Ultimate Guitar Interview

[orange_nerds]

Panic At The Disco: 'We Just Never Really Set Boundaries For Ourselves'

Panic At The Disco might have drawn the public’s attention in January by dropping the exclamation point at the end of its name, but it’s clear that there has been an even bigger musical change for the Las Vegas quartet. In March PATD released Pretty. Odd., an album that features quite a different sound than the band’s debut record. Rather than delivering a series of run-of-the-mill contemporary rock tracks, Pretty. Odd. conveys a vintage sound, with moments that feel like a nod to The Beatles.

When guitarist Ryan Ross talked with Ultimate-Guitar about the sudden style change, it was obvious that the past year has been one of self-exploration for each member of the band. After spending several months in the mountains writing new material, PATD decided to scrap it all and start from scratch. It was a gutsy, but honest move made by a band that in the past has been labeled as little more than emo. With the release of Pretty. Odd., it’s clear that PATD is quickly jettisoning the emo title and discovering a unique sound of its own.

UG: I understand that the band originally went into hibernation to write the new record, only to scrap most of the songs. What exactly was the band’s mindset at that time?

Ryan: I don’t know. I didn’t really have anyone to relate to in our situation, being 17 and 18 and writing an album - having way more success than we ever thought we would. Then we tried to figure out what we’re supposed to do next. I think we were just confused and we didn’t really know what we wanted to do. It took us a while to figure that out. I guess you could attribute all that time spent in the mountains to us just trying to figure it out.

The new album has a vintage feel, almost with a Beatles-esque sound. Were you influenced by artists like that?

Yeah, definitely. I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of that stuff, or at least not from what I remember. Everything about those bands was just so intriguing to me. The songwriting is just impeccable. We just sort of were drawn to all kinds of things about it. The production was even something that was interesting to us. It just sounded more natural, like real people were playing songs together. That’s not something you hear a lot in pop music these days. Everything is pretty much computerized and auto-tuned and beat mapped. I think that just 3 years of touring and playing live music and listening to different things sort of changed our viewpoint on what we wanted to do and what kind of music we were going to make.

Is it true that everyone in the band switched instruments throughout the course of making the album?

Yes. I don’t know. I guess we just never really set boundaries for ourselves in this band. So when somebody picks up the guitar, it’s not a thing where me or Brendon say, “Oh well, I’m going to play the guitar.” It doesn’t really matter as long as we’re all happy with the song that is being written. On this tour Jon plays the guitar a little bit and Brendon plays bass. I don’t think any of that stuff really matters. However the song is written is the way we’ll play it.

Do you usually come up with the core elements of the song?

It was different this time because we got Jon a couple years ago. He was a songwriter before we met him. Me and him ended up staying together for most of the writing process of this album. We just kind of threw ideas off of each other. There were really no rules. There was no set way of writing the songs, which I think helped us come up with a bunch of different-sounding things. Some of the stuff was my idea, and I would show the band. Some of it was his, and then a couple songs Brendon wrote. So it’s just kind of anywhere. There are a bunch of ideas in this band, and everyone is allowed to have them.

“Nine In The Afternoon” is one of the bigger productions, with an assortment of instrument featured on it. How did that take shape?

That was the first song that we wrote for the album that ended up on the album, minus all of the stuff we had done in the cabin. We had come back from playing a couple of summer festivals, and we weren’t really feeling good about the other stuff we had been working on. So we got together one night, just sat around, and we started playing together in our old rehearsal space. We started working with a melody that John had an idea for, and then we wrote the lyrics together that night. It was definitely the most spontaneous thing we had done. It was just a lot of fun to have everybody involved in it, kind of writing a song about the band and how we were all feeling.

Who played piano on that track?

Brendon played piano on that track.

Do you also play keyboards on part of the album?

I do a little, yeah. On the record I think he played most of it. I just got a piano in my house, actually, and I’ve been trying to learn it when I’m home. You just write a different kind of song when you can play the piano. I’m just kind of curious about playing other instruments and stuff.

What made you initially want to start playing the guitar?

