Nine in the Afternoon

Nine in the Afternoon Panic at the Disco Pretty. Odd. Supervision Recommended Information Released 2008 Genre Emo Language English Source Rock Band 2 Available September 14, 2008 Playable in Rock Band 2 Rock Band 3 Rock Band Blitz Difficulty Band 0 Basic Pro Guitar 1 1 Bass 2 2 Drums 0 0 Keys 0 0 Vocals 2 2

Details Male singer 3-part Harmonies

Nine in the Afternoon is a song by Panic at the Disco.

Frontman Brendon Urie in the New Musical Express January 26, 2008: "It's a very positive rock song with a very positive message."

Guitarist Ryan Ross on MTV News: "This is the first song we wrote. It's a song we all wrote together. It's basically about our situation for the past few years, just kind of looking at it all in a good way, and as a positive thing. It's one of the most straightforward songs we've ever had, lyrically. We wanted to have a song people could just get on the first listen. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment songs that came together in a couple of hours. It's just a fun song; it's not really meant to be taken seriously."

The song was first performed publicly at the Virgin Festival 2007 in Baltimore.

This was the first single released by the band since they lost the exclamation point at the end of their name.

Ross explained to MTV News: "At least for me, it got a little bit annoying to try to write that every time you're typing the name. It was never part of the name to us. People started writing it, and then it ended up in more and more things like that, so there it was. When we started doing new promo stuff for this album, we just told everyone not to use it anymore." Brendon Urie added: "We wrote it that way once, when we first started the band, and then people kept writing it that way, and it was a freakin' whirlwind. We never made a big deal out of pulling it off the name. I mean, every time I write [our name], I never put an exclamation point in there."

Like the rest of the album, this was produced by Rob Mathes. He'd previously collaborated with the band on their cover of "This Is Halloween," a song originally written for the animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Brendon Urie told the New Musical Express: "The new album's definitely gone in a new direction and it's definitely a more positive direction. The first record was a little more teenage angst - we were 16 and 17-year-old dudes writing music. With this one we're in our twenties, we're a few years older. We're more experienced as musicians and with the instruments we've been playing. We've been really happy on this record and less stressed so we've been writing happier songs. They're more organic: there's nothing as synthesized or anything like that, it involves more real instruments."

Urie then discussed the writing process for the album: "It's been really different on this album concerning lyrics because we've all had a little hand in it. It's been great the way we worked with this record-all four of us would sit in a room together, in the place we wrote the first record, just talking about ideas. It's been more of a natural, less stressful environment and a really good experience for sure. We all wrote different songs and also had songs that the four of us wrote together."

Ross explained the album title to MTV News: "It just happened one night. We were working on a new song, and we weren't even talking about album titles, but it was just something I wrote down, and I brought it up to the guys. Like, 'Pretty. Odd.' And then they all liked it, and that was a couple of months ago, so we just kept it since then."

This is the first Panic At The Disco song where the title is part of the lyrics.

Ross explained to VH1 about the song title: "The title is this silly thing we came up with. There's really no significance, except for when we were writing the song that night no one knew what time it was and somebody said it was 9 in the afternoon."

Drummer Spencer Smith told Live Daily why they decided to enlist Rob Mathes to produce the album: "He arranged the strings for us when we did a cover of 'This is Halloween' when they re-released Nightmare before Christmas. That's where we met him. He normally gets hired to do orchestrations, different arrangements. He's done different things from, like, opera - Pavarotti - to I think he did string arrangement on one of the Jay-Z songs for that movie American Gangster. It's a pretty wide spectrum. But, at the same time, he grew up loving Led Zeppelin and Classic Rock. That's still kind of part of him and a part of music that he loves. He loves a classic Rock or Pop Rock band, whether they're The Beatles or anything. He's always wanted to work with a band in the similar style of George Martin with The Beatles: writing string arrangements and horn arrangements and different things that not a lot of people were doing. It was exactly what we were looking for, and it just kind of ended up being perfect."