Brendon Urie Explains Origin Of Hit Single “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”

It’s been a while since Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie sat down with Zane Lowe to talk all things P!ATD, but that means even more to discuss this time around.

Urie sat down with Zane Lowe for BBC Radio 1 and discussed the origin of the band’s hit single “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”, which gave the band a kick-start back in 2005.

Here’s what Brendon Urie said about the track:
“We wanted to do something different. Listen we were trapped in a practice space in Vegas and every band around us sounded the same…We had to move completely away from it. So at that point, we were like ‘dude we don’t want to sound anything like this,’ and it kind of forced us in this direction to do something that we didn’t even know what it was going to sound like until the end of the product.”

Brendon Urie also revealed how the track came to be the first single the band would release.
Here’s what he shared about the business end of things when Panic! At The Disco started out:

​“That was a very interesting time because within six months it went from knowing nothing [about the] music industry, going and making our first album, getting a call from management and label about we have to pick a song because the radio playing seven different songs, so we had to pick a single not really knowing what that was…So then we picked [“I Write Sins Not Tragedies,”] in the car.”
“We were on the to a show in our conversion van tugging this trailer behind us and we got that call. Immediately we’re just ‘yeah let’s do that song, let’s start a rock song with cello. It’s going to mess them up so bad. From that point on, the next year was just crazy.”

Brendon Urie might be tired of the track, but we sure do love us some “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” any day, even 13 years after its release!