All-American Rejects Channel Queen on Next Disc

All-American Rejects have spent the past few months getting ready to headline the Warped Tour, prepping a new album and embracing their deep love of classic arena and pop music from the '60s and '70s. "If there's one thing the band loves collectively, it's Neil Diamond and fucking Queen," says frontman Tyson Ritter. "I just turned 26 and I've realized that this is the time when all the greats like the Beatles and the Doors and Janis made their best records."

Inspired by some of rock & roll's icons, Ritter says the follow-up to 2008's When the World Comes Down, which featured the radio smash "Gives You Hell," will veer far beyond emo-pop. "As a band, we put something different out all the time," he says. "If we've taken baby steps before, this will be our rocket ship to Mars." He adds, "We're not writing scream-out, barky, pop-rock."

So far, the Rejects have sketched out 20 tracks and finely tuned three: "Bleed Into Your Mind," "Beekeeper's Daughter" and a ballad titled "After You." "We definitely have nice walls," says Ritter. "Now we're just looking for that solid foundation." Lyrical inspiration is coming from Ritter's recent realization that he's spent the majority of his young adulthood working the record-tour-record grind. "You wake up one day and you realize you're not a kid anymore," he says. "Living with record cycles, you get frozen in time. It was almost four months to the day that I woke up and was like, 'Well, "Gives You Hell" is over.' "

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Song Stories

“Baby Got Back”

Sir Mix-a-Lot | 1992

While watching a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl, Sir Mix-a-Lot thought the skinny female models in the ad didn’t represent reality. So he wrote this ode to ample bottoms, featuring its famous to-the-point lyric: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” MTV banished the video, featuring shaking booties and sexually suggestive fruit, to 9 p.m. or later. “I thought my career was over,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I called Rick Rubin, and I told him the video was banned, and he was like, 'Great!' We sold another 2 million records.”

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