Panic! at the Disco (often shortened to merely Panic!, P!ATD, P!@tD, or PATD) is a band that originated in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA whose sound incorporates elements of pop, electronica, dance, rock, along with many others. Their 2005 debut album A Fever You Can't Sweat Out reached #13 on the US Billboard 200, and has sold over one million copies since its September 2005 release.

History

2005: Origins and signing

The band was formed in the suburban area of Summerlin, Las Vegas, by the two childhood friends Ryan Ross on the guitar and Spencer Smith on the drums. Since the age of thirteen, the two played Blink-182 covers in bands of different formations. Ryan and Spencer then created a band under the name of "Summer League," possibly a reference to the suburb in which they lived, with childhood friends Brent Wilson, and Trevor who would later leave the band.

It was at Palo Verde High School, Brent met Brendon Urie. Wilson had asked Urie to try out as guitarist for Panic!, as they were looking for a replacement at the time. Originally, Urie was not the band's lead singer. Rather, the position belonged to current guitarist and lyricist, Ryan Ross. However, when the band heard him sing backup during a rehearsal, they were impressed with his vocal abilities and unanimously decided to make him the singer, the band then settled on the name 'Panic! at the Disco.' They got the name from the lyrics of a song called "Panic", by Name Taken: Panic at the disco / Sat back and took it so slow / Are you nervous? Are you shaking? / Save compliments to praise complation / We don't have to feel we fit in / We can move back / We can leave them.^[6] Although the band often says that the name comes from the song Panic by The Smiths, it was revealed that the Name Taken song did lend inspiration, but that the song by The Smiths is easier to explain to those who are unaware of Name Taken.

In order to promote their music, the band contacted Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz through LiveJournal, and sent him a link to their PureVolume site. Wentz was apparently so impressed that he took a trip to Las Vegas to meet the band in person. After seeing them practice in their garage, he asked if they would sign with his Fueled by Ramen imprint label Decaydance.

2006: Debut album and departure of Brent Wilson

Panic! at the Disco released their debut album A Fever You Can't Sweat Out on September 27th 2005, quickly building up a fan base through PureVolume and MySpace, though achieving little commercial recognition. After a consistent presence in PureVolume's top 10 signed artists, and reaching number one in MySpace's indie charts, Panic! at the Disco were featured on MTV's Total Request Live on January 17th 2006, where they premiered their music video for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies." Featuring Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque and an eerie circus wedding theme, the video débuted at #10 on the TRL countdown, later winning the Video of the Year award at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards, beating out major artists such as Christina Aguilera, Shakira, Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The single itself, released April 27th 2006, peaked at #7 in the US charts.

The band was originally third-billed for the Truckstops & Statelines Winter Tour in early 2006, which was headlined by The Academy Is... and included Acceptance as direct support and Hellogoodbye on the line-up. Due to their alarming increase in popularity before and during the tour, the band ended up getting pushed above Acceptance (band) to second-billed every night playing right before the headliner and "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out" outsold The Academy Is...'s debut album, "Almost Here" during the tour.

Their second single, "But It's Better If You Do," was released in the UK on May 1st, 2006 where it debuted, and peaked, at #23. The accompanying music video, released the previous month, portrays the band playing in a speakeasy in 1930's America, which, according to Urie, shows "the dark and secluded style of Panic."^[7]

The band officially announced the departure of their bassist, Brent Wilson, with a message on the band's website on 17 May 2006. Wilson has since claimed that the decision to leave was not his, and that he was fired without warning for monetary reasons, though the rest of the band deny this.^[8][9] Wilson is now demanding a cut in royalties, and has threatened he will take his former band to court if need be.^[10]

Just days after Wilson's departure, the band embarked on their first headlining tour through Europe, with long-time friend, Jon Walker, filling in for the summer tour as a temporary bassist while a permanent replacement was sought. All of the dates were sold out, with some, notably Manchester, selling out in a matter of hours. Upon their return, the band embarked on a two-month North American headlining tour with supporting acts The Hush Sound, OK Go, The Dresden Dolls, and Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, still retaining Jon Walker as a temporary bassist. On July 3rd of that year, the band's MySpace profile was edited to list Walker as bassist/vocals, and he became a permanent member of Panic! at the Disco.

