Excerpt: The Last Heroes of Troy, or the New Adventures of Odysseus

"So anyway, this tour," he says, fiddling with the radio until he finds a station that can pick up his iPod perfectly. "It was our first tour after we had all moved out here from California and it was in support of our second album, and it was just gonna be an easy van tour. And it pretty much was, except for a couple shows where management had dicked us over time and payment and shit like that. But the fans were awesome and just the whole vibe was brilliant. All of us got super close and at the end we just wanted to keep travelling."

'All of us' is a motley group from around the country. Brendon and Ryan hail from Las Vegas, and were the progenitors of the band. They recruited Bob Bryar, a powerful and technically adroit drummer from Chicago, who in turn recruited best friend and consummate businessman/promoter Pete Wentz. Wentz is the de facto front-man of Last Heroes of Troy, with his obnoxious personality, gift of gab, and tenacious, bewildering charisma, all of which overshadow his mostly perfunctory bass-playing skills.

Recording the first album, as most of the band has admitted, was 'like pulling teeth', according to Urie and Ross [see "The Last Heroes of Troy are Lost at Sea", RS 1430]. The lyrics fell to Wentz and Ross, who clashed over every syllable, and Urie became responsible for writing the entire musical score, which, for the then-20-year-old Urie, became almost too much. The resulting album, With Help from the Gods, became what nobody had expected: a smash.

"The fame was almost instantaneous," Urie would recall later. "We went platinum in two months. Suddenly everyone was knocking on our door asking us to do this tour or this interview or this photo shoot or this radio contest. It was all we could do to breathe."

Back to the here and now, Brendon is talking about his dogs, two toy greyhounds and a Jack Russell terrier, and how, with Shia, they became the people and animals he missed the most on this second, seemingly unending tour. "They all sleep with me, and even though it got nice and cosy in the back of the van, it just wasn't the same, especially since, you know, I don't actually have an sexual attraction to anybody in my band. Except maybe…" And here he winks at me, turning up 'If U Seek Amy', moving his hands in a very bad imitation of someone who knows how to dance.

The rumours of Urie and Ross have been persistent and never-ending, even though Ross is almost certainly heterosexual and Urie insists that they would 'kill each other before we could ever date'. Ross' and Urie's relationship is almost constantly strained to the point of breaking—Ross walked away after the first tour and sequestered himself in a new beachside home in Topanga Canyon, where he lives currently.

The second album was borne from many parts. Each member wrote and recorded their musical parts separately, and Ross and Wentz sent Brendon lyrics that he had to cobble together with help of the magician producer Ryland Blackinton, who mostly has to deal with hip-hop egos.

"Here's Urie, who's small and sort of spastic and pretty much handing this over to me like I was gonna salvage it," Blackinton says from his studio in Brooklyn. "I would get packages of lyrics and music and it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. We'd spend days just putting this shit together like it was…it was almost like we were clock makers or something. It was a lot of fun, though. Seeing his mind work is like watching a very skilled painter at the canvas."

The second album, as most sophomore albums, didn't fare as well as the first, and the band found themselves at a loss. "Without all the brouhaha from the first album, we just had all this time on our hands…"