How did you challenge yourself sound wise to fit this concept?
Andy Biersack: When you’re writing something that plays out over the course of an entire album you tend to bog yourself down and how you think more about how you want to write around that story and I think it becomes an albatross to write to a story. We did the first week and half saying, “Alright lets write for the concept.” And after that we kind of just erased the concept from our mind and try to write songs that were just great songs that we really loved and even though we had the concept in the back of our head we didn’t want to focus too much on it. I think in terms of building a record that is a story it is important that you are always writing genuine songs and you’re not writing a script for a play. Sonically I think that’s where it really came in. How do we tell this story when it will just be the sounds of this record? How can you feel an emotion, how can this be the soundtrack to something – just sonically and that came from just playing with music a lot more. We kind of reinvented the way we write songs we started writing from scratch as opposed to the way we would write in the past with say a lead guitar part in mind. On this record we wanted to write on piano or acoustic guitar first and make sure it was a solid song all the way through and then come in and write the guitars around it and violins and everything else around it. In doing that we were able to build the record and also just playing with music. The idea of involving instrumentation that we had never used before stuff like violins and big band instruments like horns just to make it a little more grand and help tell the story.