Catching Up With... Panic at the Disco

Since their debut release five years ago, the members of Panic at the Disco have grown up and reached legal drinking age, and their musical tastes have evolved. Perhaps most obviously, they've lost the exclamation point in their name, something that guitarist Ryan Ross, one of the founding members of the band, says he's been asked "two hundred thousand times" (read an explanation for the removal below).

Panic’s new album, Pretty. Odd., demonstrates the band members’ growth from somewhat naive 16-year-olds to 21-year-old selves, now musicians who name The Beach Boys and The Beatles as influences rather than Third Eye Blind and Counting Crows.

Paste: On your newest album, Pretty. Odd., you all switched up your style pretty drastically. How do you all feel about the possibility that you might gain an entirely different fan base than you had from your first album?
Ryan Ross: That's sort of what we wanted to do. We don't want to leave anyone out, but we're a few years older now and the kind of music that we're writing now is a bit different than what it used to be. We were actually hoping that we'd be able to gain some new fans from this album, and there's always talk of bands just sticking to something because they're afraid of losing something or change, but we were curious to see what would happen. We didn't feel like we should hold ourselves back from the music that we were writing, and it's been interesting. I'm sure that we've lost some old fans, but we have gained a couple new ones. As long as we're doing what we want to do, I think that's what people can see the most.

Paste: Do you have any idea what the response has been from your old fan base—the ones that really loved the band from the first album?
Ross: The only way that we can really see it is at concerts, and we've been on tour for two months and it seems still that most of the people that are coming to the show are our old fans, and they're getting in to the new songs just as much as the old. The album's been out for about two months now and there's been a definite change from the beginning of the tour until now in terms of how many people we see singing along and stuff. You kind of forget what it feels like to have an album just come out because we toured on that one for so long.

Paste: In What sort of music were you all listening to when you wrote this album? There are some pretty obvious influences that you can hear right away like The Beatles and Brian Wilson—did you consciously go in that direction when you were writing it?
Ross: I think we just started listening to that stuff, and more classic rock, and it just slowly started to creep its way in to our stuff. I'm a huge fan of the Beach Boys and The Beatles and we were listening to stuff like The Who and the Rolling Stones and The Kinks, and stuff like that mainly during those few months of writing. It was just strange to me because I hadn't grown up listening to a lot of that, and hearing it for the first time, it sounded like new music to me even though it had been recorded 40 years ago, so it didn't have that kind of untouchable thing to it to me. It was just hearing new music that was brilliant and sort of inspiring for me to do what we did.

Paste: What was the change in what influenced you from the first album to this one? What were you listening to when you guys wrote the first one?
Ross: I guess things that were more popular at the time. Spencer [Smith, the band's drummer] and I had always been fans of more '90's alternative stuff like Third Eye Blind and Counting Crows. We just kind of listened to the radio when we were kids, and didn't know a whole lot about music. The three years of touring with other bands, someone just tells you about something great and you hear it and you find something else. Instead of going to college I had a musical education with finding thing over the past couple years, and I think that's one of the big reasons that our second album sounds so different from the first one, because we hadn't really heard that much music when we made the first one.

Paste: How would you say you got into playing music, then? A lot of musicians get into music because they love other people's stuff and want to emulate that- what would you say drew you guys to that path?
Ross: When we were 13 or 14, Blink-182 was basically the biggest band on the planet, and you just get to the point where you want to be a teenager and rebel against your parents and skateboard. That was the first band that we were really attached to, and shortly after that we started to play music ourselves, but I think that was the first spark of interest for us.

Paste: How did you label feel about your decision to change your sound? Did you discuss it with them before you started writing, or did you finish it and go to them and say this is what we did?
Ross: It wasn't anything pre-conceived. We wrote all the songs, and we'd play them stuff along the way, and it was sort of unspoken. I think everyone just understood that it was different, but it wasn't like "We're going to change our sound so get ready for it." It was just like "Well, we're writing songs and they're different now, but we like them." I guess they liked them enough to put out the record too, so that's all I can ask for.

Paste: What was it like working with [producer] Rob Mathis on this album?
Ross: Rob was fantastic. We met him from working on the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, and he's a classically trained musician. We knew that we were going to want some of those flourishes in those songs, and we just got along with him great. He just loves everything from Bach to Led Zeppelin, so it just felt like a good fit. He just would sit around and listen to what we were doing, and if he had a question he'd ask, but he wouldn't fix it for us, he'd make us do it ourselves if it felt weird. He's just brilliant. He would just be able to hear any kind of idea in his head, and write it out on the piano. I think we'll be working with him a lot in the future.

Paste: How many times have you guys been asked why you dropped the exclamation point from your name?
Ross: [Laughs] About two hundred thousand times. No, I don't know, everyone asks, and we didn't think that they would, maybe if we had known we wouldn't have done it. We didn't think anyone would really notice. I never really noticed when it was there. We just did it because someone asked us if we wanted to keep using it, and every time we had ever written the band name we had never put it. Finally, someone asked us if we wanted it and we said no.