The Story So Far had just formed when we started working together. I produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered their first EP, While You Were Sleeping, then we made their debut full-length, Under Soil and Dirt, at The Panda Studios.
That record launched the band into international touring, bigger support slots, and what quickly became a full-time career.
Then we made What You Don't See.
And everything exploded.
The audience grew. The tours got bigger. The expectations got bigger. Today, What You Don't See remains the band's most-streamed studio album.
What We Did
I was there before there was a sound to protect. That meant the early records weren't documentation, they were where the identity got built: the guitar tones, the vocal approach, the balance between melody and aggression that people now recognize as this band.
Once that worked, the easy move would have been to make Under Soil and Dirt again. We didn't. What You Don't See pushed the songwriting and the performances harder rather than replaying the debut, and that's the record that broke the band wide open.
My job across those records was the same one it always is: figure out what the songs actually needed, then make sure nobody settled before we got there.
A sixth member of the band.
Then The Curve Started To Flatten
By the third record, The Story So Far was already a major band.
The album debuted at #23 on the Billboard 200, but creatively I felt like we were starting to move sideways.
The timeline was tighter. The band was exhausted from years of touring. The process felt more focused on getting the next record done than discovering what the next record could become.
And years later, the streaming numbers reflect some of what I was feeling at the time.
Album one launched the band. Album two took everything to another level. Album three still succeeded, but the long-term growth had flattened.
That worried me.
Going into album four, I didn't want us to make another record that simply benefited from the momentum we'd already built.
I wanted us to go big again.
Proper Dose
By then, the band was even more burned out.
Management was changing. The band wanted to make the record somewhere remote so everyone could isolate, focus, and force the process forward.
In theory, it sounded perfect.
In reality, gear arrived weeks late, getting everyone fully engaged was difficult, and we left the remote studio with far less finished than we intended.
So we came back to The Panda Studios.
And I decided I wasn't cutting corners.
Proper Dose required production at every level.
I had to keep advocating for the songs, even when that meant pushing against the easiest decision, the established formula, or what everyone expected the band to do next.
The safe move would have been to recreate the sound that had already made the band successful.
But the band was burned out on that version of itself, and I knew repeating the formula wasn't going to move us forward.
So we pushed.
Arrangements. Performances. Instrumentation. Electronics. Guitar tones. Vocals. Production.
"[Sam]'s got that passion and all of that amazing enthusiasm for audio."
Mixer, Proper Dose
And when it came time to finish the record, I brought in one of my heroes, Eric Valentine, to mix the album.
We Went Big Again.
Proper Dose reversed the streaming decline from the self-titled record and became one of the strongest-performing albums in the band's catalog.
The Four-Album Curve
| Album | Spotify Streams | Daily Streams |
|---|---|---|
| What You Don't See | 214.2M | 77.4K |
| Proper Dose | 203.0M | 48.8K |
| Under Soil and Dirt | 169.9M | 62.4K |
| The Story So Far | 169.7M | 57.6K |
| I Want to Disappear | 75.7M | 42.6K |
The Run Ended. The Records Didn't.
After Proper Dose, my run with the band ended and they continued with a different production team. Creative relationships change. That part is normal.
What happened to the records afterward isn't.
As of September 2026, the four albums we made together are still the band's four most-streamed studio records. Even the quietest of the four has more than twice the lifetime streams of the album that followed.
Lifetime totals are the easy argument, and they're also the weakest one, because a record that has been out longer has had longer to add up. So here is the harder version. Right now, today, all four are still out-streaming that album on a daily basis. Under Soil and Dirt came out in 2011. Fifteen years later it is doing more plays per day than a record released in 2024.
That's the part that matters to me. The records didn't just work when they came out. They kept working.
241,000 streams. Every day.
Across the four records we made together. That's nearly 88 million Spotify plays a year, from records up to 15 years old.
That isn't release-week momentum. That's longevity.
Proper Dose was one of the most demanding records I've ever made. The process wasn't always easy, but easy wasn't the goal.
My responsibility was to the music and to making the strongest record I believed we were capable of making.
Years later, the numbers don't tell the whole story, but they reinforce what I believed then: the record was worth pushing for.
Four records. Seven years. Nearly 750 million streams.
They started as local kids. They became one of the defining bands of modern pop punk and eventually toured with Blink-182.
We helped build the sound that got them there. Then, when that sound started becoming a limitation, we pushed it somewhere new.
Sometimes producing means knowing when to protect what works and knowing when it's time to leave it behind.
