You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

Panic at the disco is the Grammy-nominated project of Brendan Yurrie, who originally started it as a band in 2004 with his high school friends from Las Vegas.

In the 18 years since, Panic at the disco has won American Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, I Heart Radio Music Awards, and more.

In August 2022, Brendan put out the seventh Panic at the disco album, Viva Las Vengeance.

The title track hit number one on Billboard's alternative Airplay chart.

In this episode, Brendan tells a story of how he and Grammy-nominated producer Jake Sinclair and Oscar-nominated songwriter Mike Fjola all got together to make the song Viva Las Vengeance.

I grew up musical. My mom played organ for the church, sang in the choir. My dad as well. We both played guitar. So music was always around.

I had to come in and be the loud, younger child and ask for drums and the parents would like, yeah, just get all your energy up.

I am Brendan Yurrie and I have a band called Panic at the disco.

I was kind of wandering around my studio aimlessly at 3am, 4am, and I had this earworm in my head.

I just kept like humming that over and over. Then I started questioning myself, what am I doing here? Why am I still awake right now?

Why won't my brain turn off? Shut up and go to bed. I was so drained but I was restless because I had this idea and I knew I needed to sleep but I couldn't.

That's usually how it starts for me. I have this thing trapped in my brain. I got to get it out and it won't leave my head until I put it down melodically.

So I shut the doors and started recording all this stuff in the studio.

So the first demo was very much like the cars. It was like, little guitars chugging along.

And I kind of wanted this do-op style of drums so it was like starting stuff.

I didn't have any words at this point but I had the melody. So I wrote down some nonsense stuff.

I was sounding like I was saying like folded ones or loaded guns or something like that.

Having that driving force for it kind of helped me be like, oh yeah, I should go back and look at old lyrics that I've written down.

Ideas that I've had that I haven't used yet. So I went back in my notes app and I just scrolling through and I was like, oh yeah, this thing, Viva Las Vengeance.

That came from a movie. I was watching this horror movie called Army of the Dead. Basically the world was in a dystopia of like zombie like nature.

The only zombies were in Vegas and Dave Batista's character. He's this like X-Marine. And on his jacket is a patch that says Viva Las Vengeance. So I was like, oh that's great.

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