Last month, Patrick Stump (formerly of pop-punk band Fall Out Boy) debuted Soul Punk, his first full-length solo endeavor. This record taps into a much funkier side of Stump than what fans are accustomed to hearing from the singer.
In an interview with Alternative Press, Stump was candid about the music he made with Fall Out Boy and other collaborators. “At no point in any of this has it been my thing,” he stated. “I’ve never had my thing. I wanted to do my thing, and I wanted to do it my way… I wanted to set the tone for the future. [Soul Punk is] kind of like a calling card.”
Take one listen to Soul Punk’s opening track, “Explode,” and you will at once realize that this is not the Stump we all knew from Fall Out Boy. Rather, he’s emerged here as a pop/R&B/hip-hop dynamo to reignite appreciation for the art of music.
Really putting a stamp on his identity as an artist, Stump wrote and produced the entire record. He also played every instrument, including drums, bass, guitar, analog synth, piano, percussion, trumpet, saxophone, and mandolin — just to name a few.
Channeling his musical influences throughout the record — among them Prince, David Bowie and, obviously, Michael Jackson — Stump successfully manages to cross multiple genres. There’s hip-hop, R&B, and a little bit of rock thrown in that creates a record that the singer described as “hopefully smart pop” to Virgin.com’s Red Room.
“I wrote a lot of songs that on the surface sound like they’re very vapid and, you know, silly songs,” he explained. “But then I subverted in them a lot of meanings and a lot of things. It’s a very political record, but I disguised them as drinking songs or sexy R&B songs.”
Continue reading Music Review >> Patrick Stump – ‘Soul Punk’
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