Any pre-show nerves kicking in? It’s been a while since you’ve been over here.
B: Yeah, it has been. I’m just more excited. I guess there are always some nerves before a show, just in general, but it’s just exciting to know that we’re back here after about three years, I think it’s been?
You’ve playing the UK a fair few times now – what are some of your favourite things about playing over here?
B: Glasgow has one of the more rowdy crowds I guess, which is always a treat live.
Do you notice much of a difference between the UK and US crowds?
S: Oh yeah.
B: Yeah, and not just subtle differences either. In terms of volume there are differences between how loud there are which is really cool. We’ve missed it a lot.
You’ve just released Vices & Virtues which is Panic’s third album but also the first album that you’ve written as a duo. Obviously the writing process must have been very different, so how did you approach this album, in comparison to your previous releases?
B: Yeah it was. I mean we kind of knew it was going to be different, obviously going from the opinions of four different people to just the two of us. It was just good because there’d be moments where we’d be recording or writing, mostly in the studio, and we noticed after a couple of weeks that there wasn’t much arguing when we were talking about ideas, so that was really nice. I guess looking back at how it was written; I had to take on more lyrical duties. It was just the two of us and we just knew what we wanted to do, we’d been on the same page since the beginning of the process so that made it a little bit easier too.
In comparison to your first two albums, Vices & Virtues seems a lot more fluid, in terms of the style of music. Was that a conscious decision to steer away from just one distinctive sound?
S: Yeah, I think in the second record we really were excited about doing that the way that we did, but then after we’d done the whole album tour it seemed like there were fewer options as to what could fit in that so it was fun to get back into not having it. At the same time you want it to sound like its cohesive, so there are more influences that are coming from a broader range of music but you still just have to try and figure out a way to make it fluid and fit the record.
Was the majority of the material written after the split, or are there some older ideas thrown in there?
B: There are a couple; Mona Lisa, I’d had on my laptop for a while and it’d had just never gotten used for the band. Nearly Witches, the last song on the record, was an old idea that we’d started. It was only a verse and we didn’t really know how to finish it so we’d just – not really threw it out but just left it be on our laptops and didn’t really do anything with it. That was while we were still writing for ‘Pretty. Odd.’ We really liked that idea and we were never able to finish until this record, so that was kind of nice to have that time to spend on it. I think that helped finish the song.
What sort of music were you listening to whilst writing the album?
B: A lot of different stuff. I guess we hadn’t really listened to newer bands in previous recordings. Arcade Fire was one, their new record, but we were still listening to the stuff we’d always listen to. A lot of Simon and Garfunkel, but also some influences from the Eighties that we hadn’t really picked up on before this record. XTC was a band that we were just introduced to a couple of years ago and Peter Gabriel was one that we hadn’t really analysed before for writing purposes.
Along with Vices & Virtues you seem to be delving back into the theatrical side of things. Tell me a little bit about the film you’ve just released, ‘The Overture’.
B: We knew we wanted to use a few of the songs as a soundtrack to a film but we didn’t know how to go about it. We mentioned it to Shane Drake, our director, and he had plenty of ideas to work around, so we just talked back and forth on the phone for about a week or two about ideas for the script. It ended up working out based on the four songs that we’d chosen for it.
So having a visual aspect to your music is also pretty important to you?
B: Yeah! Once we’re finished the music, the visual aspect is always important. We love being able to dress up and have carte blanche for just craziness I guess. It’s just really fun.
You’ve also worked with Shane Drake on your latest video for ‘Ready To Go’. How did the concept develop?
B: We did it at the same time as The Overture. We had a couple of things we wanted: first of all I wanted to be shot out of a canon, which is something we’ve always wanted to do for the past five years and we’ve just never gotten to do it. So we wanted to be shot out of a canon and we wanted the three musical parts, like with dancing and choreography and all that stuff, which we’ve never done in a music video before. Those were the two main ideas that we worked around.
Next up we have some fan questions, sent in by CtrlAltRock readers. Firstly, what is the strangest request you’ve ever had from a fan?
B: I think Spencer and I just recently got asked to prom by a fan.
S: Wow! I didn’t know that!
B: Yeah it was about two weeks ago. During the show she was just like “Take me to prom!” It was very flattering, but we weren’t going to be in her town so that wouldn’t have been possible. I guess that was more flattering than strange…
Which song by another artist do you wish you’d written and why?
B: It’s hard to pick just one…Arcade Fire, that new record. I’ll listen to the record all the way through and there are parts in every song that I’m like “Man that’s so cool” and I wonder how they wrote that. The fact that it’s so appealing to both of us says something about it. That’s something that we want to get across in our music too – we just want that appeal and want people to get excited to listen to it just like we were excited when we were writing it. That’s something that’s very important to us.
Which song on the new album was the most fun to write?
There are a couple of songs that we ended up writing in the studio while we were demoing. I think The Calendar might have been one…? There were a few that were just fun to, once we had the arrangement down, just go in there and throw random ideas on them. We used an iPad synthesiser on the record which was really cool! Every song we try to just keep exciting or it’d get quite boring for us…
What is the most meaningful lyric on the album?
B: The last song that we wrote for the record was Ready To Go and the chorus lyrics just kind of explain a lot of how we were feeling at the time. [The feeling of] just wanting to get on the road again and get out of the studio, out of our own headspace. I guess for me personally the lyric in the verse – ‘You’ve got these little things that you’ve been running from, you either love it or I guess you don’t’ – just hit home. I was kind of talking about myself, outwardly just saying “Why do you run from all these things? Why are you so apprehensive of these things?” and just questioning all of that.
Do the majority of the lyrics stem from personal experiences?
B: They’re all based on stuff that we’ve been through over the last couple of years. Specifically The Calendar, where we wanted to talk about the split. When we were writing the song it was actually about a different thing, it was about a relationship, but then we decided it actually sounded like [it was talking about] the band. We hadn’t finished the lyrics yet so that helped us finished it off and tie it all in. We just wanted to talk about it – it was something that we felt strongly about, something that we’d gone through.
Thanks guys! Is there anything else you’d like to say?
B: Just to let people know that we are excited to be playing so if you happen to be in a town that we are touring please come to a show because it’s going to be a blast!
Source: http://ctrlaltrock.com/interviews/panic-at-the-disco-2011/
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