mcr black parade tour

The Black Parade World Tour

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The Black Parade World Tour  was a  concert tour  to support and celebrate My Chemical Romance 's third album The Black Parade . The tour featured 133 performances worldwide, as well as several festival and condensed shows. The tour is the longest and most internationally comprehensive headlining tour that the band has played to date, featuring three legs in North America, one leg in Europe and one in Asia, Australia and South America. During the tour, the band's drummer Bob Bryar  suffered several different medical issues and towards the tour's end, took a hiatus to allow himself to heal and returned for the final few shows of the tour, while bass player Mikey Way  also took a hiatus to marry his fianceé and spend time with her before going onto the road. A concert was filmed at the performance in  Mexico City  from the tour, which was released as a part of the CD/DVD set  The Black Parade Is Dead! . The CD features the audio from the concert, and the DVD contains both the Mexico concert and another in New Jersey later in the same month.

Background [ ]

Rise Against  was the support act on the first leg of the tour in the United States, which began February 22, 2007 in  Manchester, New Hampshire , and ended on March 16 in  Reno, Nevada . The band then took the show to Europe with bands  Thursday  and  Funeral for a Friend . The band then returned to North America for more shows in the US with  Muse  and  The Bled . The band performed the full show on two more occasions in May and June 2007. The band then embarked on the 2007  Projekt Revolution  tour, with a new set and production. However, beginning in October 2007, the band resumed the production of The Black Parade tour for dates in Mexico, Europe, and Australia.  Pop Shuvit  was the opening act for the concert in  Kuala Lumpur  as well as two other shows in the Asian leg of the tour.

James Dewees , of  Reggie and the Full Effect  was the keyboardist for the tour and appears in costume like the other five members, which led some to believe he became a permanent member of the band, although he did not appear in the My Chemical Romance portion of the show, only The Black Parade set.

To signal that the band was nearing the end of touring for the album,  The Black Parade , the concert in Mexico City was filmed of a live DVD entitled  The Black Parade Is Dead! , which was released July 1, 2008.

Setlist [ ]

The band's performance is divided into two parts. First, they perform  The Black Parade  album from start to finish as the Black Parade; in the costumes worn in the music videos from the album. Following this, the band takes an intermission break to change into regular clothing, while the recording of their song "Blood" is played. The band then returns and plays songs from their previous albums as My Chemical Romance.

• "This is How I Disappear"
• "The Sharpest Lives"
• " Welcome to the Black Parade "
• " I Don't Love You "
• "House of Wolves"
• " Teenagers "
• "Disenchanted"
• " Famous Last Words "
• " I'm Not Okay (I Promise) "
• "It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Fucking Deathwish"
• "Cemetery Drive"
• " The Ghost of You "
• "Give 'Em Hell, Kid"
• " Thank You for the Venom "
• "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us In Prison"
• 1 Bandit Lee Way
• 2 Gerard Way
• 3 Frank Iero

My Chemical Romance to Play 'The Black Parade' in Full at Major Music Festival

MCR is one of 50 bands playing a full album set at When We Were Young 2024.

By Michael Hein - November 13, 2023 06:19 pm EST

My Chemical Romance is putting on a special performance at the When We Were Young music festival in 2024. On Monday, the festival organizers announced the full lineup for next year's show, including over 50 full album live performances. At the top of the list is My Chemical Romance playing The Black Parade from start to finish.

When We Were Young 2023 was less than a month ago, but the festival organizers are on top of their game as the 2024 lineup is already set. Monday's announcement included the date – Oct. 19, 2024 – and the time that ticket presale begins – Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 at 1 p.m. ET. It looks like the big event this time around will be full album performances, with several bands playing their most beloved records all the way through as they were recorded. In the case of My Chemical Romance, it's no surprise that The Black Parade is their choice. The album helped define its era in music and pop culture as a whole.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by My Chemical Romance (@mychemicalromance)

Other big headliners at this show include Dashboard Confessional playing Dusk and Summer , Simple Plan playing No Pads, No Helmets... Just Balls and Chiodos playing All's Well That Ends Well , to name a few. Notably, Fall Out Boy is on the list but does not yet have an album specified, so they may be playing a more conventional set. The same is true for L.S. Dunes.

