Patrick Stump: I’m a 27-Year-Old Has-Been
Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump published a long blog entry last night on his personal site in which he laments the commercial failure of his solo album, Soul Punk, and his status as a “has-been” at 27. “Whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again,” he wrote.
Stump’s post is extremely candid and often quite heartbreaking, particularly as he describes being insulted and harassed by his own fans and blowing his nest egg on touring in support of his album, only to find that he “couldn’t get booked at the opening of a letter.” “The barrage of ‘We liked you better fat,’ the threatening letters to my home, the kids that paid for tickets to my solo shows to tell me how much I sucked without Fall Out Boy, that wasn’t something I suppose I was or ever will be ready for,” Stump wrote of his “haters.”
According to Stump, his run of bad luck began when Fall Out Boy’s last album, Folie A Deux, bombed so horribly that fans would boo the band for performing numbers from the record in concert. “Touring on Folie was like being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoods,” wrote Stump.
Stump was quick to point out that Fall Out Boy never broke up, and he said he is open to getting back together once his bandmates complete their own solo projects. The singer hasn’t decided whether he wants to release a follow-up to Soul Punk, and he is reticent about performing in public anytime soon. Yet despite the despairing tone of his post, he’s not entirely pessimistic about his future. “I’ve managed to cobble together some work,” he wrote, noting that he’s been mulling over the possibility of going to school to learn a trade. “I’ve been moonlighting as a professional songwriter/producer for hire, and I’ve even been doing a bit of acting here and there.”