & Roll, So Much (For) Stardust, and Take This To Your Grave left to talk about.

Stump’s solo career is also incredibly interesting, because people were not receptive to it whatsoever, despite his debut solo album, Soul Punk, being one of my favorite pop records of all time. I haven’t listened to Soul Punk in quite a long time, but I’ve been going back to it recently, and it’s a killer record. Soul Punk is also a severely underrated record, but I don’t think fans were ready for a Patrick Stump solo album. Fans already hated Folie A Deux for some reason, and I still haven’t figured out why. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t a pop-punk record, but Infinity On High wasn’t, either. I think that album had just enough of their older sound to appease fans, but Folie A Deux went fully into pop-rock. Soul Punk, unfortunately, went further into pop, soul, R&B, and funk, and people just didn’t like it. Stump got so much backlash at solo shows, he eventually disappeared for a year out of the public eye, and penned a scathing blog post towards fans in which he said, “they liked him better fat.” It’s such an ugly display from fans, but like with Folie, fans have come around to the album. There’s a lot to really love and appreciate on this record, whether it’s Stump’s vocals, the lyrics, the instrumentation, or the production, especially because he did it all himself. This is a 100% self-made record. The only guest spot on the album is Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco on a remix of lead single “This City.” I had never heard his verse until recently, because I decided to check out the deluxe edition of the album, and it’s okay, frankly. It’s a very simplistic verse from him, especially compared to his usual fare, but it wasn’t half bad. The rest of the album, however, is all Stump. He wrote, produced, and played on the record all by himself.

Because Stump is a producer and multi-instrumentalist, I’m not surprised that the instrumentation and production is fantastic here. This album is so full-bodied, and nothing gets overshadowed by anything else. You can hear his vocals just as well as the instrumentation, but I love it. The most interesting part of this album are his lyrics, because Stump was never a lyricist in Fall Out Boy. That was Pete Wentz, the band’s bassist, and he has such a unique and distinct lyrical style, but do Stump’s lyrics reach the same level of cleverness, memorability, and uniqueness? No, but he has a different writing style that’s a lot more direct, earnest, and straightforward, all the while still being memorable and enjoyable. Songs like “Dance Miserable,” “The ‘I’ In Lie,” “Run Dry,” and “Coast (It’s Gonna Get Better)” are pretty straightforward tracks, but the lyrics are very earnest and heartfelt. They express ideas that people can relate to, whether it’s sobriety, unfaithfulness, depression, or just staying positive. This record is also insanely catchy, as Stump has an ear for melody. He always has, especially with Fall Out Boy; albums like Folie A Deux and Infinity On High have some of their best melodies, but even on their post-hiatus material, a lot of their melodies are relatively strong.

While I like a lot of the melodies on 2013’s Save Rock & Roll and 2015’s American Beauty / American Psycho, 2018’s M A N I A and 2023’s So Much (For) Stardust have some of their strongest hooks, especially in the latter. So Much (For) Stardust is their best album since Folie, and it’s in my top three of Fall Out Boy albums because it reminds me so much of Infinity On High and Folie. It has that pop-punk spirit, but it also has the R&B, soul, and funk sounds that Patrick really liked back in 2007 / 2008, and it modernizes it for 2023. I just really love Soul Punk, because I had wanted a solo record from Patrick for years, but the one we got was a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t really listened to pop music at the time, but I credit this record and Michael Jackson’s Thriller with getting me into pop music. I first got into music at an interesting time, because pop music was in a weird place. The club boom was happening, and artists were making really generic, boring, and uninteresting dance-pop that appealed to the lowest common denominator. As a teenager at the time, it just didn’t interest me, so I had to go back into the past to get more into pop music. Patrick Stump’s Soul Punk was a perfect glimpse into the past, but still being modern and new at the same time. If anything, I think this album has aged like fine wine, because it has an 80s pop, R&B, and soul aesthetic that The Weeknd co-opted just a few years ago on Dawn FM, so I think Stump was ahead of his time in being influenced by Michael Jackson, Prince, and the like.

I also went ahead and listened to the deluxe edition of Soul Punk, because I had never listened to the bonus tracks before, and while I can see why they’re bonus tracks, I still really enjoyed them. It was just great to hear Patrick on his own for once, but you can’t deny the magic that the four members of Fall Out Boy share when they make music together. It was still cool for Patrick to make a solo record, and out of the solo work that the members put out during their hiatus, Soul Punk is my favorite. I will say, though, that drummer Andy Hurley and Joe Trohman had a heavy metal band with members of Anthrax and Every Time I Die called The Damned Things, and that was a close second. Their debut from 2010 is an absolute banger of a record, and their follow-up in 2019 was pretty solid, too. Soul Punk is easily my favorite of the solo projects that the band put out when they were separated, but it’s an underrated masterpiece, nonetheless. Like with Folie A Deux, I don’t know why people hated this so much. Maybe it was since this was unashamedly a pop record, but why is that a bad thing? I think fans were so used to the band putting out pop-punk stuff, they didn’t like the fact that they were moving forward and moving out of that scene. Some bands can make it work by playing the same type of music throughout their whole careers, such as Blink-182, New Found Glory, and some other mainstays of the scene, but Fall Out Boy were a cut above the rest by wanting to expand and experiment. Sure, their post-hiatus material is very much pop-rock and even leans into Imagine Dragons-level arena-rock / pop-rock by American Beauty / American Psycho, it was different and not just retreading the past. So Much (For) Stardust was a great culmination of everything they did prior to that, even including some of Soul Punk, but Soul Punk itself is such a great record, and it’s criminally underrated, even 14 years later.