When Paige Owens was about 10 years old, she told her mom that she wanted to be the editor-in-chief of Alternative Press. And that’s what she did. In 2015, she started out as a freelancer before earning her B.A. in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University in 2016. A year later, she started working at Alternative Press, bringing herself one step closer to her dream. At 25, nearly 15 years after expressing her career dreams to her mom, Paige finally became the editor-in-chief. She did end up leaving Alternative Press in 2021, however, but she eventually “found a new home with my team at idobi Radio, and I absolutely adore them.” At idobi, Paige is the current Editorial & Digital Marketing Director.
It is very clear that Paige has a strong passion for music, to the point where she has made it her whole life. The great thing is that her passion does not need to be contained – it can be spread and shared with the masses, which she has done through her debut book, 500 Essential Pop-Punk Albums. Out now, the book is a deep dive into the genre of pop-punk, giving readers a look at the albums that have made the genre the compelling force that it is today. During our interview, we discussed how the book came together, the albums and artists that might be debated, and what Paige hopes readers will take from the project.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and time.
So, 500 Essential Pop-Punk Albums is your first book, right?
Yes, so this is my first solo book. I was a contributing author with a small group of amazing writers for The Big Book Of Emo Album Covers, and that was released through Alternative Press Books in 2019. And this 500 Essential Pop-Punk Albums is my debut book.
I think I read on your Instagram about how it came together for you, but overall, how did it all start?
Yeah, well, so the great thing about Ruffian Books, which is where my book is released through, is that it’s actually owned and operated and founded by Mike Shea, who was also the founder of Alternative Press, and I was lucky enough to work with him at A.P. He hired me in 2017, and I worked with him until he sold the company in the very end of 2020. I ended up leaving A.P. close-ish to a year later in 2021.
So, in January or February of 2023, we hadn’t seen each other in person in a couple of years, but we had texted and stayed in touch and had chats on the phone and what not, and we decided to get together one night to discuss Ruffian, which was this new venture he was starting. I was coming in as a freelance contracting editor for Mike, and I was going to be helping on other books. Well, that debut book that we started working on with this amazing author Tim Stegall out of Austin, Texas, that book transformed into something way massive, like way bigger than we ever planned it to be… But whilst we were working on that, Mike put his thinking cap on in terms of like well, we still want to create something that’s more accessible because this project we are working on with Tim, it’s 70s punk, and while that’s really great, it’s very niche. He wanted to create something that was very accessible, something that would be able to touch multiple generations of music lovers and music listeners. And from being a pop-punk/emo/scene kid growing up, my expertise typically tends to be in that latter half of what Alternative Press really was, you know, the Warped Tour years, so he came up with this idea for the 500 Essential books.
Why 500?
When we started this, it was not meant to be 500. I think we were gonna do like 250. But then we sat back and looked at what we did with Alternative Press in 2019 with Emo Album Covers, and that was like 200/215 maybe. And we were like, ‘There’s more than that. Why don’t we go all in and see what would happen if we tried to get to 300 albums.’ And we did that, and it was like, ‘Okay, let’s see what happens if we take it up to 400 albums.’ And we did that, and we were like, ‘Okay, well wait, now we just need to round it out. Let’s take it to 500 and just do it!’
So, that was kind of how that came together. It just kept growing. I’m just lucky enough to be able to work with somebody who is so creative and so collaborative and so outside-thinking. It was amazing to work on, it was a lot of work, but it didn’t make me scared because I’m actually working on a second one now, so obviously, I liked it enough.
Yeah, I was actually going to ask if you were planning a follow-up?
Yeah, so I’m actually currently working on 500 Essential Emo Albums, and it is actually available for pre-sale now at Ruffian’s website. It’s gonna start shipping out probably in January or February, and it is very similar to the pop-punk book, but more. We have taken the same concept and expanded it yet again and made it even more informative and cool for fans of emo music, so there’s gonna be a lot more to unpack with that one.
It’s really fun because I’m getting a chance to not only explore albums that were released before I was born, but I’m also getting to experience all over again these albums that really made me fall in love with this community in the first place. I think people often forget that these are still active genres, and it’s not just these peak artists that are active in that genre, you know, it’s not just the Sum 41s and blink-182s of the world still releasing music 20-something years later. It’s these new, emerging artists who are essential to these genres, and part of why they’re so essential is not only is the music fantastic, but they’re essential in pushing and propelling these genres forward and to new listeners, and they’re creating these diverse spaces that – not that they didn’t exist – but they weren’t as fruitful when this all started, when these genres were first coming up.
That was something I was going to ask too; because pop-punk is very broad and you can go a lot of ways with that, how did you define what would be a pop-punk album?
