Panic! At The Disco

14 October 2011

by Poppy Reid

When Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie was 18-years- old, he told his parents he had no plans to further his education and would be moving out with three other wide-eyed dreamers into a room, in a basement, to live on a diet of theatrical pomp music and callow faith. “I was definitely acting like a little asshole, I wasn’t the nicest kid,” he says from a hotel room in Sydney.

Eight years later, the Las Vegas lads turned their nascent hope into a two-million-selling debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, an ARIA #1 with 2008’s Pretty.Odd and a third record which subsequently split the quartet directly down their monolithic middle.

Urie and drummer Spencer Smith kept the moniker and the sound whilst guitarist Ryan Ross and bassist Jon Walker went on to become The Young Veins before dividing again to seek an even more self-governed path as solo artists.

“They basically told us, ‘hey we’re gonna start this new band,’ and we said, ‘that’s totally cool, whatever you guys want to do’.” The 24-year-old had felt the need for the split as soon as the band had started work on the most recent album, Vices & Virtues in 2009.

“We realised it was really for the best because we didn’t want to go into a studio where we’d have to compromise a bunch of our ideas because we didn’t see eye to eye.” With Ross as the band’s principal lyricist -“[Ross] did 99% of it,” Urie quips - media’s censorious eyes were on Urie and Smith to see how they would follow the success of their last two offerings.
“We didn’t really like to think about it, it gave us anxiety a little bit,” he says. The pair approached the pressure in much the same way they have approached their music from the beginning, using cathartic self-reflection to study their own behaviour instead of others. “If you start dictating what you do by what other people are saying it just seems cheap,” he adds.

Understandably, Urie was at first uneasy about leading the band’s lyric march but after teaming with Pretty. Odd producer Rob Mathes and songwriter-producers Butch Walker (Avril Lavigne, Weezer) and John Feldman (Good Charlotte, Foxy Shazam), Urie says the creativity flowed easy.

“I think I was a little anxious,” he admits. “I didn’t really know how I wanted to go about it but it just kept happening song by song by song.” One track even played a hand in Urie and Smith’s emancipation from the former Panic! The Calendar began as “a guy and a girl story,” and although lyrics like ‘Put another ex on the calendar, summer’s on its deathbed,’ paint a similar picture, when the pair changed the meaning to denote themselves and their critics the track’s purpose changed.

“We changed it from a boy and a girl to the story of us and that tied it all together,” he says. “It was a therapeutic thing to do to get things off our chest that would have been more difficult to do if we hadn’t written it in a song.”

Despite Vices & Virtues being widely received as the first opus from Panic! as a duo, they weren’t a twosome for long. Guitarists, Ian Crawford and Dallon Weekes soon joining the ranks; Crawford left fellow Nevada band The Cab around the same time as Ross and Walker’s departure and Weekes had previously played bass for indie band The Brobecks.

“We felt so fortunate that we found people with the same sense of humour, we also seem to have a similar taste in music and where we see the band going.” But Urie assures he and Smith won’t be too quick to jump into bed with them; he maintains they’ll make sure they’re certain so as to avoid a Ross- Walker repeat.

“It’s kind of like a marriage, we didn’t want to rush into a pre-nup or any kind of agreement,” he laughs. “But we’ve been dating each other for a while and y’know we’re dating and I think it will eventually happen.”

With Vices & Virtues peaking at #6 on the ARIA Album chart and their first two singles weaving their way to the forefront of the commercial airwaves, Panic! At The Disco’s return to form has been met with a widespread nod of approval from the critics they could care less about.