Ryan Ross didn't really start getting into The Beatles until he was already in Panic! At The Disco.
Of course, he was aware of them. It's impossible not to be, isn't it? But it was only during the making of the band's first album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, that he really sat down and burrowed deep into their discography. All of a sudden, a whole new world was uncovered, one that made a whole lot of sense to him.
"I was trying to find something on the Internet, a new band, just trying to find something that excites me, and I just wasn’t finding anything good as far as new music goes," he told Rolling Stone. So, I was listening to the Beatles, and it was just like, ‘Whoa, my God.’ It’s about how many kinds of songs they’d write, the scope of everything they did and that they just didn’t put themselves in some kind of specific place. They just did whatever they wanted.”
It was interesting for Ryan to be coming at creativity from such an angle, when, in terms of everything else that was happening around the alternative scene, Panic! sounded unlike anyone else. Between the poetic pop-punk of Fall Out Boy, the powerful melodies of Paramore, and the world-building extravagance of My Chemical Romance, they remained an intriguing outlier, despite often being lumped under the same emo banner as their aforementioned peers. Not that it frustrated the band, but more a case of there being an expectation of what they should be because of it.
But in sitting down and combing through Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, for the first time in 2007, sandwiched between a bit of The Beach Boys and The Who, unlocked a sentiment that Ryan knew would change the way he thought about Panic!.
"Those bands had a lot to do with giving us the go-ahead in a way: telling us about not holding yourself back and just writing the song that you’re starting to write and not saying, ‘Oh, well we’re this band, so we have only these kinds of songs.”
