The indie band Panic! at the Disco returns to The Voice for the Live Finale of Season 15 on Tuesday, December 18. It seems like just yesterday when the band performed at the Season 14 live semi-finals, when teenager Brynn Cartelli advanced to the finals and won. This time around, the Grammy Award-nominated Panic! at the Disco will perform a medley of its latest hit singles “High Hopes” and “Hey Look Ma, I Made It” off their #1 album Pray for the Wicked.
The lead singer of Panic! at the Disco, Brendon Urie, says “High Hopes” is about when he realized that he “had to aim high and fail, fail, fail in order to keep growing” and just going for it. “Hey Look Ma, I Made It” includes the lyrics: “Look ma, I made it / I’m a hooker who sells songs, and my pimp is a record label.” Urie says, “So it’s very tongue-in-cheek, but it’s not dishonest.”
Urie is known for his honesty. In a town hall meeting once, a young person in the audience asked Urie to talk about his mental health, and he did. He said he was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 13. His mom — “the sweetest person in the world and always backed me” — took him to see a child psychologist who prescribed medication. He tried it for about a year before he decided to quit. “It freaked me out, I didn’t like who I had become.”
He tried the pills again for about six months when the band started to get a lot bigger, and started touring. But again, he decided to quit. “I’d rather be myself and cope with this, I don’t want to just numb this.” He added, “It took a while for me to understand that.”
Urie admits, “It definitely affects everything I do but it’s not like a detriment to anything I do by any means.” It now has “a positive effect” on Urie. “Now I use all that energy to expel into creating stuff,” he says with a smile. The Voice airs Mondays and Tuesdays at 8 pm on NBC.
