#fall06

There were two different covers for the magazine. The black one was for subscribers and then the white one was for regular sale:

Yves Saint Laurent

Ad campaign FW0607

Creative Director: Stefano Pilati

Photo: Juergen Teller

P!ATD’s cover of This Is Halloween

This was really fun to see happen in fall 2006 because Brendon, Ryan, and Spencer had talked a lot over the previous year about how much they loved Danny Elfman’s soundtracks & Tim Burton movies.

Panic decided to do their cover of This Is Halloween after they found out that Fall Out Boy was also going to be on the special edition re-release of the soundtrack for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Spencer said they were originally offered What’s This but chose This Is Halloween instead. Marilyn Manson did a cover of the same song too… P!ATD told fans “Some other guy covered the same song, we think he gave it a valiant attempt, but we are really happy with how ours turned out, and we hope you enjoy it.”

Spencer said in an interview at the end of 2006:

“We’re huge fans of Danny Elfman’s scores and we weren’t planning on doing any new recording because we were on tour but when that opportunity happened, we couldn’t pass it up so we ended up doing it with an orchestra rather than Panic! style because it was easier to work on just arranging the vocals on the road.”

Rob Mathes co-produced the song and arranged & conducted the orchestra (some news said it was a 20-piece orchestra). This project was the first time that the band met him. It seemed like Rob really understood their creative vision and they worked well together. The Panic guys had been talking about trying to get Danny Elfman to produce their second album, but I’m so glad they met Rob at this point (don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Danny Elfman fan… but I really can’t imagine the future P!ATD or TYV projects without Rob’s contribution). Here’s an excerpt from an EQ magazine article where Rob briefly mentioned his experience:

“Ryan and Brendon had done a work-up of the song ‘This Is Halloween,’ with guitar and vocals, and my manager had suggested to Ryan that he work with me, as I could orchestrate the song straight down the Elfman route. I got the demo, and I was delighted. They’d totally gone for it—recording all kinds of crazy vocal parts. Ryan and I traded emails, and I told him I was just going to go nuts on it, and write a full orchestral score to match their tracks.” Mathes met Ross for the first time in the studio during the “This Is Halloween” orchestral tracking sessions. “I had scored these strange licks for contra bassoon and bass clarinet—the kind of parts most pop bands would kind of dismiss, and instead ask me to bring up the guitars in that section,” says Mathes. “But Ryan was like, ‘Let’s take the guitars out of there, and bring the woodwinds up.’ He was really into it.”

The booklet says "vocals arranged by Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie" and that they recorded some bits at Ryan's house.

The cd was released a week before Halloween 2006. Fans could listen to P!ATD’s version of This Is Halloween for a day on AOL (or one of those sites) about a week before the cd came out, and there were some short samples a bit earlier too. Here’s a brief news segment I saved:

some articles from late August 2006 about this project:

probably the greatest feedback any magazine published about Jon Walker lol