Smith vividly recalls the first time he met Ross. “I met Ryan when I was five and he was six,” the drummer says, talking in a breathy spray that makes him sound like a dead ringer for Beavis’ pal Butt-Head. “My grandpa and his dad worked together at a hotel here called The Thunderbird, which was a famous hotel, as blackjack and craps dealers. I was taking a walk around the block with my grandpa and he recognized Ryan’s dad, who was out mowing the lawn while Ryan was hitting plastic golf balls across the lawn to his next-door neighbor’s house. For nine years after that, we lived down the street from each other. We never went to school together because Ryan went to private school and I went to public school, but I never had a big group of friends, and so we mostly just hung out with each other.”

“We went through pretty much every phase that young boys can go through,” says Ross. “Remote-control cars, riding bikes, sports, a lot of video games. For about a year, we really wanted to skateboard, but we were both terrible at it. We got our instruments the same Christmas [when we were thirteen], and I think after we gave up skateboaridng, we started playing music because we couldn’t hurt ourselves doing it. We started recording our own songs when we were fourteen, at Spencer’s house. They were the worst songs you’ve ever heard in your life, by the way.”

“Blink-182 was huge at the time,” Smith recalls. “To us, as fourteen-year-old boys, it was like, ‘Well, this is the best band in the world, obviously.’ We would basically try to write songs about whatever Blink songs were about. We wrote a song about ditching class, which I’d only done, like twice in my life. It just sounds like something Blink would have a song about.”