The success of their first two singles helped catapult their debut album to to the top of the Billboard Independent chart and to #13 on the Billboard 200 in July 2006. The video for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" has been streamed from YouTube almost 8 million times and the song itself is also the most requested song on New York City radio station Z-100,^{[citation needed]} leading Urie to say he feels the song and video have been overplayed; "[It] isn't the only song we've written."^{[citation needed]}

Towards the end of July 2006 Panic! at the Disco released their third music video, "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off." The video features people with fish tank helmets walking the streets of what appears to be a studio back lot. The video only shows the band in one shot, reportedly because they felt that their looks were distracting from their music.

In early August 2006, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out went platinum, having sold over one million albums.

During Panic!'s opening song on August 25, 2006 at the Carling Weekend: Reading Festival, an unknown audience member threw a bottle at the stage, which struck and temporarily knocked out Brendon Urie, forcing the band to stop playing. After some minutes, he got back up and shouted to the crowd, "You can't take me out! Let's see how well you guys do with my left side," and continued with the same song.^[11] In a phone interview Ryan Ross stated that "We [Panic!] were kinda expecting that [The bottling] going into the Reading, because we heard that that's kinda a tradition they have over there" and then continued by saying that "We walked on and we were kinda expecting that to keep our heads up the whole time, and unfortunately Brendon, he was catching bottles coming towards me and Jon and then he was dodging them himself, and kinda just didn't see one coming that I saw and it got him pretty good, and I dunno that's the only time anything like that's ever happened so hopefully we won't have to worry about anything like that too much." ^[12]

The band embarked on a world tour in the later part of 2006. It included dates in Australia, New Zealand, and continental Europe. On November 7, 2006, they kicked off their first-ever arena tour with Bloc Party (who shortly dropped out because of drummer Matt Tong suffering a collapsed lung) and Jack's Mannequin. The Plain White T's were added to the next few weeks of The Nothing Rhymes With Circus Tour. They opened up the shows beginning in New York through November 26 in Iowa. After that, Cobra Starship were on the tour through December 9 in San Diego. The band appeared along with Fall Out Boy, Marilyn Manson, and other bands on the special edition soundtrack of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas covering "This Is Halloween", which was re-released in 3D on October 20.

Their most recent and final single from A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, "Build God, Then We'll Talk," was released on March 5th 2007. The accompanying music video portrays the fallacy of relationships.

2007-2008: Second album

The band planned to have producer Danny Elfman, who worked on the original Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, but have since been confirmed to have moved on to producer Rob Mathes, who worked on the re-release of the soundtrack, which Panic! was featured in with a cover of "This Is Halloween".^[13]

Pete Wentz, the Fall Out Boy bassist who signed Panic!, said in an MTV article that he is "pumped for the [upcoming] Panic LP". He has reportedly heard some of the new material, and also said, "I think it will be all over for anyone else in 2008 if this [one] track is picked as the first single. It has the biggest hook I have ever heard." Wentz also commented on guitarist Ryan Ross, saying, "Ryan [Ross] always likes to keep me guessing or try to freak me out with stuff. So he will message me to tell me that they have just written an amazing song, and I will get excited, then he will message me again to tell me it sounds like 'Aladdin', and I will feel kind of bemused. Or last week he messaged me to say they had written a song that makes him think of France. He can say some weird stuff." ^[14] Since his statements however, Panic! have chosen to scrap all the songs that they had worked on and have remade the second album.

In May 2007 it was announced that a Smashing Pumpkins Tribute LP would be released, compiled by MySpace and Spin. The LP features Panic!'s cover of "Tonight, Tonight" and was included free in the June 26 2007 issue of Spin. ^[15]

Panic! at the Disco have recently been performing new songs (Three in total) from their upcoming album, at the various festivals they are performing at before going into recording. Panic! have been playing two songs under the working titles "Nine In The Afternoon" and "Middle Of Summer" but it is believed that the titles will change once Panic! goes into recording over the winter. ^[16] Two of the new songs has been officially titled, "It's True Love" and "Nine In The Afternoon" as stated by Ryan Ross in an interview with MTV, yet it seems that "It's True Love", may not appear in the second album. "We hadn't played a show in a while, and we wanted to play something new, but that song's probably not even going to make the record at this point," said Ryan Ross "We've changed a lot of what we want to do with the record. And I feel like we're happier with the new songs we have so far than we ever were with any of the old songs on the last record." ^[17]

