Like Bobby said, Against the Grain "was where the harmonies really started to take off". Jay said in the early 90s The Adolescents did harmonies better than anyone. "They used three part harmonies all over the place". BR saw them live and thought they were brilliant, so in a way they gave BR the confidence to do it themselves. Jay: "Musically speaking, once you get out of punk rock you find out that the members of BR are listening to the Beach Boys' 17-part harmonies, bands like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, bands that did background vocals. So it wasn't that hard to conceive, why not use it for what we're doing? We always tried not to do anything in the studio that we could not do live, you don't go completely off the wall. Doing three part harmonies in the studio wasn't so absurd, because we could do them live. It almost became a trademark sound. It wasn't anything I ever noticed people doing, until one time I heard a band and thought, 'That sounds like us, but it's not us.' And I realized that it mostly had to do with the background vocals".