Ryan Ross holds out his hands, palm sides up, as if showing the world he has nothing to hide. Sitting on a high-backed, green-cushioned chair, the lead guitarist places his elbows on the round wooden table in front of him, his eyes as round and shiny as platinum discs.

Ross is currently occupied explaining just how normal, just how routine his life happens to be. Yes his band Panic at the Disco (these days without an exclamation mark) may have injected the music world with more colour than The Simpsons on HDTV, may have sold a couple of million copies of their 2005 debut albm, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, but just like you he puts his socks on one foot at a time.

"See," he says, "people think that [success] must totally change you as a person, but it doesn't really. I still do the things I did before. I still have to pay rent, I still have to pay the bi..."

It's halfway through the world 'bills' that he stops dead, as if someone has pressed the pause button. His eyes are now less platinum discs and more rivulets of shame. To his left, Brendon Urie, the band's heart-throb of a singer, throws out a quick whinny of laughter, like a horse. He's heard this story, knows that it's a good one.

"Alright," he says, "paying bills might be a bad example."

Why?

"Because I'm not very good at it."

A little over two months ago Ryan Ross was at home in Las Vegas. Rising from bed he stepped into the shower and turned on the hot water, only to receive a short, sharp, shocking blast of cold water. Clattering blindly out of the shower stall, Ross wondered what the problem could be. Damn! Suddenly he realised what it was. Turns out that while the guitarist had remembered to buy himself a yellow and green upright piano with flowers painted on it, he hadn't remembered to pay his utility bills. Because of this, the power company had disconnected his home of heating and water.

"I have the money to pay bills," he explains, "it's just that I fall into the mind-set where I don't pay bills, where I don't put gas in the car, where I don't do laundry." This is said, by the way, as if it could hardly be more normal. Like, God, what kind of lunatic would you have to be to pay a bill?

Anyway, Ross didn't rectify this problem for three weeks. In fact, he didn't rectify this problem at all -- his girlfriend did, when she was out in Vegas visiting the guitarist from her home in New York.

Ross himself just shakes his head, explains that "things like this happen to [him] all the time," that he's "always getting [his] cell phone cut because [he's] forgotten to pay the bill." Ask him if were it not for the intervention of his girlfriend in getting the power in his home reinstated, whether the water and heating would still be off he answers, "Er, yeah, possibly...well...probably."

"He was coming over to my place every day to use the shower," says Urie.

"Actually," says Ross, happening upon a solution, "I would probably have moved in with [drummer] Spencer [Smith]."

So rather than pay your heating bill, you would actually move out of your home and into someone else's?

"Yeah."

The music Panic at the Disco make sounds as if it doesn't come from the real world. It's reassuring to know that some of the people who make that music don't seem to come from the real world either.

*

If you're in the business of dreams then London's Abbey Road Studios is as good a place as any to be. Around the corner from Lord's cricket ground, this unassuming Georgian townhouse in well-to-do St John's Wood has been turning music into magic since 1931. It was here that Cliff Richard (ask your mum...) recorded the first ever British rock 'n' roll single, and where the Beatles revolutionised the form in the decade that followed. In fact you can recognise the building simply from the coloured loops of Beatles graffiti drawn onto the white pillars that stand at the studio's entrance -- despite these pillars being repainted white once a month.

Panic at the Disco have been coming to this building for the past couple of weeks. While the majority of Pretty. Odd., the quartet's upcoming second album, was recorded at the Palm Studios in Las Vegas, the important finishing flourishes are being sprinkled on here in North West London. The band -- whose line-up is completed by Chicago born bassist Jon Walker -- are staying in apartments in nearby Maida Vale. They've been falling out of bed each day at 3 or 4pm and then walking over to Abbey Road. They've been adding strings and vocal harmonies to their 15 new songs. They've been working in Studio 1, which isn't the one used by The Beatles. At 4am, the end of each shift, they've been climbing into the back of a black taxi cab before falling into bed shortly before dawn.

"We haven't seen a lot of daylight," admits Urie. "It's been kinda like being in Vegas."