It was strange. I didn’t know anyone who played guitar. I didn’t know anyone that played any instrument when I started playing it. Me and Spencer grew up around the street from each other, and we had been friends since we were really little kids. One Christmas we both just decided that we were going to play music. He asked for a drum set and I asked for a guitar - that way we could play together. It didn’t really matter. At that point I could have played the drums or he could have played the guitar because we didn’t know anything about it. We were just trying to figure it out on our own, and we had a lot of fun when we were 12, 13, 14 by just learning songs together. Then we started writing our own songs together and playing them in his garage and stuff. We started taking it more and more seriously as we got a little bit better and found other people in high school to play with. Here we are!

Did you have any lessons at all?

In the beginning, probably about the first year, I just tried to do it on my own. It was really, really frustrating. So I took lessons for a little while. When I go home, I still go and see my old guitar teacher when I can to brush up on things.

Can you recall some of the first songs you wrote? Were they similar to anything we might hear you play today?

Oh, no! They were some pretty terrible songs! I guess we were sort of growing up listening to pop punk and the whole skateboarding scene. So it was sort of very juvenile, very innocent pop punk.

I noticed that you play Hagstrom guitars quite often. What drew you to them?

I’m actually not sure. I think that someone from the company came out to one of our shows one day and let me try them out. They played really well, and so I just started playing a couple of them. I started collecting guitars a little bit over the past few years, and so I play all kinds of guitars. On this tour I’m actually playing mostly a Stratocaster and a couple of old Gibsons I found in Europe and stuff. It’s weird to bring out those guitars, though, because they’re so delicate. You don’t want anything to happen to them, but they sound better than anything else. Sometimes they get banged up a little bit!

Are we hearing the Stratocaster and Les Pauls on the new album?

I played a 1960 Les Paul Junior for most of it, and then an old Epiphone Casino. Yeah, on this album I used all old guitars.

What are you specifically looking for in a guitar? Do you tend to focus on the way it feels as much as the tone?

It definitely does depend from song to song. I’m a pretty small guy, so I tend to go towards guitars that are pretty light. Then I try to figure out how to make it sound good! It’s more about the playability than the initial sound because you can kind of make a guitar sound like anything. With the older ones, they just play so much better than new guitars for some reason. They’re just easier to play.

I don’t necessarily think the label “emo” applies to the band, particular with the material we’re hearing on Pretty. Odd. There are some who did place that label on the band when you first came onto the scene. Did that bother you?

I guess it didn’t offend us. It just felt like it was a misplaced word for our band. We didn’t ever really listen to what is the real emo. People talk about bands like Promise Ring or Rites of Spring, and we knew nothing about any of that. It was just sort of this fad that was coming up. Being a new band, people were trying to call it emo. That was the thing to do. I guess people are going to call you whatever they’re going to call you. We still wrote the same songs we were going to write on this album, and people can call it emo or they can call it rock and roll. It doesn’t really change the song. So it is whatever it is. I don’t know what to call it!

The producer of Pretty. Odd., Rob Mathes, said some very complimentary things about working with you on the album. He even compared the experience to his days of first hearing The Who and David Bowie. Could you sense that something special was happening in the studio?

Yeah. Ever since we met Rob, we really got along great. He was our first choice on working on this album. From the first time he came out to hear the new songs, we just felt really positive about it. He was always sort of more of a cheerleader in the studio than anything else. He just kind of motivated us to keep going with whatever it was that we were working on. He’s brilliant as well. If I had any kind of idea for an arrangement or something, I could just sort of tell him what I wanted it to sound like. Sometimes it was so vague, but he would still get it. I told him on some songs I wanted it to sound like part of the Wizard of Oz or I wanted it to sound like it was underwater - all of these references that don’t have anything to do with actual sounds. He just really got inside of the record and what we wanted to do with it. He was great. I don’t see us working with anybody else on the next record but him.

Did you record at Abbey Road Studios?

We mixed the album there. We recorded it mostly in Las Vegas, but we did our orchestral arrangements and the mixing there.

For the coming year, can we expect a pretty steady touring schedule for the band?

We’re going to be touring for most of the year. We have a month in Europe coming up and then also a month abroad in Asia and Australia. At the end of the summer we’ll have a little break and then we’ll do another fall tour. Then we’ll do another record!

Interview by Amy Kelly
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