about Panic! at the Disco’s cabin album
ok the original version of this post was just an ongoing random list that turned into a bit of a mess, so I redid the format now and then combined 2 other post drafts into this yay.
ABOUT THE SOUND / CONCEPT
The album had a “modern fairy tale” quality and took place in a “mixed reality” – a place that’s not real. it was a “strange world” Ryan said he was trying to figure out. Jon called it a “timeless age of romantic, poetic fantasies.” Brendon said something about how they were trying to create a fictional world that any era could relate to.
There was an overall plot with a short story that ran through each song. It was like a “Disney-styled fairytale concept album” but was also a doomed love story (they said Pretty. Odd. was a lot more uplifting & positive in comparison). Apparently the album had started along the concept of the seven deadly sins with songs roughly titled “pride,” “jealousy,” etc.
Folkin Around was a song title that was carried over (but not the actual song!! just the title. the band still wanted to use that title somehow). Brendon & Jon were probably joking about the Fill Me Up / Porridge stuff but I thought that was great… so was the “I don’t have a shirt, but I’ve got a hat” bit. (again, jokes).
Jon said that “She Had The World” is the closest to the sound of the cabin album. “Behind the Sea” carried over elements too. Ryan said that some of the Pretty. Odd. songs were about the fictional characters he created for Cricket & Clover, so they carried over some small influences. None of the Cricket & Clover songs were on Pretty. Odd., though.
The band often said the songs sounded “cinematic” and compared everything to a film score (both in terms of the sound and how they approached writing it). Apparently there was a Danny Elfman influence… he’s one of the people they had talked about considering as a producer too.
Ryan told Rock Sound that the album “would have been animated if it had been a movie. It was set in a somewhat alternate world and it did not contain human beings, more creatures of some sort. Maybe. They were not based anywhere in particular, just somewhere. It was more of a fairytale.” So maybe things evolved at some point because he initially said that both Cricket & Clover were human.
There was almost no rock sound, no choruses, and almost no guitar or drums. Producer Rob Mathes said “the song structures were really bizarre.“ The album was also called “shapeless, formless, largely instrumental… more akin to a film score or rock opera – sans rock that is.”
The band almost didn’t want to use real instruments… Spencer even wanted to build a drum set out of old junk like wood crates & glass etc.
Pete Wentz described the album as a film score/modern Beatles thing and also "a bizarre musical about wolves. It felt a bit forced.” Brendon said it “sounded like we were writing a musical – not even a rock opera, just an opera.” The band made a lot of other comments about how it sounded more like a musical than a band.
Sometimes Ryan said it wasn’t a concept album, but other times he called it a concept album himself.
Pete told Popworld Pulp that “I’ve heard some songs. One was like a film score, then it turns into Beatles 2007… They’ve got a hard road ahead of them because when you have that amount of success in a short amount of time, you have to repeat it or take a nosedive.”
This next part is from a Japanese interview that was spread through 3-4 magazines. I was hesitant to include it before because the methods of translation available 12 years ago were not the greatest lol. However, I just spent half a week scanning everything & running it through different sites to get a solid sense of the main ideas:
The album was a story about 2 characters: Cricket & Clover. Cricket was the main character (Brendon sang that part) and Clover was the girl he fell in love with at first sight. (example of how the translation sites were iffy in 2008: people used to say that CRICKET IS THE STAR, which the lyrics of Nearly Witches later sounded like they supported. But it turns out he probably wasn’t an actual star in the sky who fell from the heavens… the word translates to “protagonist, star, main character” etc).
Ryan was asked if the love songs were about him and he said maybe, but it’s easier for him to write through fictional characters. Ryan had written about half of the lyrics by the time this interview happened at the cabin. He knew where he wanted the story to go, but still had to get the rest down in the form of lyrics.
Ryan liked that there was an overall story the whole band was familiar with, because then they all knew what emotion they were going for in writing the music (whereas when they were writing AFYCSO Brendon would sometimes have to ask Ryan to explain the emotion he wanted before Brendon could take the lyrics and create music to fit that).