That’s a really hard question. I left the definition very open, and it was a very liberal definition of how we selected these albums. We not only went with what the community feels, but we did take advice of other journalists or other media outlets or what these listeners are hearing and saying and how it falls into this. I mean, pop-punk – it’s an easy one, I think, because it’s pop and it’s punk. It’s got those pop sensibilities but the punk attitude, the punk sound. [Sighs] There’s gonna be a lot of debate on some of these artists, and I fully expect that, but I really do hope that there are people who will…try to see that the definition of pop-punk has changed from its roots when it started in the 70s to its peak and spike in the 2000 and 2010s, to what it looks like in the 2020s because it’s different in every single iteration, and we tried to capture that.
Are there any that you were stuck on for a while, like debating whether or not they fit?
Yeah, there’s always so much debate. The Holy Trinity is always so debated, whether it’s My Chem/Fall Out Boy/Paramore, or My Chem/Fall Out Boy/Panic! at the Disco. Paramore and Panic! at the Disco kind of go in and out. I say Paramore because hello, it’s Hayley Williams, but there was a lot of internal debate within myself on if Fall Out Boy belongs there. For sure they belong there, no doubt. Paramore, absolutely, especially with Riot! But I definitely had a hard time deciding which My Chem I was gonna include, and why and how I was justifying that. They’re just always so widely debated on whether they are pop-punk, emo, punk, just rock… And then I also had a big internal debate with myself on Panic! at the Disco because I think they’re somebody that, like especially with A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, it is so widely considered to be pop-punk or emo or both. It is so theatrical, and there’s so much of a Broadway feel to it. There was a lot of internal debate, but at the end of the day, I felt like it was one of those ones where I have to have it there, and I still think that there’s enough pop-punk sensibility in it that it does belong.
So, it was more of those big players where these kind of don’t but they do. There was a lot of debate within myself and trying to not only go by what I think the major fans will feel but also the people who are pop-punk purists. I decided that there will be some albums in here that people completely disagree with me on, and that’s completely okay. And then there will be albums that people probably think should’ve been in there… Music is really subjective, and by no means I’m saying with this book, this collection, that this is the end-all and be-all. That’s just not true.
How long did it take for you to put this together?
I wanna say, like November through January is the amount of time that it took me to kind of take that giant list that I had already worked on and put it together, and then I had to pull album artwork, and I obviously had to do the writing, so I don’t know, maybe somewhere in the ballpark of like four to six months.
We got the first proof of the book in April, and crazily enough, when I saw the very first proof, I was reading over the foreword, and I texted Mike and I was like, ‘I hate this. This sounds so forced. I feel like this isn’t even, like this is not me as a writer. I feel like this is just me trying to prove a point to the community…’ and I was like, ‘Can I rewrite this?’ So, after all of that, and we had the very first proof, I ended up completely scrapping and rewriting the introduction of the book, and I’m really glad I did that because now looking at the two…at the time, I was like, I feel like I’m trying to make myself not sound like myself. And I think I was scared of that judgment because I am a female in this industry and that can prove to be more difficult. But yeah, I did definitely have a moment where I was really scared of that criticism, and I even had a lot of fear going into launching the book.
You know, during the launch, I had a lot of imposter syndrome, and it’s so crazy because I’ve been in the music industry for 10 years now…but the imposter syndrome around that still is definitely real, and that was definitely something that I had to work through when I was writing, when I was launching it, when I was promoting it. Still to this day, I wonder, ‘Who’s gonna hate it? Who’s gonna say what? Who’s gonna think that I used the incorrect word here? What albums do they think are gonna be wrong in there?’ It’s just, it’s a process.
I think that was everything that I had. Is there anything else you wanted to add or any last thoughts?
I think I’ve touched on it so much, but I really, really was dedicated to making sure that this was a reflection of a community that’s very important and very special to me. I am still so honored that I get to work with Mike Shea, and I do really look up to him and appreciate his trust that he’s given me to not only have worked on his first publication and his baby, if you will, but he’s allowing me the opportunity to continue to work with him on his new venture, and Ruffian is something really special. We want to tell these stories about important moments in music history and about important genres, but we also want to make sure we are lifting the artists who are expanding these genres and propelling them forward. So, that is a huge mission of mine; that’s a huge mission of Mike’s.
You know, whether you are somebody who is coming for blink-182’s albums for this book, or you want to discover something new, or you’ve never listened to pop-punk in your entire life but you’re interested in it, I hope that this is a snapshot of the community and how great it can be and how great it is. I just, I’m really proud of it, I hope that people really like it. if you don’t, I completely understand that too, but I hope that it will also make people feel inspired to be a part of the community – whether they look, sound, identify with some of the larger artists or whether they identify more with these new, emerging artists. I think there’s a space in the pop-punk/emo/alternative community in general for everyone, and you just have to be willing to find it. Yeah, I love this community, and I really hope that that is what people take away from it.
You can order 500 Essential Pop-Punk Albums here.
You can pre-order 500 Essential Emo Albums here.