When We Were Young began in 2017, but it took its more permanent form in 2022 at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds in Winchester, Nevada. The festival draws millennials and fans of alternative rock released in the early 2000s, though it casts a wide net in terms of subgenres. The 2023 festival had some of the biggest names yet with Blink-182 and Green Day headlining.

My Chemical Romance performed in 2022 but missed this year's festival. The band reunited for a tour in 2022, releasing a new song called "The Foundations of Decay." So far, the stand-alone song has not been attached to any plans for an album or an EP. The band officially has four studio albums, two live albums, six EPs and three compilation albums. For many fans, The Black Parade is their most iconic release. The standard edition features 14 songs counting the hidden track "Blood," but the band also released B-sides and deluxe editions later on. It's unclear what the set list for this nostalgia-driven performance will look like.

When We Were Young 2024 tickets go on sale on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 at 1 p.m. ET on the festival's website . The festival itself will be on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024. The Black Parade is streaming now on most major music apps.

• Man Found Dead in Parking Lot After My Chemical Romance Concert
• My Chemical Romance Plan Reunion Show After Nearly 10 Years

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The Eternal March of the Black Parade

Twenty years after their debut album and more than a decade after the critics dismissed them, My Chemical Romance stands as one of the greatest rock bands of the 21st century. How did we end up here?

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My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed white dude with a guitar dominating the charts. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album— The Ringer is following Emo Wendy’s lead and tapping into that nostalgia. Welcome to Emo Week , where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade.

Our story starts in New York City on September 11, 2001. It just does. Suspend your disbelief; respect his audacity. But is it really so hard to believe, and is it really so audacious, that Gerard Way—then a 24-year-old New Jersey native, NYC art school graduate, and creatively stifled Cartoon Network intern—would choose that awful, vulnerable, crushingly human moment to reimagine himself as something immortal, someone superheroic? “That felt like the end of the world,” he told Newsweek in 2019. “It felt like the apocalypse. I was surrounded by hundreds of people on a dock on the Hudson River, and we watched the buildings go down, and there was this wave of human anguish that I’ve never felt before. Since then, I’ve continued to think about what we would do at the end of the world if we knew we only had a little time left.”

Standing on that dock, what Gerard decided he would do was channel his shock and grief and newfound sense of immediacy into the ultimate rock-star origin story. “Something just clicked in my head that morning,” he told Spin magazine in 2005. “I literally said to myself, ‘Fuck art. I’ve gotta get out of the basement. I’ve gotta see the world. I’ve gotta make a difference!’” So he hooked up with a drummer friend from high school named Matt Pelissier (the first of several drummers, alas) and wrote an anguished, furious, and yet startlingly tender pop-punk song called “Skylines and Turnstiles.” It starts like this.

You’re not in this alone Let me break this awkward silence Let me go, go on record Be the first to say I’m sorry Hear me out

Gerard sang and played guitar, though he struggled to do both at once. (It’s harder than it looks.) Slowly, he found other bandmates: Ray Toro and Frank Iero on guitars, plus his own younger brother Mikey Way on bass. Thanks to his gig working at Barnes & Noble, Mikey also contributed a band name: My Chemical Romance, an improvement on the title of an Irvine Welsh book . The band signed with a tiny label called Eyeball Records and released, on July 23, 2002, their debut album, called I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love , produced by New Jersey punk deity and Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly, who’d already mastered the dark art of combining the rawest possible materials into something impossibly gargantuan.

This broken city sky Like butane on my skin Stolen from my eyes Hello angel, tell me Where are you? Tell me where we go from here

“Skylines and Turnstiles” is not, by a long shot, the highlight of MCR’s least-great album. The raw materials are there, of course: the scabrous and shimmering guitars, the breathless downhill-sprint propulsion, the throat-shredding screams to bolster the chorus and punctuate Gerard’s unguarded and brutal horror-flick lyricism. But your first song is never your best. Here, the one called “Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us” is better. And the one called “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” and the one called “Demolition Lovers,” and the one called “Drowning Lessons,” and even the one called “Cubicles.” But as an opening salvo, as the gritty first panel in a dense and ludicrously ambitious comic-book-punk saga, as an achingly sincere attempt to break the awkward silence and roll back the wave of human anguish, as a macabre but heartfelt attempt at genuine connection , Gerard Way’s first song got him where he needed to go, which was firmly on the road to leading everyone where they needed to go.

