Ryan Ross & Brendon Urie on their singer/songwriter dynamic throughout 2006 (transcriptions + sources under the cut)
Rock Sound magazine:
"He is everything I am not," comments Ross of Urie. "From day-one I knew he was the singer, and I wrote the songs knowing I could not get up there and deliver the stuff in the way that he does. In a way he becomes me when on stage, as he says everything I wish I could but cannot. There are definitely things I did not hold back on because I knew it would not be me delivering it live."
Musiqueplus interview:
Interviewer: Was there a special moment where you guys said, every single piece of the puzzle is there and this is actually going to work?
Ross: Probably when I decided that I'm not a good singer and Brendon started singing. I was like, (Brendon: Okay!) this will work.
Urie: There we go, when I became the singer. There we go.
DVD interview:
Interviewer: How is it the two of you work together in the sense of like, cause [Ryan is] writing lyrics and [Brendon is] singing them and it's gotta be an interesting, uncommon situation.
Ross: Yeah, and that was really a tough kind of thing to figure out.
Urie: That was hard, writing for the album, because, well, A, I had never worked with a band, writing songs and stuff like that, so that was new to me, just being in a band, and never playing shows and having the experience so, and B, I always wrote, you know, shitty as they were, lyrics by myself and I would sing them so it was kind of weird to work that way with him being like, you have to sing it this way, it has to be presented in this fashion, and being like, oh God, I don't know if I can do it justice, because these are your words, how am I gonna be your voice? But I think we're getting better now.
Ross: Me trying to explain some kind of vocal characteristic to him, but then me not actually being able to sing it because I'm not that good at singing but then expecting him to understand what I meant was just very stressful the whole time. We'd get in fights all the time just out of frustration. It was very frustrating, but at the same time I think allowed me to write whatever kind of lyrics I wanted to write because I knew he was going to be singing them and I felt like he had such a stronger voice and it was definitely a voice that sort of demands that attention, you know, it's very prominent. And some of the lyrics were, you know, they're not exactly playing it safe, I guess, in any sort of way.
Urie: You could kind of hide behind my voice, I guess, in a sense.
Ross: It felt right to have confident sounding lyrics behind a confident voice, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
