Taylor Swift is officially back…and she’s not alone.
After weeks of anticipation and countless clues, the Grammy winner finally premiered her new song and its colorful music video on April 26, and for the first time in her impressive career, the 29-year-old chose to release a duet as her first single. Rather than choose one of her frequent collaborators over the years, like Ed Sheeran or Jack Antonoff, she tapped a somewhat unexpected partner: Panic! at the Disco‘s Brendon Urie.
Urie, along with Joel Little, co-wrote the jam with Swift, helping her reveal her true self with “ME!,” her highly anticipated follow-up to 2017’s darker reputation.
“‘ME!’ is a song about embracing your individuality and really celebrating it and owning it,” Swift told Robin Roberts of the song’s meaning. “With a pop song, we have the ability to get a melody really stuck in people’s heads and I just want it to be one that makes them feel better about themselves.”
That meaning applies just as much to Urie, who first made debut on the mainstream music scene back in 2005, as the 32-year-old is the last remaining member of Panic! At the Disco and has evolved just as much as his co-songwriter since becoming an emo icon at just 17 years old.
While fans were first introduced to him as an eyeliner-wearing 17-year-old frontman with a penchant for theatrics, costumes and a sort of d–kish attitude after an infamous interview with Alexa Chung, he’s evolved into an LGBTQ advocate and someone who has developed a deeply personal relationship with his fanbase, much like Swift.
But at the start of it all, Urie was just a Mormon teen living in Las Vegas who wanted to be part of a the already-formed Panic! at the Disco, which was made up of members Ryan Ross, the main lyricist and guitarist; bassist Jon Walker, and drummer Spencer Smith.
Originally tapped to be the guitarist after he struck up a casual friendship with one of the guys in guitar class, a cold changed everything.
“When Brendon joined the band, he was gonna just play guitar,” Ross, who was reluctantly serving as the lead singer, told Rolling Stone in 2006. “And I think I was sick one day or something and said to him, ‘Why don’t you sing the song?’ He started singing, and we were like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you could sing?’ He said, ‘I didn’t know I could.'”
And that was that.
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The band soon received their big break when they posted some of their songs on one of Fall Out Boy‘s message board, withPete Wentz deciding to sign Panic! to his imprint, Decaydance. All under 21, the quartet quickly and unexpectedly became major players on the emo scene, with their debut album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out becoming an enduring classic in the genre, thanks to its quirky blend of punk, pop and theater.
But before fully committing to the band, Urie, then 17, had to have a “devastating” conversation with his parents, telling them he was choosing not to adhere to Mormonism.
“That conversation with my parents was pretty brutal. We weren’t even signed yet, but I knew I wanted to be in this band and do it for life,” he recalled to GQ. “I told my parents: ‘I have to level with you. I don’t believe in the church. I’m not even sure I believe in God.'”
Devastated, his parents told him he needed to move out. “I’m like, damn…it was a learning time for me. I didn’t feel too bad, but I felt guilty that I made my parents feel that hurt.”
Fortunately, Urie and his parents reconciled shortly after, but he still felt the need to sort of confess his “sins” to them.
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“It would eat me up to hide things from my parents, so every six months I would call a family meeting,” he told Paper, “and be like, ‘Okay guys, in the last six months I have been smoking weed, dealing drugs, f–king promiscuously, sneaking out staying at friends’ houses.'”
And really, before landing the record deal that would change his life forever, Urie was just your average high schooler. He worked at Tropical Smoothie, using his minimum wage paychecks to help pay for the rent for the band’s practice space.
“That was an interesting job. I had fun making smoothies for people,” he told OK!. “There were a lot of housewives with their little Chihuahuas coming in, and asking for a little Chocolate Chiller smoothie. It was relaxing. They let me sing during work, so that was nice of them.”
Somewhat of a loner in school, Urie recalled one kid that used to pick on him.
“He used to drop my food and beat me up in little corners,” he said. “Nothing serious, but tease me. I remember knocking his food out of his hand one time when he in the middle of explaining something to his friends, and they all laughed, so I thought that was pretty nice. ‘Well, there you go buddy.’ I was able to get instant karma.”
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ME! Out now! Made this song with @BrendonUrie and @iamJoelLittle. @Davemeyers and I co-directed the video. And everyone knows you can’t spell awesome without DAVEBRENDONJOEL. Oh wait…
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Like Swift, he’s also faced his share of break-ups, including what could’ve been a devastating professional one when Ross left the band, along with Walker, after the band’s sophomore album.