And after seeing what we saw Can we still reclaim our innocence? And if the world needs something better Let’s give them one more reason, now

It’s the rousing, heartbreaking vocal harmony on the words the world needs something better that shows you what Gerard and his vampiric cohort is really about. Look beyond the eyeliner, the hair dye, the ghostly pallor, the extra-macabre marching band outfits, the wholesale mall-goth hijacking of this band’s whole look, its whole ethos . Don’t flinch at the lyrics no matter how gnarly and nihilistic they seem to get; don’t get too wrapped up in the surreal sensationalism of their flames-and-chaos music videos. Buy the album tie-in comic book or don’t. Just never forget that the closer we get to the end of the world, the tighter Gerard Way means to hold us, to make however much time we have left just that much more bearable.

I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love just celebrated its 20th birthday, and inspired some very excellent anniversary pieces despite being, well, MCR’s least-great album. Their next record was a gleaming and snarling major-label-debut colossus that crowned the fellas as Warped Tour royalty; the record after that was a hilariously overblown rock-opera funeral march and consensus masterpiece that now stands among the greatest emo albums ever born, any era, any wave; the record after that is my personal favorite. Then MCR broke up in 2013, to appropriately operatic dismay, going out as close to On Top as a youngish rock band possibly can.

There was no explicit tabloid-roiling catalyst, no real drama, except no drama is not exactly this band’s vibe. Gerard’s farewell letter, posted to Twitter three days after the news broke and titled A Vigil, On Birds and Glass , is my personal favorite Rock Band Breakup Explanation Letter, any subgenre, any era, precisely because it captures this band’s precise and fantastic combination of galactically overwrought and unabashedly intimate.

We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us- Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope. Fatalism.

And then he expands on the fatalism part as a way of explaining why, exactly, this band broke up after only 11 years and four albums.

That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of its system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit. To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll.

He goes on at great length. It’s wild, it’s lovely, it’s absurd, it’s genuinely moving. The fellas found stuff to keep them busy post-breakup, and Gerard most prominently, of course: the solo album , the ongoing and relentlessly off-kilter Netflix series based on his comic book. And then, inevitably, MCR reunited—tentatively in late 2019, and full-throatedly here in 2022, headlining giant festivals and packing arenas as what certainly feels like the first rock-band reunion that anybody’s actually given a shit about in years. Put it this way: If you are a remotely young person who, like Way himself, still believes in rock and roll , My Chemical Romance is very likely why, and it’s worth ruminating on how, exactly, this profoundly strange and desperately necessary band has inspired such belief. Anybody who listened to I Brought You My Bullets in 2002 couldn’t have predicted any of this. But the guys who made it did.

My Chemical Romance staggered into the atom-bomb-bright sunlight of 2002 alongside Avril Lavigne, Taking Back Sunday, Simple Plan, the Used, and Coheed and Cambria—a fleet of vital and volatile debut albums that blazed myriad intriguing trails worth following: toward boldface pop, toward hooky and archetypically grievance-driven emo, toward kegstand-worthy pop-punk, toward wanton screamy hardcore, toward lore-heavy prog pyrotechnics. Our heroes were already trying to do all of that shit simultaneously.

Emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album—we’re diving deep into all things emo.

Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us for Emo Week.

The most striking song on I Brought You My Bullets —the most Gerard song, the most MCR song, The Most in general—is called “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville.” It begins as a woozy but deceptively gentle waltz but darkens by ominous degrees, and soon Gerard is wailing the line “If I had the guts / To put this to your head,” and maybe you worry for a second that this is the 200,000th uncouth and unnervingly violent post-breakup emo song. And then you find out that Monroeville is in Pennsylvania, and parts of George Romero’s 1978 zombie-flick classic Dawn of the Dead were shot there, and oh, wow, suddenly you realize this is actually a very grim, very romantic song about an inconsolable man realizing he has to kill his no-longer-human wife:

And there’s no room in this hell There’s no room in the next And our memories defeat us And I’ll end this duress

Not the best song, but the most . My Chemical Romance would get truly dangerous, and truly great, when their best and their most intertwined. They signed to a major label; all the coolest kids do. Deal with it. Deal with this, while you’re at it.

