Panic! at the Disco emerged from the suburbs of Las Vegas in 2005 with the breakout album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. The album and signing to Decaydance Records the year before were essentially the result of guitarist Ryan Ross annoying Pete Wentz through email. Fully prepared to reject these little clown bastards who were barely out of high school, Wentz listened to a couple of songs Ross had sent over (unprompted, of course). Instead, he found himself with the newest emo sensation on his hands.Fast-forward to December 2006, and Panic! has completed their Nothing Rhymes With Circus Tour. It’s been a long, strenuous excursion, and they’re tired of being on the road. But something has to come next, after all. How do you follow up on one of the fastest and unlikely successes in the emo scene?If you’re anything like Panic! at the Disco, you retreat to a cabin in Mount Charleston, do mushrooms, listen to the Beatles, and write an album that will never see the light of day. New Panic! fans might say, “But they did release that album, that’s Pretty. Odd.” But hardcore Panic! fans know what’s up, don’t you?Panic! at the Disco’s Brief Flirtation With A Much More Intricate Concept AlbumSomewhat officially titled Cricket & Clover, but affectionately known as The Cabin Album, the band wrote this collection of songs with a central concept in mind. Before that, the main lyricist, Ryan Ross, was good at crafting loose narratives, vibrant characters, and a mostly formulated world. Now, inspired by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who, Hitchcock soundtracks, and Danny Elfman, he dove into more complex concepts.Cricket & Clover was a tragic love story between the two titular main characters. In Ross’ words, it was a “doomed love affair” that came from wanting to “do something that you wouldn’t be able to place in a certain time period.”Mostly, the songs came out disjointed and weird. According to producer Rob Mathes in a 2007 print edition of Alternative Press, “There were no choruses, just parts that didn’t repeat.” He found this project to be “really bizarre,” he said. And there was truth to that sentiment, according to the band. While Ross’ newfound influences led him to seek a different sound, the cabin demos ended up veering way too far off course for Panic! at the Disco. Essentially, following the tour, they were tired of playing the same songs every night.“[W]e wanted to write songs that were really complicated and kind of challenging for us,” Ross said in 2007. “And we did that, and then we realized that it’s not gonna be any fun playing these live, and we kind of decided to just scrap that.”‘Cricket & Clover’ is Laid to Rest, But In Its Place Comes ‘Pretty. Odd.’Tensions built up, nothing was working creatively, and The Cabin Album was scrapped. Panic! at the Disco went home to Las Vegas and back to the drawing board. But many elements of that first attempt still carried over onto their official second album, Pretty. Odd.The folk elements and concepts survived, but they included guitar and drums this time. Pretty. Odd. also brought every member of the band into the writing process. Ryan Ross was the sole writer of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. But Pretty. Odd. was a joint endeavor and a labor of great love. “I think the overall goal was to make something a little more uplifting and positive than the last record,” bassist Jon Walker said in 2009. In addition to a new attitude, Panic! was also feeling shoehorned into the “emo” label. Now, they’re often considered one of the Emo Big Three (alongside Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance). But at the time, it felt more suffocating than enriching.“We weren’t really fitting into anything at all,” said Ross in 2008. “We weren’t really that, and we weren’t really this, so it was bad and good, in a way. Because feeling like that allowed us to keep doing whatever it was that we wanted without trying to adhere to any certain kind of scene.”In 2009, Panic! at the Disco would split, with Ryan Ross and Jon Walker starting The Young Veins, leaving Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith to carry on the Panic! name. While there were plenty of hits, the post-breakup era never quite got it right in the same way again. To this day, I can’t listen to “Northern Downpour” without feeling like I’ve been emotionally sucker-punched.Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe post ‘Things Are Shaping Up To Be Pretty Odd’: A Brief History of Panic! at the Disco’s Lost Cabin Album appeared first on VICE.