Brendon said that the storyline of the fairytale album they were writing was for adults, but he hoped kids could enjoy the music as well. He was a Miyazaki fan and said he loved how those movies were timeless & could be appreciated by all ages… Howl’s Moving Castle sounded like some of his main inspiration for the cabin album. However, Brendon said Ryan had other inspiration and that he wasn’t speaking for him.
Brendon said that the first song on the cabin album sounded like Build God (the band had also been saying throughout 2006 that their next album would pick up where the previous one left off… they wanted to continue with the orchestration).
Ryan said that the third song on the album was about the first time the two main characters met and fell in love at first sight, but there were 3 characters overall.
Brendon said that a lot of the songs were satirical… and that’s exactly what I was trying to get at when I kept saying that we were probably missing a lot of context for It’s True Love and we weren’t reading the tone right.
Ryan had been working on different stories since fall 2005 and wanted to tie them together… he’d put a lot of work into the background story for the lyrics. There was too much to fit into the songs, so he was hoping to publish a short story to accompany the album that would give people a better understanding of the whole world & storyline.
ABOUT THE WRITING PROCESS
When the band wrote AFYCSO they were sick of the current music scene and wanted to do something different to challenge themselves & their listeners. By 2007 they were tired of playing their old songs and wanted to shake things up & do something “complicated and challenging” that was different. However, they weren’t sure exactly what they wanted to do… and they had the complete freedom to do literally anything. I really need to emphasize how much pressure the guys were putting on themselves at this point (which they admitted later on). Ryan had been turned into a wunderkind by some of the media, the band’s identity seemed to be wrapped up in doing something creative & unique, and the Fever era had ended during the peak of the pre-split band’s fame.
Ryan took voice lessons throughout the Fever era to prepare for the album. Eric also gave Ryan & Spencer classical piano lessons in late 2006, Ryan took guitar lessons, Spencer took drum lessons, and Brendon learned some new instruments.
Ryan said this was the first time he tried to write a love song.
Ryan wasn’t sure if he should write the lyrics for this album in the style of a modern writer or not. He viewed “timeless” writers like Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Lewis Carroll as his inspiration.
Here’s a post of some of the band’s comments throughout the Fever era about their plans for the second album. Ryan had been coming up with some ideas on the road and then he told Helio that “on the new record that we just started to write it has been Spencer and I writing the lyrics together and working out what we call the plot line.” Spencer had been a HUGE part of dreaming up some of the most creative aspects of the Fever era (like for the stage shows, videos, album art, and other visual stuff), so I was excited to hear that he was involved in planning any kind of story.
Jon said in 2008: "It took us some time to get used to writing songs and actually having the time to search and discover what we wanted to be doing.”
MTV talked to the band during the Atlanta show at the end of March (here’s a recent upload with some of the short clips that MTV News used).
Ryan told MTV that "After bands become successful, they always make that choice to do the record about how cool or how hard it is to be in a successful band. So we wanted to do something more universal, something that pretty much anyone can relate to.” He also talked about the writing process: “it’s been really fun so far. I’ll show these guys the lyrics and we’ll all sit down and just come up with ideas. Kind of how you do a film score: the composer will watch the scene and then write what he feels like that scene is.”
Jon told MTV during the same March interview: "We all got together and created this — I guess you could call it a concept — that we all wrote and we were all involved with and pretty interested in.”
Ryan later described the cabin album as “a short story set to music. I was mostly working on it by myself, and while the other guys liked it, it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.”
The guys said they would write stuff separately on different instruments and then throw it in the mix.
Jon told AbsolutePunk in 2008: “It was pretty much the first time we had ever hung out together not touring or had something else to do, you know, TV shows or all the stuff. Basically just us hanging out. We all felt relieved. It was more a vacation than anything. We didn’t really know what we wanted to do musically. More than anything it was just us experimenting. Just trying different stuff. But then we realized that we kinda got in over our heads. We were trying to do some kind of story - you could call it a concept album - but we didn’t really know what it was.”