“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria , Harry Houdini, and croquet,” Ray Toro informs Gerard Way at the onset of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” one of several monster singles from their 2004 Reprise Records debut, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge . “You can’t swim, you can’t dance, and you don’t know karate. Face it: You’re never gonna make it.” Cue the high-school-outcast histrionics, the cuddly arena-punk viciousness, Gerard’s destabilizing magnetism as he practically screams in your face, the vintage airbrushed-van metalhead radness of Ray’s guitar solo, and, before the final bone-crushing chorus, a truly bonkers Gerard buildup/breakdown for the ages:

But you really need to listen to me Because I’m telling you the truth I mean this I’m okay (Trust me)

And, boom. There are days when this is the best song ever written. And there are other days when it’s not even the best song on Three Cheers : “Helena” has a majestic Mötley Crüe meets the Misfits chorus, the power chords ascending a stairway to hell, an infinite legion of demons pumping their fists along to every word: So long and good night / So long and good night . Or maybe the power-ballad pyrotechnics of “The Ghost of You” do it for you, the classic quiet-verse-loud-chorus dynamics, Gerard’s unapologetic controlled-screaming melodrama (“At the top of my lungs in my arms / SHE DIES”), the extra-luxe video that recreates D-Day down to the puking soldiers landing on the beach. Tell me these guys aren’t spectacular, and not driven by friction, ambition, LOVE, glamour, and fatalism.

By 2005 MCR are headlining the good ol’ Warped Tour alongside Fall Out Boy, and early-2000s third-wave emo—undaunted in its embrace of pop-punk, of the mall, of teenagers both actual and perpetual—has its very own Queen, and/or Led Zeppelin, and/or Pink Floyd. Suspend your disbelief; respect their audacity. “The main thing that we’ve always wanted to do was to save people’s lives,” Gerard informed the magazine Alternative Press in 2004. “That sounds Mother Teresa–ish and outlandish, but it really does happen. It does make a huge difference. We’ve seen it in action.”

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge , by the way, is a semi-derailed concept album involving two lovers, a man and a woman, who both seemingly die in a gunfight: The man goes to hell, is informed by the Devil that the woman is still alive, and agrees to kill 1,000 evil men in exchange for the chance to reunite with her. I say semi-derailed because during the writing process Gerard and Mikey’s beloved grandmother died—“Helena” is about her—and Gerard considered scrapping the whole thing. “When that happened, I was like, ‘Fuck. Oh, God. How am I going to deal with this story? Does it even matter anymore? Is it just fucking pretentious? Is it bullshit?’” he told Alternative Press . “And then I came to grips with it and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to write the songs that I want.’” Even the song called “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” has a certain funereal poignancy to it.

Even for a band already operating at this scale in terms of both ungodly rock-star bombast and naked emotional intimacy—Gerard has gotten increasingly forthright in interviews about his struggles with mental health and substance misuse in this era—My Chemical Romance’s third and biggest and most extravagantly beloved album, 2006’s The Black Parade , struck like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. There is an awful lot to absorb here; the marching-band outfits are as good a place to start as any.

The Black Parade is a classic leveling-up record, the fairly conventional tale of a young, ferocious rock band hitting its commercial peak (the album debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard album chart, behind a Hannah Montana soundtrack) with the help of some new big-shot collaborators. It was produced by Rob Cavallo, who probably also produced your favorite Green Day album; the screaming-and-fire video for “Famous Last Words” was directed by Samuel Bayer, who also directed your favorite Nirvana video. (I’m just assuming your favorite Nirvana video is “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”) Several members of the band got severely injured while shooting this, by the way, and somehow you can just tell.