Apart from it being grey, and oppressive, and raining. That is, except in one of Abbey Road's mixing rooms, where out of the room's giant speakers, Pretty. Odd. shines like summer.

Panic at the Disco shelved the initial sessions for what they believed would be their second album -- a good six or seven songs which, according to Urie, "sounded like we were writing a musical -- not even a rock opera, just an opera." And they started again. Smith described this as being "easier than you might think," while Walker says the experience was "actually quite liberating." But if you assumed that the band scrapped these sessions in order to return to more familiar ground then you're set for a surprise.

Pretty. Odd. is not really a rock album. There is the occasional guitar-heavy song (Mad As Rabbits, for one, a tune so insanely catchy you'll be singing it until you faint) but mostly this is an album that is too restlessly creative to be confined to one thing. You can forget all about 'emo.' Instead this is a set populated by lush, melancholic orchestration (Do You Know What I'm Seeing?), by clarinets an ukuleles (I Have Friends In Holy Places) and by acoustic guitars (Northern Downpour and Folkin' Around).

Pretty. Odd. is outlandish and accomplished: fearless, even.

"When I first started playing in this band all I wanted was to be able to tour in a van for the next five years, " says Ross. "My definition of 'making it' was to be in a band and have that as my job. I didn't want to make tons of money and I didn't want to be famous. I just wanted to be able to commit myself full-time to making music. And we've achieved that. But at some point things got so big and so out of our hands that we had to do something important because we have so many people paying attention to what we do. And this album is us doing something important."

Have you made tons of money, by the way? Are you set up for life?

Ryan Ross laughs, a little snort, a quick flash of cynical humour from a young man otherwise unaffected by such an emotion. "No," he says. "I'm not even close to having enough money to last me for the rest of my life. Nowhere near.

"You know, that's the big misconception about people in bands," he adds, "that we make way more money than we actually do. I do okay, but it's not like it used to be. Bands in the '70s made way more money than bands do now."

*

"It's really weird, but since our music and our band has become well known, the only question people seem to ask us is, do we have any celebrity friends?" These are the words of Spencer Smith. The drummer is speaking on a mobile phone, live from Hollywood. He's not sure exactly where he is but as he speaks you can hear the whoosh of lunch hour traffic, of cars barreling down the boulevards. "Hang on," he says, "let me see if I can find a quiet street to walk down."

Okay.

"...Can you hear me better now?"

Much.

"Cool, what was I saying? Oh yeah. People just ask really obvious questions, questions that are kind of stupid. They want to know if it's true that Pete Wentz writes all of our songs. They want to know if we hang out with him all time. It gets a bit boring, you know? I think that people seem to think that we live in this big celebrity bubble, and we really don't," Smith pauses for a second. The gentle hum of distant traffic sounds almost like a sigh. "And no one seems to want to talk about the music we make."

Okay, talk about your music.

"Well, what do you want to know? All I can say is that I really love it and that I think it's great."

When Panic at the Disco finally stepped off the treadmill of touring following the success of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, the group, according to Walker, had "probably played something like 200 shows, and [had become] much, much better as a band." They'd also grown much, much bigger. The just-out-of-their-teens quartet had gone from playing to 800 people supporting labelmates The Academy Is... to headlining three nights at London's Brixton Academy. They were playing to 10,000 people in Manhattan, and in hockey arenas all over their home country. And all of this happened with the band inside of a tour bus, the metal casing of which offered protection, and made them all but bulletproof.

And then that all stopped. Urie went home to Nevada and took stock of his recent experiences. He admits that it was "really strange to be outside of the touring bubble, which is what our band had existed in for so long." He took a look at the view and realised, "Wow, this thing has gotten to be totally huge."

He says this was strange because the members of Panic at the Disco "really don't think of ourselves as being a huge band." But the evidence was all around him, and "there definitely were moments" when Urie realised that "this whole thing had become totally out of control."

"It was a bit strange," says Ross. "Management would call up and say, 'Hey, you sold 50,000 albums this week.' But because we were on the road I'd go, 'Oh, really? That's interesting.' It didn't really mean anything to me, because it didn't seem real. But when we got off the road, and I had time to think about it, I realised, 'Wow, that is a lot of albums.' Especially these days. And then I began to get a sense of what we'd achieved."

