“I just loved it, and it gave me that feeling of being a kid and seeing Goonies for the first time, or Indiana Jones —so adventurous and imaginative and different.

I left there wanting to make an album that gave people that same feeling.” Higgenson, the group’s principal singer and songcrafter, held onto that concept through the full year of writing that followed.

It was also the band’s fastest-selling single to date and marks their third platinum hit, following “1, 2,3,4,” and mega-hit “Hey There Delilah”.

The track is penned and sung by vocalist / guitarist Tom Higgenson, the previous single, was written and performed by vocalist / guitarist Tim Lopez, both of whom have contributed songs to the album.

(In “Broken Record,” Higgenson references “Billie Jean” and sings, I knew it was final / Got in her daddy’s car and she was gone like vinyl.) The message throughout is clear: They were so much older then… Higgenson had the album title and concept come to him in a place not usually associated with tender innocence: Las Vegas.J-14: Why did you choose to call the album -- the whole idea of putting together nostalgic childhood imagery. We were writing the whole time, just working on this album. Tim Lopez: I think it was about 8 months, but it took about a year to get all the writing done. We recorded 16 songs -- 14 are on the album and 2 are b-sides. I think anywhere your song gets a chance to take life is a good thing.The song was written to drive that point home and that feeling i wanted the album to have. J-14: You took a brief break, so what was it like coming back after a little time off? J-14: What do you think when you see your song in promos for shows like ? It gives more people a chance to hear it and get it stuck in their heads. Tom: Delilah was a girl I thought was really cute and I wrote "Hey There, Delilah" about her.The video clip that accompanies the single was directed by Tim Nackashi, whose previous credits include, Ok Go, White Lies, and Radiohead.The band have just completed a US headline tour and will be performing at the Download Festival on the 12th June, they have also confirmed their rescheduled London date for June 14th at 100 Club.It was there, on a Valentines Day 2009 visit, that he was bowled over by a Cirque du Soleil show, O, and wondered if it would be possible to capture the same anything-can-happen spirit on record.“The entire show has pirate ships, clowns and carousel horses coming up and going back into the pool, and at one point there’s a piano that comes up out of the water, and it was really epic,” he says.“The scope is a lot bigger than anything we’ve done before,” Higgenson says.“We definitely tried to get out of our comfort zone. But we wanted to push ourselves outside of what the Plain White T’s are accustomed to—exploring different arrangements and striving to be more adventurous and exciting lyrically, musically and thematically.The leap forward they’ve made in writing, arrangements, and production on the new album might be compared with the kind of step up that fellow Warped alumnus My Chemical Romance made with The Black Parade.Ironically, on an album that in some ways is deeply concerned with resisting the wiles of “maturation,” the band’s sound has grown exponentially more sophisticated.It all has to give you that epic feeling that we wanted the album to have.Even the performances that we’re doing and the video we made has to have that slightly surreal, slightly fantastic kind of vibe to it.” “It’s funny because on our last album, Big Bad World [in 2008], we had the opposite approach.Any fans who go looking for the hard-rocking pop-punk the group originally became known for as a Warped Tour favorite, or the acoustically based love songs that newcomers came to expect after “Delilah” and “1,2,3,4,” will find something to their liking here. represents a drastically richer sonic experience than anything the T’s went for on any of their five prior releases.Trying to coast by on the sound that had gotten them tagged as emo way back in the day—correctly or otherwise—could only have culminated, on a project this thematically ambitious, in a sense of blunder.