Ryan said they were trying to stretch their creative boundaries and “it became a lot harder than we thought.”
the guys took a lot of drugs at the cabin (I don’t really reference a lot of post-split stuff, but this quote sums things up well).
Brendon said in a summer 2008 interview that the songwriting had been frustrating, forced, and no fun.
It just didn’t sound like anyone was having fun with the project eventually. Jon also said it felt like a chore to work on.
In early 2008 Brendon told Rock Sound that “as a band where we were over a year ago was a very different place. We worked out that egos and pretension can really get in the way. We were at a point where things were getting heated and we were fighting a lot, we were getting freaked out and feeling the pressure of being hectic. So we switched it round and focused on stuff that was fun for us and started to ignore all the criticism.”
Jon said he was frustrated that they were all in a positive, happy place but that wasn’t coming through in the music they were writing. He also said that “we kind of forgot we had to go on tour and play the songs in front of people.”
Jon told The Cleveland Free Times in 2008: "We’d been touring for so long, and we hadn’t written anything on tour. We were definitely rusty. We were never discouraged by it but we were never really excited by it. We were having a lot of fun, we were all getting along really well, but it wasn’t coming out in the songs we were writing. And that was a big thing for us. I think we realized that after playing the same songs for two years, we had a chance to write more songs that we’re going to play for the next two years, so we better make sure we’re going to have fun doing it.” (Jon reallllllly seemed like he led the shift towards Pretty. Odd. btw… like I had such a strong sense in late 2007 & early 2008 that Jon had helped them find that particular direction).
later in 2007 Ryan told MTV: “It didn’t really sound like a band, it sounded like a film score. We decided to ditch the whole project and just start playing as a band. It’s been a lot better.”
Ryan told Spin that he “wanted to write a musical and maybe stage it in New York or L.A. It was a love story set in this animated, fantastical world. But we got halfway through some demos and I couldn’t figure out how to finish it, so we decided to do a rock’n’roll album instead.”
This MTV article is just someone’s opinion, but I thought it was really spot-on in its assessment: Panic have already shown a flair for the, uh, dramatic… Plus, they’ve never exactly been taken seriously by critics, which means that they probably headed into that Nevada cabin with both a bucketful of bizarre ideas… and the always-dreaded something to prove. Now, take all that potential, add to it the pressure a young band must feel when it has to follow up a breakout debut disc, and stir in the idea of four kids spending an inordinate amount of time by themselves in a log cabin, with no one to tell them what to do — or not to do. It’s almost like some sort of perfect storm — a mixture of inexperience and ego and idealism and isolation that could have birthed the most terrifically terrible concept album of all time.
When Brendon was at The Cab’s show in late March he told a journalist “We’re about halfway done with the demos. We’re keeping them all so far. Every one we’ve done, we like.”
Zack told fans at the Atlanta show at the end of March that the band had finished 4 songs so far. Patrick Stump said in April that he’d heard parts and had high expectations for the album.
Ryan also told MTV during the Atlanta show that they had 4 songs finished.
Rock Sound wrote in May (for the June issue) that Pete Wentz had heard some of the stuff that P!ATD was working on. Pete 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. Ryan 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.”
MTV reported in early May that the band had finished 8 songs and were due to start tracking them in June.
P!ATD’s site updated fans in late May that the band was finishing up writing and would begin recording in a few weeks. Then the band transitioned to the LA area to record their demos (I put all of that info in another post).
The Cab told some fans that they’d heard P!ATD’s new album… as in multiple songs.
Ryan said in early June: "We’ve got about nine songs complete with lyrics and melodies and everything. Right now we’re still finishing writing the last three or four songs.” The album was scrapped in July after the band played It’s True Love at Summerfest (idk if that was the official name of the song, but that’s what it ended up getting called… even though some fans on Buzznet insisted that the full title was “The Simplistics Of True Love’s First” because they wanted to make it about fanfiction).
we did get to hear the Nearly Witches demo over a year after the cabin season.
