do you like Ryan's or Brendon’s version of Nearly Witches better?
lol do y’all think Spencer just sat in a corner until someone told him to play drums or what?
Around early 2007 Ryan told Helio “on the new record that we just started to write it has been Spencer and I writing the lyrics together and working out what we call the plot line.” I was excited about that because Spencer had a huge imagination, a flair for the dramatic, and was the creative vision behind a lot of visual aspects of the band in the Fever era. Ryan and Spencer were a strong team for the years while they were still on the same page (and one of Spencer’s favorite authors was Chuck Palahniuk btw). Hopefully this goes without saying, but just because one person gets credit for writing the lyrics doesn't mean that they were the only person involved in creating the song as a whole.
Obviously it was a good thing that the cabin album got scrapped. The band needed to unwind and go in a totally different direction after the absurdly intense end of 2006, but the cabin album wasn’t something they could actually tour with or play on festival stages with normal instruments (more info here). It was way too complex for a start. Ryan was even talking about writing a companion book with more of the story for that album. Songs like It’s True Love didn’t work very well outside of the context of the cabin album when the actual storyline was missing. Brendon’s voice was having a hard time in general at Summerfest on July 7th, but the absolutely brutal fan backlash online for It’s True Love focused completely on the lyrics. People were treating it as a single meant to stand on its own and were totally missing the tone & context of any possible story. It didn’t really work.
Jon was the most eager to put the scrapped album behind them and just move on (maybe because he was such a key player in defining the band’s new direction in summer 2007). Spencer was the one who came to the defense of the cabin album the fastest in many interviews in late 2007 & early 2008. He often said something about how the idea wasn’t bad or the songs themselves weren’t bad… it just wasn’t the right time for them. Now skip to summer 2008: Nearly Witches wouldn’t have made it onto FOB’s mixtape if the band was 100% over it. There was still something there. However, Ryan and Jon were moving in a very different direction with the songs they were writing for P!ATD’s third album that season (they ended up using a lot of those songs for The Young Veins). They wanted to get so scaled-back that Ryan was even eventually talking about how he didn’t want to use any orchestration on the next album (contrast that with how Spencer was saying during the Pretty. Odd. era that “Ideally it would be amazing to play with a couple of string players and a couple of horn players every night” and also said that he hoped the band could eventually travel with “a string quartet and a three-piece horn section” lol. Spencer definitely did want to do something “different” after the Fever era ended, but he absolutely retained his flair for the dramatic and his large-scale creative vision).
The original version of Nearly Witches sounded like it was about Cricket, but we don’t know how it fits into the larger story of the cabin album. We’re missing the context. Spencer and Brendon were able to take the early version of Nearly Witches and turn it into something bigger that could stand on its own. It’s pretty incredible how they made it fit a completely different album too.
Both versions are amazing. I just see them as serving very different purposes for different stages of the band.
BRENDON'S VERSION IS NOT MOCKING RYAN:
Google the definition of burlesque and you get:
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.
That's literally what Brendon was doing in his live performances of the song. His performance fits what he's singing.
Also, AFYCSO is not the "burlesque" that any version of Nearly Witches is referring to. 🙄 That is the weirdest take. Also, the old-fashioned vaudevillian second half of AFYCSO was written in the studio with the help of Matt Squire, where the guys were drawing inspiration from a whole range of decades and sources (which the album’s cover art portrays too). The whole vaudeville visual theme with the band wasn’t even fully around until later in the Fever era.
And yes, Ryan wrote most of the lyrics for AFYCSO. But he was very clear that Brendon & Spencer were involved in the overall process of creating the songs as well. If Brendon or Spencer took a dig at AFYCSO, they’d be targeting themselves too. Especially after the split when they still liked that vibe, yet Ryan had distanced himself from it completely.
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