PANIC AT THE DISCO AND THE PRESSURES OF PAST SUCCESS

Panic at the Disco have released their sophomore album ‘Pretty. Odd.’ and the band talks about dealing with the internal pressures of past success.

Panic at the Disco have officially released their sophomore album, ‘Pretty. Odd.’ and the band will look to duplicate the tremendous success of their debut album ‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out’ which has already sold 2.2 million copies and peaked at #13 on The Billboard 200 chart. Initially the band contacted Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz through LiveJournal and sent him a link to their Pure Volume site so he could check out their music and after flying out to Las Vegas to check Panic at the Disco live, Wentz immediately offered the band a contract to sign to his upstart label Decaydance, which is under the Fueled by Raman umbrella.

We caught up with Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross of Panic at the Disco to get their thoughts on the pressure of living up to the success of their debut album.

“I think most of the pressure we put on ourselves. Yeah, internal pressure. Yeah, just to outdo what we did on the last record or the last tour. We’re always trying to out do ourselves. It’s getting more and more complicated now but it’s more fun, so.”

Panic at the Disco initially began writing their sophomore album in early 2007, but decided to scrap close to an entire album’s worth of songs because the band didn’t feel the direction was necessarily the right direction at the time to take. The first song the band wound up writing after their new direction was the first single ‘Nine in the Afternoon,’ which began to showcase multi layer harmonies, drawing influence from The Beach Boys and The Beatles.

“Well, we’d come off a pretty long winter of struggling with concept albums, so we came home and decided to write a song that had nothing to do with that and just ended up writing that song. It’s basically about the four of us in a band.”

We also talked with Panic at the Disco about the inspiration for ‘Nine in the Afternoon.’

Panic at the Disco will be performing on Saturday Night Live on April 5th, with host Christopher Walken. The band will next be starting The Honda Civic Tour with Motion City Soundtrack, The Hush Sound and Phantom Planet. Dates begin April 10th in San Francisco, California and extend until June 14th in Anaheim, California. Look for the band at Bamboozle, which takes place at The Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey on May 4th.