Rolling Stone reported that “the band discarded ten or so songs.”
Different articles made it sound like the band was ¾ finished with the cabin album when they scrapped it because the concept got spread too thin and it was hard to covert to something a band could play live.
Brendon later said they wrote 6 songs overall. In another interview in summer 2008 he said they had recorded 6 demos. He also told 1Live Radio in 2008 that they nestled in a cabin and wrote 6-7 songs following a very specific concept, but overdid it.
Ryan told Kerrang that “we wrote six songs and it had a storyline that never really got finished. It was supposed to be fun to write but in fact just became a chore. It was creative in a way that just became detrimental because it was so challenging.”
Spencer told Rock Sound in early 2008: “We wanted to do something that we could turn into something more than just an album. But we had never tried anything like that before, so we got about five or six songs done and we evaluated it and realized it was not becoming what we wanted. Us writing music had become a weird task, trying to fit everything into this one idea we had dreamt up.”
A decent amount of the comments from Brendon, Spencer, and Ryan were relatively consistent & similar, but Jon kept trying to downplay the cabin album & dismiss it. Here are a few of his comments from interviews during 2008:
“There were 6 or 7 ideas for songs but very few actual songs. We eventually figured out that we weren’t having as much fun as we thought and that we couldn’t use any of it.”
“Well, just to clarify, it was about seven or eight ideas. Nothing concrete was ever really recorded…. There were a few songs that were demoed - rough, incomplete demos… it was more of random ideas here and there.”
"We didn’t get any songs done, but we got like 8 to 10 ideas for songs that never got finished.”
”It kind of blew up into this thing where we had a whole album recorded and we just threw it away… it was more just a few ideas that we had that we ended up never completing. It was just the first stages of writing. We were just having a bit more fun than we should’ve instead of concentrating on writing songs.”
All four guys said there was a possibility that they could still do the concept someday (but Ryan also made other comments that they would never use any of those songs again). Spencer insisted that it was a good idea even if it wasn’t the right time. However, they all agreed that it would be hard to tour with that kind of album since it was more of a musical than something a band would do. Forgive Durden seemed to face a similar challenge with Razia’s Shadow… it’s an awesome musical, but it wouldn’t work well in the context of a normal tour (especially at big festivals). P!ATD talked about how their album’s idea became “very strained” when they tried to make it into more of a band sound or something that could be played at shows. Jon said it was “becoming pretty inorganic as we could only play two of the songs live.” (In comparison, he often talked about how he appreciated that the sound of Pretty. Odd. was so organic).
The guys all sounded relieved to start over after they scrapped the album and began to pursue a different direction that they were happier working on. People from their label have said that it was good the cabin album got scrapped because the band tried too hard to make it perfect and do too much with it. Rob Mathes also said “the only problem with this thing is it’s all ambiguity. I’m all for experimentation but it was to a fault.”
update: I wouldn’t view the cabin album as some kind of missing link between AFYCSO & Pretty. Odd. This album was like a more extreme extension of what they’d started with AFYCSO (with the Danny Elfman theatrical vibes), and then the band completely changed directions when it wasn’t working.
Basically, spring 2007 was like a season for the band to figure out what they wanted to do next and reset after an intense 1.5 years of touring on AFYCSO. I think the best summary of the cabin era was how The Cleveland Free Times called it a “palate-clearing writing exercise for the band.” The process of writing a weird concept album that sounded like a continuation of where they left off with AFYCSO helped them learn what they did not want to do for their second album. They decided to stop taking themselves so seriously, and to start writing happy songs that were fun to play & they could tour with.
In some Pretty. Odd. interviews the band said the cabin songs were intentionally trashed and probably wouldn’t resurface. But apparently Brendon said somewhat recently that there’s stuff on a hard drive somewhere but he doesn’t have it? I also heard Jon said he found some demos and wants to release them… and then Ryan said a few years ago he has nothing left but then in 2019 he said he has the demos??
