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The All-American Rejects pulled up to Genius to break down their classic “Dirty Little Secret.” Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler dive into how the song came together, why it took two years to get the record off the ground, how it marked their shift into the pop space, why a great bridge can make or break a track, and more gems along the way!

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Transcript
00:00I don't know how many people have come up to us after the fact and said, like,
00:03I heard this in middle school and I was really closeted and this was like my anthem for my sexuality
00:10and my awakening.
00:12It's just so surprising after the fact where a song was born inside you can be received in so many
00:17different, really profound ways.
00:27Nick and I decided to move to Nowhere, Florida, and it took us two years to get this record going.
00:32We found ourselves just writing a bunch of kind of junk.
00:37It was like, it was kind of just like a lot of experimentation.
00:40Everything was fueled on Frasier and red wine.
00:42Yeah.
00:43By the time he showed me a little secret, he was like, sure, that's fine.
00:47That's easy.
00:48Let's do that one today.
00:50Let me know that I've done wrong when I've known this all along.
00:56I go around a time or two just to waste my time with you.
01:03A dirty little secret can be so ambiguous.
01:05In the context of the lyrics here, having this special thing that obviously to one party's
01:12side is something that there might be a little shame for and that the other party clearly
01:18knows that that's the case.
01:20I mean, I think I was 18 when I pinned this.
01:22And so it's just as simple as sort of pretending you're in a relationship that you don't want
01:27anybody to know about.
01:42This person clearly has made sacrifices for this relationship and clearly the narrator hasn't.
01:48And it's stringing them along.
01:51It's not really taking itself too seriously, but it's a common occurrence in a relationship
01:56where people are guarded and slow playing and one side's always running faster than the other.
02:02It's more fun if it's just ours.
02:22I remember just running around the kitchen chasing my girlfriend with this chorus and it was fun and it was
02:29silly.
02:30And I think that's sort of like the measurement for a good song when you're kind of casting
02:34it aside as, oh, this is just kind of silly fun.
02:50I think this couple is actually the part that actually people took their own takeaway from.
02:55Life is so, it's so serious all the time that sometimes definition, especially with relationships,
03:01can make things so much more complicated.
03:03It's just easier to keep it easy and light.
03:30The song is this relationship.
03:32It's playful, it's fun in the beginning.
03:33And then as the second verse kind of comes along, it's kind of getting a little deeper.
03:37At the bridge, it's like punching with this breaking point of this relationship.
03:42The torment of this secret isn't going to keep itself anymore.
03:46She's had enough.
03:47A good bridge can just fucking make a song.
03:51More modern music, people just skip it because they got in a room together and wrote a verse
03:56and a chorus.
03:56That's pretty much it.
03:58Then they never see each other again.
03:59They ran out of time.
04:00Somebody had to go get their kids at school.
04:02I don't fucking know.
04:02Nobody ever makes time to write a bridge.
04:04So I think a well-constructed bridge can be fucking...
04:08That was our bag, man.
04:10Bridges on that Move Along record are fucking the best parts of the songs.
04:14It's funny.
04:15Looking back now, it's like, this is our band.
04:16This is a tongue bursting through the cheek.
04:19It's fucking catchy.
04:20And it's what we love about the music we grew up listening to.
04:24You know, this was the first song that we crossed that Rubicon from going to alternative
04:29rock, which is why I think we didn't want Dirty Little Secret to go.
04:32Because we crossed over to pop with this.
04:35A lot of bands in our genre didn't make it there.
04:38It was that moment in Field of Dreams when James Earl Jones steps off the field and is
04:43like, I'm a doctor now.
04:44He gives up his career at baseball.
04:46We're a pop band now.
04:47And that hung over us like a monster for a long time because it wasn't cool to be a
04:53pop band in the mid-2000s.
04:54And we were the band who dropped off the Warped Tour and went and played like David Letterman
04:58or some shit and then came back to the Warped Tour and like it just felt different.
05:04Yeah, like you guys are like mainstream now.
05:07And now I am so fucking grateful for walking across that line.
05:12We were just like, man, we're t-shirt and jeans, rock and roll from Oklahoma.
05:16So like either you fuck with us or like fuck off.
05:22It kind of sounded like a really bad Tom Petty song when we played it as a full band.
05:26And we're like, yeah, that's probably not going to be on the record.
05:28And it wasn't until our producer on this record, Howard Benson, he was like, what about
05:32this Dirty Little Secret song?
05:33Like, eh, we tried it, it sucks.
05:35He was like, why don't you just like play it like a rock band?
05:38And we're like, oh, that was easy.
05:40Thanks, Howard.
05:41Yeah, that's better.
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