“It was a breakup that needed to happen. We saw it happening and we said, ‘I would rather be able to see you in public and give you a hug than see you and be like, ‘F–k you,”” Urie explained to Paper magazine years later. “It was happening over a year and a half, or two. Our egos were bumping so hard.”
For how hard the split between Urie and Ross was for Panic!’s loyal following at the time, just think of them as the OG Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, the One Direction band mates that fans were convinced the two were secretly dating. Before there was Larry, there was Rydon, with the duo playing into it on stage.
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“There are still fans that ship us together as a gay couple,” Urie said. “It’s adorable. For like the last 13 years they are like, ‘Rydon is real.’ I tell them ‘no’ all the time, and they don’t believe me. I’m like, ‘Good don’t believe me.'”
A lot of that speculation may have come from Urie’s performance style, something he used to call “stage gay.” (A term he later expressed regret for using.)
“For our first headline tour I would go up to Ryan our guitar player, and like kiss him on the neck or kiss him on the mouth and he would be so mad,” he explained. “I was like, I just want to kiss you bro. I would hang out with friends and after five or six beers we’re just kind of like smooching on each other. People just get hammered and fool around.”
The departure of two of the band’s original members heavily influenced Panic!’s third album, Vices and Virtues, with Urie saying at the time that songwriting became a form of therapy.
“We lost a couple buddies, so for a couple months, it was a little weird, but writing all this stuff was therapeutic,” he told OK!. “Writing all this stuff down and how it made us feel and how we could mask that in lyrics…those things had to be talked about. We wanted to talk about that stuff.”
Also influential in the 2011 album’s creation was Urie’s relationship with his wife Sarah Orzechowski, who he married in 2013.
And how’s this for the beginning of a love story? Though she had a boyfriend when they initially met, they crossed paths again eight months later when they were both single. But he didn’t win her over until he wrote a song for her called “Sarah Smiles,” which he later revealed was his favorite song on Vices and Virtues.
“When I met her I wrote this song to try and impress her. I was infatuated with her. I played it for her and we’ve been dating ever since,” he told Spin. “That was a huge step for me, personally. I was able to build up my confidence to write a song and try to woo her. I’m a lucky guy.”
But ahead of their fourth album in 2013, Urie had to deal with another loss when Smith took a hiatus from the band due to health and substance abuse issues, making his departure official in 2015.
And then it was just Urie; the guy who joined the band last was now its last hope. Rather than just go solo as Brendon Urie though, he wanted to keep Panic! alive.
“Panic! has become my little play thing and I get to do more than I used to feel like I could. The first two or three years of the band I didn’t feel like I had a license to create as much as I do now,” he explained to Paper. “I felt like I was the last guy who joined and you guys just included me. I just wanted to hang out with those guys. So then when I finally gained some self-respect and started to realize I could do whatever I wanted, I gained the confidence that I never had. I always wanted to do Panic. Panic the name symbolizes no rules.”
Since Urie became a one-man band, Panic! has flourished; 2015’s Death of a Bachelor became their first album to debut at No. 1, delivering its best sales week ever. It was also Panic’s first album to be nominated for a Grammy, earning a nod in the Best Rock Album category.
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2018’s “Pray For the Wicked” also debuted at No. 1 and was the year’s best-selling alternative rock release, thanks in large part to the single “High Hopes,” the band’s best-performing single ever.
“High Hopes” actually feels like a nice companion to “ME!,” given its inspirational lyrics—”Didn’t know how but I always had a feeling, I was gonna be that one in a million”—and upbeat theme.
“I spent too long not setting my expectations high enough, worried about how it felt to fail,” he explained of the song’s meaning. “I hit a point when I realized I had to aim high and fail, fail, fail in order to keep growing. This one is for all of you who helped me go for it all. Thank you.”
Urie actually wrote the song while making his Broadway debut in Cyndi Lauper‘s Kinky Boots, a full-circle moment of sorts for a kid who grew up obsessed with musicals and whose band was known for its theatrical music videos and performances.
I would constantly watch musicals at home, whether it was The Sound of Music or Les Misérables or something like that. That was the only thing I was allowed to watch on Sundays,” Urie told Elle, referring to his Mormon upbringing.
After it was announced it was joining the show, Urie said in a statement, ” It’s been on my bucket list for the longest time, and it really is a dream come true.”
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