Also: we can hear hints of the cabin songs in Shane’s documentary stuff, but I’m just saying… there was clearly a lot more of that footage that existed at one point (although idk who would own the rights to that). I totally understand that the songs the band worked on in spring 2007 aren’t supposed to be good or anything that you’d probably want to share with people, but I would still love to hear literally anything.
I guess I’ll include the picture of the “feather fingers” lyrics too because it does look like Ryan’s handwriting (but idk the source so I’m def not saying it’s 100% real… maybe people who have been around in the last decade have more info about this picture, but I’m just saying – I saw enough fake lyrics “from Ryan” in 2007 to make me take everything with a grain of salt):
some comments the band made about where they were at in early 2007:
Ryan to Billboard in 2008: “We wanted to grow, and we were really over the circus theme.”
Ryan to AbsolutePunk at the end of the Fever era: “Our goal wasn’t to become part of the mainstream music scene so if we disappear from it but are making records we’re still proud of, I won’t consider that failing.”
Spencer talked to Kerrang while the band was at the cabin: “We had so much success so quickly, so there are some expectations for ourselves anyway. For us, just trying to write 13 or 14 songs that we’re all happy with is kind of difficult, because we’ll write something and then throw so much away. It really takes a long time for us to be happy with anything!”
Spencer in spring 2008 to the Toronto Sun: “We’d been playing those songs for a year and a half so all you want to do is play something different. We were coming off the road from our first album and we just wanted to write songs that were as far away from the first album as possible.”
Helio asked Ryan at the start of 2007 how he will make sure the band has staying power: “I think a lot of people try to guess what people are going to like and that’s what they try to do throughout their career. I think the only thing we can do is keep on creating things that we are happy with and hopefully other people enjoy it too, because the second you stop having sincerity and you just try to appeal to people, I think that’s when people can see through what you’re doing.”
Ryan talking to Ultimate Guitar about the band’s mindset while they wrote the cabin album: “I didn’t really have anyone to relate to in our situation, being 17 and 18 and writing an album - having way more success than we ever thought we would. Then we tried to figure out what we’re supposed to do next. I think we were just confused and we didn’t really know what we wanted to do. It took us a while to figure that out. I guess you could attribute all that time spent in the mountains to us just trying to figure it out.”
Jon talked to The Cleveland Free Times in 2008 about what the end of the Fever era was like: “In the back of our minds we’ve all had this feeling of, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ It has all happened so fast. We’d been going non-stop up until starting to write the next record. We spent pretty much of ‘07 writing the record and it was probably the first time we’d stepped back and actually realized what had happened and kind of went, 'Whoa, that was pretty crazy. Now what?’ But after a few months, we got our stuff together and phased all that out and started writing songs.”
Spencer told Drum Magazine that “there was definitely more pressure on us just understanding that we were going to have an audience when the new record came out. And knowing what level [of success] we were at made it a little bit scary.
Ryan in June 2007 about the speculation of a sophomore slump: “There is definitely that pressure. A lot of people try and say they aren’t affected by it. The only thing we can do is try and write songs we enjoy like the last time… From a radio and MTV standpoint, all of our singles (off the last record) were pretty strange pop songs. It would be hard for us to try and recreate what we did on those because it would be obvious that’s what we were doing. It’s going to be different this time around. Different doesn’t always mean better, but hopefully in this case it will be.”
random note: the earliest versions of Nine in the Afternoon and Middle of Summer had absolutely nothing to do with the cabin album. Also, the version of Folkin’ Around that’s on Pretty. Odd. had nothing to do with the cabin album either (aside from using a title they had liked).
update just in case it’s helpful: the band wasn’t at the literal cabin the whole time that they were working on the cabin album. their time in LA is still part of the cabin era! read this, and then here’s more info. any demo that they worked on in LA instead of at the literal cabin is still part of the cabin album.
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