The Black Parade is also an unprecedented and not-at-all-conventional narrative flex credibly described by The New York Times as “a stricken tour de force about coming of age in the post-9/11 era.” It’s a not-at-all-derailed concept album about a man (“The Patient”) dying of cancer while wracked by fear and regret; Gerard decided to add to the verisimilitude by cutting his hair short and dying it a stark silver. (“I wanted to appear white and deathlike and gaunt and sick-looking,” he cheerfully told the NYT .) Liza Minnelli (“I love those guys”) drops by to portray a grieving mother; musically, the klezmer parts somehow hit harder than the heavy metal parts. Influences range from David Bowie to KISS to the Beatles; there is also, as the marching-band uniforms might suggest, a marching band. The scale of this, in every sense, is nearly overwhelming, so if you’re new to it all maybe start out by just putting the caustically hilarious goth-blues anthem “Teenagers” on repeat for six hours.

They said, “All teenagers scare the livin’ shit out of me” They could care less as long as someone’ll bleed So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose Maybe they’ll leave you alone, but not me

Even five years ago, this record was an easy fan favorite but not necessarily an agreed-upon, era-defining masterwork. “ The Black Parade , though well-reviewed at the time, hasn’t accrued the same reputation as other classic albums,” the critic Jeremy Gordon wrote in 2016 in a 10th-anniversary piece for Spin . “It was almost entirely ignored in lists of the best albums of the ’00s run by tastemakers and canon-formers like Rolling Stone , Pitchfork , Stereogum , Billboard , Paste , Complex , NME , and, yes, Spin .” By this record’s 20th anniversary, however, it might be universally hailed as the pop-punk Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band : In 2020, when Rolling Stone unveiled its updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time , there was The Black Parade at no. 361, not quite as good as Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove , but just a little better than Luther Vandross’s Never Too Much .

You could argue that rock critics ruin everything. You could regard The Black Parade ’s steady ascent on lists like this as proof that something essential—a life-affirming secret shared only between MCR and their Day One fans—is being lost. As a Late Pass–holder myself, out of respect/trepidation, I have decided not to argue that the band’s fourth and last album, 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys , is actually their best album, even though I love it profoundly for both the reliable audacity of its concept (now MCR are Mad Max –esque rebels battling an evil corporation in postapocalyptic California, with the Gerard-penned comic book to prove it) and the chaotic scope of the songs themselves. Get acclimated by putting the song “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” on repeat this time.

Danger Days probably includes one too many songs that blatantly reach for Coldplay-style arena-rock uplifting grandeur, but what I will say is that this record’s final attempt at volcanic sentimentality, “The Kids From Yesterday,” totally works, and the album ends with an extra-caustic and extra-hilarious trashing punk tirade called “Vampire Money,” in which Gerard politely declines to contribute a song to the soundtrack of a Twilight movie.

(Come on!) When you wanna be a movie star (Come on!) Play the game and take the band real far (Come on!) Play it right and drive a Volvo car Pick a fight at an airport bar The kids don’t care if you’re alright, honey Pills don’t help, but it sure is funny Give me give me some of that vampire money, come on!

“Originally, what we did was take goth and put it with punk and turn it into something dangerous and sexy,” Gerard explained to the NME . “Back then nobody in the normal punk world was wearing black clothes and eyeliner. We did it because we had one mission: to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate. But then that image gets romanticized and then it gets commoditized.”

This is all delightfully but decidedly rude: There’s an excellent argument that the Twilight universe is every bit as vital and inclusive and life-affirming as any of the rock bands it attempted to romanticize and/or commoditize. But I will laugh at the line Pick a fight at an airport bar forever.

As for MCR’s breakup, and the failsafe doomsday device that triggered it, within a few years Gerard was opening up about it: In 2014 he told the NME that he’d relapsed into alcoholism after Danger Days , and worried that his daughter would grow up without a father; the choice, he concluded, was “Break the band or break me.”

The band first reunited for a single show in 2019 in Los Angeles: “That was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had playing on stage with My Chemical Romance, for sure,” Gerard told the NME , adding that “to me, the new version of My Chemical Romance and the way I want to go about it is exercising less control.” (The NME loves this guy.) The band’s festival-headliner status now is in part a reflection of pop-punk’s bizarrely ascending reputation in the past five years as both a commercial and critical proposition, from Olivia Rodrigo to Machine Gun Kelly to Juice WRLD. But however many sonic and stylistic precedents there might be, there has never been a rock band quite this courageous, spiteful, beautiful, desperate, glamorous, hopeful.