When asked by MTV in an interview why Panic! had scrapped their whole record and chose to rewrite it Ryan Ross explained "We were just piecing stuff together up in the cabin. We would take lyrics, and we didn't really have ... a band set up," he explained. "We were just writing on pianos and guitars separately and just throwing other things in there, and it didn't really sound like a band, it sounded like a film score." Ryan then continued "We went through a stage of writing that just happened because we were on tour for so long, and we were sick of those old songs so much that we decided to write songs that were really complicated and challenging for us. Then we realized that it's not going to be any fun to play these live either, so we decided to ditch the whole project. There was a story line throughout the whole record, a short story, and we decided to put that on the shelf and just start playing as a band, and it's been a lot better." As for the new album at this point "We've got about six or seven songs that are pretty much complete ... and [they're] a lot more uplifting. They've got a more positive outlook to them. It's kind of hard to write a bunch of sad songs if you're not sad anymore. I guess they're pretty different than the songs on the first album. I mean, we wrote those songs like three to four years ago, so obviously we've changed a lot in terms of everything — what we like and what we think is good."

Spencer Smith then commented on when Panic! plan to release some of the new album "We want to have the new single out by the end of the year, probably around Christmas. And then have the album out in February. We hope." ^[18] On November 19th on the NBC drama Heroes a recorded portion of Panic!'s song "Nine In The Afternoon" was played during a scene where Claire Bennet is practicing for a pep rally. ^{[19] [20]}

Performances

Panic! at the Disco is known for old-style circus shows, where they bring an entourage of contortionists and dancers on stage with them as they perform.

They also had a notable performance in Times Square during the New Year's Eve celebrations in December 2006/January 2007 with Carson Daly. They performed two of their hit songs, "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off" (Last performance in 2006) and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" (First performance in 2007). Although both songs include swear words Panic! at the Disco sang censored versions of the songs, because the event was performed on live network television.

Live, they have also performed cover versions of Third Eye Blind's "Slow Motion", Radiohead's "Karma Police", Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight", two versions of Counting Crows' "Round Here", K-Ci and Jojo's "All My Life", Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time", Nelly Furtado's "Maneater", Queen's "Killer Queen", The Beatles's "Eleanor Rigby", blink-182's "What's My Age Again?", and The Band's "The Weight". ^[21]

Band members

Current members

• Brendon Urie - vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion (2005-present)
• Ryan Ross - guitar, lyrics, vocals, keyboards, accordion (2005-present)
• Jon Walker - bass guitar, vocals, harmonica (2006-present)
• Spencer Smith - drums, percussion (2005-present)

Former members

• Brent Wilson - bass guitar, vocals (2005-2006)

Discography

Albums

Singles

Videography

• "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" (2006)
• "But It's Better If You Do" (2006)
• "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off" (2006)
• "Build God, Then We'll Talk" (2007)

DVD

Panic! at the Disco released a limited edition collector's set. Only 25,000 of these were made worldwide and currently about 1,200 are left for sale in mint condition. The box contains a DVD of their live concert in Denver, a limited edition CD of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, pictures of the band, a blank diary, a poster, lyric cards, tour program, a phenakistoscope, and a certificate of authenticity.

Awards

• MTV Video Music Awards:

• Won: Video of the Year (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
• Nominated: Best Group Video (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
• Nominated: Best Rock Video (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
• Nominated: Best New Artist in a Video (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
• Nominated: Best Art Direction in a Video (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"

• TMF Awards:

• Won: Best Video International (2006) for "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"

• NME Awards:

• Worst Band 2007^[22]

References

External links

• Official website
• Template:MySpace
• Template:MySpace (UK profile)
• Template:Last.fm
• Panic! at the Disco's profile at PureVolume
• Panic! at the Disco discography at MusicBrainz