...Is a Real Boy
Studio album by Say Anything
...Is a Real Boy is the second studio album by American rock band Say Anything, released on August 3, 2004.
Recording
On January 27, 2003, the band announced they had signed to Doghouse Records; shortly after, they recorded demos for their next album, which was expected to be released later in the year. The following month, vocalist Max Bemis and drummer Coby Linder were in the process of recruiting members to help them tour. With tremendous self-created pressure, Bemis threw himself into pushing the sonic boundaries of the band and maturing their sound, incorporating elements of math-rock, indie-pop and theatrical pomp. He and Linder also started the search for a producer. The two met several producers but eventually decided on Tim O'Heir and Stephen Trask. Bemis struggled with different ideas for the record and decided the album should focus on "the artistic struggle, the fact that every creative person has this sick ambition to affect some sort of change in society with their art, to be more than just a guy in a band or a poet or a sculptor." According to the album's liner notes, ...Is a Real Boy was originally intended to be a rock opera, complete with a full narrative, cast of characters and spoken word interludes between each song. One tentative title for the album was Zona! Zona! However, Bemis became overwhelmed by the entire process of writing and playing most of the instruments and had a breakdown.
“...Is a Real Boy” enters the record as studio album by Say Anything. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Real, Studio and album can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3594816. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “...Is a Real Boy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.