Interview: Panic! At The Disco's Spencer Smith on touring, Patrick Stump, new music and mankinis

PANIC! AT THE DISCO’s current U.S. tour got off to an auspicious start: Frontman Brendon Urie missed the first show in Salt Lake City because there was a chance he was suffering from malaria. In his place, the band recruited replacement singers, including Neon Trees frontman Tyler Glenn and a local band member named Ashley Houghton. Thankfully, Urie soon was given the all-clear—paving the way for the band’s tour with Patrick Stump and Foxy Shazam to continue on as planned. AP caught up with drummer SPENCER SMITH earlier this week in Sacramento, California, the day after a show in Reno, Nevada. Smith talked about the replacement singers, his current tour mates, new material Panic!’s been writing, what guitarist Ian Crawford and bassist Dallon Weekes bring to the band—and what exactly was up with that picture of Urie wearing a Borat-styled mankini.

Interview: Annie Zaleski

So why did you guys think Brendon had malaria?
We started in Indonesia and then we went to Australia for ten days and everybody was fine that whole time. It was actually on the flight back—we were in Hong Kong on a layover, getting ready to fly back to L.A. All of us around the same time started feeling like we were catching a cold or something. We just figured, “Well, obviously, we’ve been doing a lot of traveling [and have been on] a lot of airplanes and stuff.” When we got back, the three of us besides Brendon were jetlagged but not really feeling nearly as bad as he was. He thought he just had a cold, but after the first full day when he was just feeling really bad, he decided to go to the doctor, maybe get some antibiotics or a B12 shot.

When he told them he had been in Indonesia, they said, “Well, we can’t rule [malaria] out, because the symptoms are very similar. So you can’t fly, because if you do fly and the test results come back positive, you’re just going to be in a hospital in Salt Lake City for the next two weeks.” We just had to figure out what we were going to do, and luckily that night of that Salt Lake City show, they were like, “Well, okay, we don’t think it’s malaria—it’s just some kind of weird virus.” They cleared him to get on an airplane.

We learned a lot about malaria in the time leading up to [getting] any sort of results back. It turns out, we thought he would have had the symptoms in Australia, and then I read online the earliest it could come up is eight days after he’s been infected—and sometimes it can take up to four to six weeks, and it’s just in your liver basically growing as a virus. It’s pretty disgusting. [Laughs.]

I love what you guys did with the fans in Salt Lake City, having them audition to sing. How did you convince people you weren’t kidding about letting them get onstage?
That morning, once we found out Brendon for sure wasn’t going to come to the show, I wanted to get [the message] out online as soon as possible he wasn’t going to be there, so people wouldn’t be expecting him. I didn’t want to cancel at the last second. Once we decided to make the most of what we could, that [idea of the fan contest] went up along with the note that Brendon was definitely not going to be at the show. At that point, some of the fans figured, “Hey, whether they’re serious or not, we’ll give it a shot.” We organized this little thing with maybe 10 fans that wanted to give it a shot. We had American Idol-style auditions in our dressing room and we eventually found our winner. She did “I Write Sins [Not Tragedies]” so that was pretty cool.

She was pretty talented! I saw the video on YouTube, and I was impressed.
Obviously, a lot of the fans were very nervous just coming in and doing the audition. If they’re extremely nervous just in front of us, [and] then they get onstage and they’re in front of like 4,000 people—that’s just so much to put on somebody. Luckily, we found this girl who worked at a local record shop and she’s in a local band in Utah, so she’s been onstage before. She was nervous, but was very cool and very excited about it more than anything. That’s when we knew we had the right person.

Your stuff’s not the easiest to sing, either!
That song starts off with a sample of a cello; we’re not even playing anything, it’s a syncopated thing. You definitely have to have a good sense of rhythm to be able to keep up on vocals. That was another challenge, but yeah, she nailed it.

I like that you guys are asking people to choose what cover songs you do every night. How did you choose each song that you learned for the tour?
We were getting ready for some of the shows and doing the basic rehearsals, and talking about some different covers we’d like to do. The idea came up of having fans vote. Some of the covers we’ve done in the past had been songs we knew going into it were probably going to be songs fans of ours may have never heard before. With a song [we’ve covered] like “The Weight” by the Band—we expose people to some music they may not have heard, and we get a lot of positive response saying, “Hey, I wouldn’t have checked this out normally, thank you,” which is good.

