After selling over a million copies of their debut CD A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, headlining their own tour last fall and starting out the new year on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, Panic! at the Disco are bored. In a recent interview with the British music magazine Kerrang!, the four guys who took home last years MTV’s Video of the Year award for their hit single “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” admit that getting back to “normal” has been a real drag. Says lead singer Brendon Urie:
I can see why old people get jobs after they’ve retired. You get so bored. I’m annoyed with how boring it is when you have nothing to do. I’ve done ‘Guitar Hero’…I can’t get any better at it.
Poor, Brendon. But it’s not just a lazy summer in hometown Las Vegas (or Chicago for bassist and newest member Jon Walker) that’s brought on such monotony. Last March, the band moved into a secluded cabin in Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest to work on their highly anticipated (and already highly endorsed by mentor Pete Wentz) sophomore album. When asked if two months in the mountains had them struggling to sweat out a “cabin fever”, Jon Walker regaled wild tales of how the rockers spent those cold winter nights.
We had a beard growing contest and we all grew some pretty kick-ass facial hair! We all stopped shaving when we went up to the mountain to work on the new songs. [Drummer] Spencer [Smith] is sticking with his, but the others shaved theirs off.
Wow, they really must have been bored. But don’t worry, kids – soon the boys will have better things to pass the time than cultivating more “kick-ass” attempts to shed the pretty boy image Panic! at the Disco has been carrying since, well, they came up with the name Panic! at the Disco. The band will be going back on tour this month when they co-headline with their friends Fall Out Boy for the Decaydance Fest, which unfortunately will only be touring in Europe. They will also be playing festivals in Reading (where the infamous Brendon Urie bottle incident took place in 2006) and Leeds in England, as well as Bumbershoot and Street Scene 2007 state-side. After that, you can be expecting Panic!’s new album in early 2008. Let’s just hope they don’t have any free time before the photo shoot for their album cover. I like my Spencer Smith clean-shaven. What about you?