Song Exploder - Panic! At the Disco - Viva Las Vengeance

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Panic! At the Disco is the Grammy-nominated project of Brendon Urie, who originally started it as a band with his high school friends from Las Vegas in 2004. In the eighteen years since, Panic! At the Disco has won American Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, iHeartRadio Music awards, and more. In August 2022, Brendon released the seventh Panic! at the Disco album, Viva Las Vengeance. The title track hit #1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart. In this episode, Brendon tells the story of how he, Grammy-nominated producer Jake Sinclair and Oscar-nominated songwriter Mike Viola all got together to make the song "Viva Las Vengeance." For more, visit songexploder.net/panic-at-the-disco.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Panic at the Disco is the Grammy-nominated project of Brendan Urey, who originally started it as a band in 2004 with his high school friends from Las Vegas. In the 18 years since, Panic of the Disco has won American Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, IHeart Radio Music Awards, and more. In August 2022, Brendan put out the seventh Panic at the Disco album. Viva Las Vengeance. The title track hit number one on Billboard's

alternative airplay chart. In this episode, Brendan tells the story of how he and Grammy-nominated producer Jake Sinclair and Oscar-nominated songwriter Mike Fiola all got together

to make the song Viva Las Vengeance. I grew up musical. My mom played organ for the church, sang in the choir. My dad as well. They both played guitar. So music was always around. I had to come in and be the loud,

younger child, and ask for drums. And the parents were like, Yeah, just get all your energy out. I am Brendan Uri, and I have a band called Panic at the Disco. I was kind of wandering around my studio aimlessly at 3 a.m., 4 a.m. And I had this earworm in my head. I just kept humming that over and over.

Then I started questioning myself, like, what am I doing here? Why am I still awake right now? Why won't my brain turn off? Shut up and go to bed. I was so drained, but I was restless, you know, because I had this idea and I knew I needed to sleep, but I couldn't. That's usually how it starts for me. I have this thing trapped in my brain. I got to get it out, and it won't leave my head until I put it down melodically. So I shut the doors and started recording all this stuff in the studio. So the first demo was, it was very much like the cars. It was like, little guitars chugging along. And I kind of wanted this du-wop style of drums. So it was like starting.

stop. I didn't have any words at this point, but I had the melody. And so I wrote down like some nonsense stuff. Whatever it sounded like I was saying, like folded ones or loaded guns or something like that. Having that driving force for it kind of helped me be like, oh yeah, I should go back and look at old lyrics that I've written down, ideas that I've had that I haven't used yet. So I went back in my notes app and I just scrolling through and I was like, oh yeah, this thing, Viva Las Vengeance. And that came from a movie. I was watching this horror movie called Army of the Dead. Basically, the world was in a dystopia of zombie-like nature, but the only zombies were in Vegas.

And Dave Batiste's character, he's this ex-Marine. And on his jacket is a patch that says Viva Las Vengeance. So I was like, oh, that's great. And it makes sense for me being from Vegas. So at that point, I did have the lyrics, you know, shut up and go to bed and Viva lost vengeance. At the time, I was just kind of taking a break from everything. I was so tired.

There was COVID and the lockdowns. And I was hoping to just hang with friends like I usually do when I feel stressed. I just want to ground myself with people I've worked with and hung out with for years. So, you know, I turned to my buddy Jake Sinclair. Jake is a music producer and musician. You know, we've worked on countless albums together, countless songs. And just being friends for a long time, it's easy to bounce ideas off of someone that you trust. So I played the demo.

And Jake was like, yeah, that's good. work on that. But then Jake had to go on a family trip. And he said, well, hey, I'm going to be out of town. Why don't you go hang out with Mike Viola? You know, you guys click really well together. And I think that that would just be really cool of you to do. You know, a lot of times, especially like having done songwriting sessions living in L.A., I wasn't a person that could get into a room with strangers and find a way to connect with anybody or, like, impress them with some idea. And I wanted to kind of freak myself out with what we had written. And no one was really into that. So I just took a step back. But then when you meet people like Mike Viola or Jake

Sinclair, for me, I just don't have to feel like I'm working. So the second demo I did for Viva, I went to Mike's house. You know, we sat down, I grabbed an acoustic. Once I showed Mike the song, he pretty much understood it immediately. He was like, yeah, you know, let's talk about the chords. But I was like, you know, is it too high? Or is it? Is there a thing we can do to make it more exciting once the chorus hits? Should we do like a key change? And he's like, yeah, absolutely. Let's try that.

And so even on that second demo, I was still trying to figure it out. And thank God for Mike Viola coming in and having such a well-versed knowledge of all those types of little songwriting tricks to help push the song forward. So we went to Jake's studio. And in the past, it was just me building myself as the band. It was like a one-man thing. I would do the drums. Then I would do guitar.