But we knew if we threw songs like that in with songs like [Adele's] “Rolling In The Deep” that’s relative right now, we’d probably be playing the same song every night. We wanted to play 4 or 5 songs that were relatively new and popular in the past couple years, so we had a good shot of playing something different. We’ll see how that works out.

I saw you guys years ago and you covered Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins, and everyone in the crowd was befuddled. It is funny, what’s really familiar to one person is a mystery to someone else.
It’s an interesting thing, and a lot of it is an age difference or a generation difference. We have songs we grew up on from our parents playing us. It’s cool to be able to do our own take on it, but then also expose people to the original. We get tired of playing our own songs, so it turns out there’s all these other bands who have written a lot of songs that are quite better than ours are. [Laughs.]

You guys and Patrick Stump go way back. What’s really stood out to you about him now as a performer, as you’re seeing him do his solo stuff?
It’s really exciting, because when we were on tour with Fall Out Boy for two or three tours, he was always writing, and a lot of times it was Fall Out Boy stuff. But when we’d just be talking backstage and talking about music we like and music we were influenced by, he would always have influences that didn’t necessarily instantly translate into what you’d hear on a Fall Out Boy record. We always knew—and grew more aware—he had this whole love of this style of music that if he had the opportunity to do something, he would be able to really do something special. That was what was really cool abut his solo record. It made sense for us—and now seeing him onstage, he has this whole new persona and this whole new confidence almost being up there as himself. His band’s also amazing, too.

In a sense, Fall Out boy were kind of mentors for you guys, and now you’re almost peers with them.
We sort of still look to those guys as a little bit more of that, like, “You guys have been doing things a little bit longer than we have,” and still sort of look to Pete [Wentz] for some advice. But it has changed over the past few years. Now, touring together is less like a big-brother, little-brother thing.

(Continued on page 2…)

I saw you guys in June, and I was impressed how much your fans appreciated and welcomed Foxy Shazam. They’re not immediately accessible, and I thought it was a testament to the type of people who come to your shows.
I was really excited about that, too. It was a band we were fans of for quite awhile. We just love the guys in the band, their stage performance and the music so much that on tour, it was like, “Well, we don’t really care what anybody else thinks, because we think they’re great, and they absolutely deserve to be on stage.” I just thought they were so good live, it would be a little odd to me if it didn’t translate to some people. That’s the best thing about having them as an opener—I feel like we’ve got an unfair advantage on the tour, because we have this opening band that’s putting on just as good a show as any headlining band I’ve seen in quite a while. It makes the show that much better for everybody.

Now that Vices And Virtues has been out for awhile, and you’ve played the songs live and they’ve had a chance to grow, what’s your take on the music on the record?
We have a weird perspective on it, because we were working on it for quite a while, and some of the ideas came from demos that were two years old—and then there are a couple songs that were written within the last few weeks of recording. [The album] seems to me like a good representation of what it actually was—which was two, two-and-a-half years of trying to figure out what we wanted the band to be, post-splitting with Ryan [Ross] and Jon [Walker].

To some people, when you just get the finished product, it can sound a little more fluid or a little more cohesive. To me, it’s still, when I hear a certain song, I know it’s three-and-a-half years old. It doesn’t come across as new as some of the other ones do. It’s now a motivating thing, because we were able to finish [the album] and get over the hump of knowing what we want to do, where we want to take the band and move forward and stop second-guessing any of our decisions. It’s positive reinforcement to move forward.

You don’t have any shows scheduled after the U.S. tour. Does that mean you guys are going to do some more writing?
We’ve been doing some writing on the road. It’s really easy now to do pretty decent demos just on your laptop or in the back of the bus. We’ve been messing around with some new ideas, and hopefully as soon as we get off tour we’ll be able to continue writing and maybe bring some of the ideas into the studio and see where things go. As opposed to leaving the studio feeling like, “Okay, the record’s done, I’m tired of working in the studio, let’s get on the road,” we were sort of like, “Ahh, I feel like we just kind of hit a stride.” We were left with a motivated feeling to keep going, and we definitely want to put something out in a shorter amount of time than it took to get this record out.

