Shortly after its February 1 debut on the iTunes Store, the single shot to #1 on iTunes' "Top Alternative Songs" chart, and remained a top ten favorite for the weeks following. On January 21, 2011, the song leaked in its entirety, and Panic! at the Disco released a lyric video on YouTube on January 24, 2011. On January 17, 2011, Fueled by Ramen posted a 30-second clip of the track on their Tumblr and YouTube accounts. The track was originally titled "Mona Lisa", and was originally due for January 2011. The single was announced in the December 2010 issue of Alternative Press. We thought that would be an easy way to describe how we were masking our own emotions and trying to figure out how we can solve the bad choices we make." Release The duality in nature, where you see yourself as a bad person, and the good person trying to correct your bad habits. "The song is about a battle in yourself an inner struggle in oneself. Not showing too much emotion, there’s this Mona Lisa smile masking what’s going on in that person’s head," he explained. For us, you look at the painting, and you can’t tell what this person is thinking. “That whole thing with Mona Lisa was the idea that there is this character. In a 2011 interview, Urie regarded the name and theme of the song as neither male nor female. The painting inspired Panic!, which pulls their style from the nostalgic romanticism of the Elizabethan and Victorian eras. The song's title is an allusion to Mona Lisa, the famous Renaissance-era oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Urie said "It was a new start when Spencer Smith and I started writing, so it was gonna end up sounding different, sonically." The music has been described as a combination of buzzsaw riffs, punchy percussion and literate, multi-layered lyrics. Musically, the song is similar to those produced for the band's debut album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out (2005) however, Urie explained in a 2011 interview that the song represented more of a new beginning. Urie notes that the move was "a huge part of growing up." It's all growing pains." The song was also inspired by Urie's move from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he's lived his entire life, to Santa Monica, California with Panic! drummer Spencer Smith. "But it's really about what I've been going through, an inner-struggle within myself, and fighting the dualities of my personality - the side that fucks everything up and destroys everything and the other side that tries to pick up the slack. "On the surface it can seem like just the story of drama between a guy and a girl," explains Urie. Other ideas beat it out or whatever reason it was.” He wrote the song dealing with his own personal convictions and struggles.
"That ended up being a really good intro to the whole process." "I showed the band a couple times," said Urie, "but it just fell to the wayside, we never did anything with it. Odd., and it was just sitting in my laptop collecting figurative dust on my hard drive, not really doing much," said Urie. "A few of the ideas - like "The Ballad of Mona Lisa", specifically - was from an idea I had probably four years ago, before we even started touring on Pretty. Odd., it proved to be an inspiration for the production of Vices & Virtues. As a song written before the band even began recording their second album, Pretty. "The Ballad of Mona Lisa", written by lead singer Brendon Urie, was one of the first tracks composed for the band's third album, Vices & Virtues.
Urie and co-founding drummer Spencer Smith pushed the band's sound toward synthy, '80s-style new wave and dance-punk on 2011's Vices & Virtues, and expanded into a swaggering blend of electronic pop. Odd., split fans and critics, and found them beginning a creative journey that would also bring lineup changes. However, their follow-up, the '60s psychedelia-influenced Pretty. Championed from the start by fellow emo-pop favorites Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco found success on MTV and on the charts with the wordy, hyperkinetic anthem "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" from their 2005 debut, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. One of the biggest acts to emerge out of the emo movement of the mid-2000s, Panic! At the Disco transcended their early fame, transforming into a vehicle for singer Brendon Urie's charismatic, cross-pollinated brand of pop.