Then I would do the band. and then do the vocals and the harmonies. But this time, I was like, I have these amazing musicians. I should utilize their talents. And so Jake's on bass and, you know, mic's on guitar. And I'm on drums. You know, we just sat down and I think we played through it once or twice and then recorded the third time.

And we were like, all right. I wanted to step away from production styles I had done in the past. I've kind of started drifting further and further away from overproduction. And this whole album was recorded to an eight-track tape machine because at the time I was just fed up with having to go back and revisit a thing and refix a thing and auto-tune this thing. And it's like just figure it out and record it in the moment. And if we're going to do this, let's all track the three of us as the foundation for this

because there's no click track. We're just looking at each other and viving in the room. And it really brought it back to like the first punk bands I ever started in middle school. You know, that's really what it felt like. And you're like, well, there's the foundation for the song. Let's sing it. A big portion of the time I write songs, I'm thinking about the live performance, what the energy is behind that. That's really kind of been the glue for as long as I've been doing panic. I mean, I've always wanted it to be performance based to a certain degree and like theatrical is all hell. I wanted to make it raw. And a lot of it was just like

my relationship with my job and my relationship with fans who see me as this person in this band, as this character, and me knowing that that's full well, not who I am. I mean, the first album for Panic, you know, we were so green and like didn't, I mean, there was no experience for any of it, but God, it was exciting because it was like, this world that we've admired for so long had become so real all in an, instant and it was overwhelming. So we started playing characters. And, you know, that's masking all of the fears and insecurities that, you know, I'm still holding on to, I'm sure. I'm just a nervous wreck most of the time. And when I'm not expending energy to get rid of that, you know, I can become

like really, really anxious and have pretty severe, like, anxiety attacks. But that's why, you know, it's so important for me to, like, keep performing. I just, it's like, I have to be on, you know, Turn it on, be this guy now because you can't have a breakdown out of your anxiety on stage. That would be bad. So play a character, you know, like do something else or act like you have the answers or something. Really, it's pulling from my personal experience. I mean, I don't want to be a diva. I just want to be free.

On a sofa with Sativa, live in the dream. I mean, that's really like how this album was written. I was like, you know, the world is crumbling and the world's on fire. So I just want to get high and write music with my friends. I don't want to be a deep. I just want to be free. We would all stack around one microphone, the three of us, you know, Beach Boys style and just stack our harmonies together.

And, you know, giving credit where it is totally due is Mike Viola. He would sit there with an acoustic and I would sing a note naturally in this falsetto, you know, so I'm like, pah. And he'd go, okay, cool. So you sing in that range and then we'll find harmonies around that. Jake has this amazing baritone, like, love. lower voice. So he's the lower harmony, mic's in the middle, and I'm screaming on the top. We didn't use headphones when we made this album. Like, we just had the speaker at a low volume,

and it's like, if you can't hear it, like, just don't sing as loud, you know? And it was kind of teaching us to hone in our voices and find this perfect balance. It just feels, I don't know, it was joyful. So, you know, we had our eight track. We're like, well, if we're going to record a full orchestra, you know, with horns and strings and all this stuff, like, we're going to need more tracks. I have known Rob Mathis, who was the string composer, since our second album, pretty odd. Rob's arrangements are bonkers. He's so good at finding the best players.

We were like, we'd love to have the best French horn player. She came in. We'd love to get the best trombone players. They both came in. When the breakdown happens, and I just dropped it in an octave, he builds attention in that moment. But the punches that you hear, and they're all over this. There's some of my favorite little things that you can hear.

That's us punching the tape. And so, like, you're hearing, sometimes it'll cut off the top end of something, like, that first little note. Because, like, we're recording it also on another track that has this other thing that we're stacking. That's the system. That's how the tape machine works. You know, Jake and I, we love skateboarding.

And so the warehouse that we recorded, the whole purpose behind it was to stack the gear against the walls and put it in the center of the room with the console so that we could skate around all this stuff because I was like, I'm not going to sit around in this room all day and not be able to skateboard. And if we can work while we're skating, that's going to be perfect. So we built this thing we called the moat, just a perfect circle around all the gear. And we're just skating around. And Mike Viola comes into the equation. And he's like, I've never skateboarded. And so we're teaching him to skateboard. And so everybody's skating in this moat. And it really is conducive to creativity. That's why we hung out a lot. And I wasn't planning on an

album. We literally just had a plan of like, hey, let's just hang out. We've got this studio. Let's just go mess around, dude. Let's just go have fun. It's fun hanging out. So that's what we did. And then songs came out of it just because we were having the best time of our lives. And now here's Viva Las Vengeance by Panic at the Disco in its entirety. Visit songexplotor.com.net for more information. You can find links to buy or stream Viva Las Vengeance. And you can watch the music video. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length,

and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast,

like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Winerobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder and the show's theme music were created by me. I produced this episode with Craig Ely, with artwork by Carlos Lerma,

music clearance by Kathleen Smith, and production assistants from Chloe Parker and Mary Dolan. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.

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