Are Ian and Dallon writing with you guys?
They have been! You know, it’s been something we had been letting happen organically, not really setting any rules. Brendon works on stuff by himself all the time, but there have been a couple times where it’s just like, “Okay, we’re all just sitting here in the middle of a field playing some German festival, and there’s nothing to do. There’s just mud everywhere you can see.” Those times lead to everybody collaborating on whatever Brendon or whoever has started working on that day. That’s led to some cool things. I think we’re going to let it keep growing naturally and see what happens, and not really have any defined roles.

What is the stuff sounding like? Is it too early to give specifics?
I don’t know, it’s tough to say. The last two songs that were written for the record were “Ready To Go [Get Me Out Of My Mind]” and “[Let’s] Kill Tonight,” so I guess that’s a general idea of where things were left off seven months ago. I don’t know. When you are in the bus, you don’t have all these organic instruments. You can have an acoustic guitar and you can have an electric guitar—but as far as certain real, live instruments, you’re limited, so a lot more electronic and programmed things come out. And that could change when we go in the studio, but a lot of it now is a little more on the electronic side of things, at least in the demos.

That makes a lot of sense. Those two songs on Vices are so layered; there’s so much going on.
That’s what we had fun getting back into, was figuring out how to mix electronic elements with live stuff, because we’ll never be a band [where] everybody on stage is playing a keyboard or a sampling, DJ-style thing. We’re always going to have the live instruments. But figuring out how to incorporate that other stuff is where we feel like we can produce the most original sound for us.

Would you consider Dallon and Ian a permanent part of the band? Are you ready to take that step?
Well, I think that…it’s something we’ve been thinking about, and it’s really been a natural…At first, we were just like, “Hey, we’ve got these shows with Blink[-182] for two weeks. We have to have people to play these shows.” At that time, it was totally un-thought-out, and we never really had any expectations as to where it would lead. The fact it’s two years later and they’ve done every show with us, it’s grown into something where onstage, we feel really comfortable. And we get along really well offstage—and that was something at the end of touring for Pretty. Odd., the relationships offstage were affecting our onstage stuff. We’re in this weird position where it’s weird to just… [Laughs.] I guess we’re in fear of commitment. We’re like a high school boy who doesn’t want a girlfriend or something. [Laughs.] We’re just kind of like, “This is a good thing we have going, so let’s just keep going and not really put some title on what it has to be.” As for now, there’s definitely nobody else who we’ve considered working with.

That’s so funny—that is so much like a relationship, someone trying to “define the relationship.” You know, “It’s going great, why do we need to make it official? Why do we need to get married? We’re living together.”
Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, I will say from the beginning, we didn’t want to have fans of the band think of the people onstage as just hired musicians. Especially when you have bands where those people are changing tour to tour. It’s a weird thing. I’ve always liked bands, when it’s like each person has an individual thing they bring to the music and the live show. That’s something we’re conscious of, too, so it’s been nice having them be at all the shows.

A couple months ago, fans were freaking out about a picture of Brendon wearing that green mankini that surfaced on the internet. What was the story behind that?
Well…[Laughs] That was on [our summer] U.K. festival run, and after a while, you can kind of lose your mind. You get a little claustrophobic in that bus. There’s nothing you can really do abut it. After a while of being totally disconnected from the people you know in the States, no Internet [and] you’re just watching the same movies on the TV over and over, you just try to look for ways to entertain yourself.

[The day before] one fan had thrown onstage this Borat bathing suit. She had screenprinted pictures of us and a Panic! logo somewhere, and there was a picture of me and Brendon, like, right on the crotch. It was pretty amazing. So when we got that, we were like, “Oh, we are keeping this, this thing is super-funny.” And for whatever reason, we woke up that day and were just very bored and looking for some way to try to get a laugh. Brendon just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and he put it on and just started walking around backstage around the other bands, the catering and stuff, and hopefully trying to put a smile on people’s faces.

But when you do stuff like that, you get the polar opposite reaction—you get some people who think it’s hilarious and the other people think you’re absolutely disgusting. I don’t know—I don’t know why we ever decided to put the picture of it up [online]. But whatever—if it generated some interest, then I guess it was worth it. [Laughs.]

I think every one of your female fans freaked out.
And also, that specific shot—he’s a very majestic being. He’s pondering life and just happens to be in a very low-cut man-thong. But the true meaning of the photo is to really make you re-assess your life—and make you think about your future. alt