Not a single member of Panic at the Disco attributes altitude sickness as the reason for the stuttering start they made in attempting to follow up A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, but such a massive shift in circumstance surely can't have helped. They went to Los Angeles and wrote some songs. They went up to the mountains and wrote some songs. They took a break, and through speaking with one another on mobile phones reached the common consensus that these new songs had to go.

So they started again, this time in Las Vegas. Within a week they'd written three numbers, all of which appear on the tracklisting of Pretty. Odd. They were on their way.

"I wouldn't say the album was effortless," admits Walker. "But it was definitely a lot easier when we found our focus."

Does it concern you whether Pretty. Odd. is commercially successful or not?

"Not really, no," says Ross. "It can't, really, because that's out of our control. All that we can do is write the best songs we can and hope that people like them."

Have you ever downloaded an album without paying for it?

"I have," he says. "Yeah. I used to do that a lot when I was younger and didn't have any money."

What would you say to someone who was planning on downloading your album without paying for it?

"Do you know what?" he says. "If that was the only way someone was going to get to hear our music I'd rather them do it that way than not at all."

*

But, really, after changes upon changes Panic at the Disco are more or less the same. A couple of Sundays back, the band were invited to the Grammy Awards ceremony, the annual US music industry backslap this year held at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Panic were nominated in a minor category not scheduled to feature as part of the live television broadcast. Not that it mattered, because Panic didn't win. Not that that mattered either, because they weren't even there to see themselves lose. Instead they arrived at the ceremony, realised that this wasn't a productive way to spend their evening and instead doubled back on themselves and went straight back to their hotel. The only thing they stopped to do was to sign autographs for the handful of fans who happened to be waiting outside.

"We realised that sitting in an arena for three hours surrounded by people in suits wasn't going to add up to a good time," laughs Smith.

So, really, the boys still just want to have fun. And, fittingly for a band from Las Vegas, they also want to gamble with the success they've achieved so far. To this end they've changed their sound, stretched themselves, accepted the possibility that many people who liked them on the last album might not like what they've now created. They've even decided to stake out their own ground in areas other than the sound of music. They've rejected what they see as the relentless negativity of so many other bands (whom they care not to name) and instead focus on things other than turmoil and pain.

"I try to think of the person who's worked an eight hour day," says Ross. "The person gets in their car and puts on their radio. I'd like them to hear a song that makes them feel happy for three minutes rather than something that makes them more depressed than they already are. We're not afraid to write about love or being happy."

"We have an entire culture that is either provocative or negative," says Urie. "It's so geared toward being shocking that it no longer manages to shock. They've pushed it as far as they can go both sexually and in terms of anger. Which is why we're here, to provide something different. "

The first song on Pretty. Odd. is called We're So Starving, which sounds so much like a bombastic show tune that one wonders just what the songs the band shelved sounded like. On this Brendon Urie sings, 'Oh how it's been so long/We're so sorry we've been gone/We were busy writing songs for... You!' At the word "you" the cheering voices of a thousand giddy fans flood the speakers. From here the tone is set. If you were to pick one word that best describes Panic at the Disco, nothing fits better than "entertainment."

"Yeah," smiles Urie. "I can live with that."

Well, how very Las Vegas of you.

"Yeah it is," adds Ross. "But you know what? We can live with that too."

****

Short Change: Swot up on the all new Panic at the Disco

The Missing !

Ryan Ross: "I'd love to tell you there was some big story behind the decision, but really there wasn't. We just decided to take it off. With the name of the album have two full stops in it -- Pretty. Odd. -- it seemed a bit much to also have the exclamation point in our name. It was a bit stop-start."

Any other changes we should know about?

Brendon Urie: "Everything is new with us. We've got a whole new batch of songs, we've learned some different sounds, some different styles and some different approaches. So everything's new. It's still Panic at the Disco, but it's definitely a new direction."

Source: Kerrang! Magazine - March 1, 2008
Transcribed by sathinks @ LJ.