Platinum debut albums are both a blessing and a curse. Panic at the Disco have already reaped the advantages of their million-selling first release, 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out: big tours, sold-out dates, adoring fans. While crafting their sophomore follow-up, Pretty. Odd., the Las Vegas quartet experienced the flip side of debut success, namely trying to make lightning strike twice.

“In the back of our minds we’ve all had this feeling of, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’” admits bassist Jon Walker. “We’d been going non-stop up until starting to write the next record. We spent pretty much all of ’07 writing the record and it was probably the first time we’d stepped back and actually realized what had happened.”

During Panic’s nearly two solid years of touring (Walker, a roadie for The Academy Is…, replaced original bassist Brent Wilson in mid-2006), the band talked about their sophomore album having the structure of a short story and the possibility of a conceptual thread running through the songs. After a six-week break at the end of ’06, Panic spent the next three months working out song sketches along those lines.

“We didn’t get any songs done, but we got like 8-10 ideas for songs that never got finished,” says Walker. “It took us some time to get used to writing songs and actually having the time to search and discover what we wanted to be doing.”

Although Panic went into the initial writing sessions for Pretty. Odd. with the intent of creating new songs, they turned into more of a writing exercise for the band. Nothing from those early sessions survived to make the new album.

“We’d been touring for so long, and we hadn’t written anything on tour,” admits Walker. “We were definitely rusty.”

Perhaps most importantly, Panic’s original members (vocalist/guitarist Brendon Urie, guitarist/keyboardist Ryan Ross, drummer Spencer Smith) wrote much of Fever when they were in high school, a long way chronologically and emotionally from the album’s eventual success.

“That’s really apparent on the new album,” says Walker. “We took a more classic approach to songwriting, in the sense that we grew up and started listening to more music. We’ve become a little less angst-y. Things have been pretty good for us and we’re all pretty happy. The thing that comes out in the album is that we’re having a lot of fun.”

For the songs on Pretty. Odd., as evidenced by the album’s infectious Kinks-colored first single “Nine in the Afternoon,” Panic found inspiration in their parents’ record collections, a sound they had rediscovered on the road over the previous two years.

“We got back into the Beatles and Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, classic songwriters that we ended growing a lot of appreciation for,” says Walker. “We didn’t rip them off in any way; we were just really inspired by the character and creativity that they have.”

Share with: del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Spurl | Yahoo MyWeb

This entry was posted by RNYK on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am