I believe Gerard when he says that this band’s original mission was “to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate,” but that was never their only mission. MCR was born in an apocalypse, and designed to help us all survive it. Us meaning actual teenagers, not critics, but we caught on eventually. We are all bandwagoners on the Black Parade now. Meanwhile, the apocalypse is closer than ever, but at least we can all huddle together in the glow.

In This Stream

Welcome to emo week on the ringer.

• When Panic! at the Disco Ditched the Exclamation Point—and Emo
• The Eternal March of the Black Parade: The Case for My Chemical Romance As the Last Great Rock Band
• The Dictionary of All Things Emo

We Need to Talk About the ‘Challengers’ Threesome Scene. Just Not for the Reason You Think.

A club chalamet deep dive, ‘tortured poets’ impressions, and a fake mark zuckerberg photo, the ‘tortured poets department’ mailbag.

• Album Release Calendar
• Festival Guide
• Heavy History

My Chemical Romance’s ‘The Black Parade’: 13 Facts Only Superfans Would Know

When My Chemical Romance released The Black Parade in 2006, it was clear they were working on a creative plane few bands will ever reach in their careers. The album was masterful, complex and completely, ridiculously over-the-top in every way. The band tore themselves to shreds during the making of it, then continued dragging themselves through gravel on tour for two straight years in support of it. It was such a force that they had to figuratively “kill” The Black Parade in the end, laying it to rest at a 2008 arena show in Mexico City.

Every anniversary, it bodes well to pay The Black Parade a tribute—a sacrifice, if you will—to keep its powers from overtaking us all. As its legendary spirit turns 13, we’re sharing 13 facts that only the most invested fans might know.

1. It was supposed to be My Chemical Romance’s final album

MCR were always known to have planned things far in advance. Vocalist Gerard Way often spoke about having titles and concepts in his head far ahead of their release, but that was not the case with The Black Parade . In a 2014 interview with NME, Way said that as they approached recording for The Black Parade and it still didn’t have a title, it felt like it was the end. “The end of Black Parade felt like a very natural ending,” he said.

“To go beyond that, felt like betraying some sort of artistic command that I had within myself.”

2. MCR started writing “Welcome To The Black Parade” in 2002

Speaking of planning in advance. In the band’s infancy, they began piecing together a track tentatively called “The Five Of Us Are Dying” that would eventually become “Welcome To The Black Parade.” You can hear a rough demo of what it once was on the band’s Black Parade 10th anniversary release Living With Ghosts .

3. The “Famous Last Words” video seriously injured two members

On August 3 and 4, 2006, My Chemical Romance joined forces with Sam Bayer to film two videos in two days. “Welcome To The Black Parade” and “Famous Last Words” were shot back-to-back, so by the end of day two, when their massive parade float was set ablaze, they were feeling some type of way . Vocalist Gerard Way described the vibe as “like ‘Lord Of The Flies.’” Things got rough . First, rhythm guitarist Frank Iero tackled vocalist Gerard Way, resulting in Way tearing multiple ligaments in his ankle. Drummer Bob Bryar’s kit was set up a little too close to the flames, and he received second and third-degree burns on his leg, which eventually festered into gangrene.

4. Those weird characters in the videos? They have names.

It’s well-established that The Black Parade is a concept album, but deeper within those layers, there are characters. Listed from left to right in the above still from the “Welcome To The Black Parade” video: Fear, The Patient, Regret and Mother War. Oh, and the skeleton on the album cover is called “Pepe,” far predating the now-corrupted sad frog meme.

5. “The Black Parade” are also a band. And they’re from Italy

At MCR’s premiere Black Parade show in London, a recording preceded their taking the stage, saying, “Unfortunately, My Chemical Romance will not be able to perform tonight due to unforeseen circumstances. In their absence they’ve asked their good friends to fill in for them.” After beginning their set with “The End,” Gerard introduced the band by shouting, “We are the Black Parade!” On their Black Parade world tour, the alter-ego “opened for” My Chemical Romance.

6. “Mama” actually features some of their mamas

Along with Liza Minelli, the track “Mama” also features some of the members’ parents. Iero’s mother and the Way brothers’ parents sing along the pirate shanty-ish bit at the end of the track. Oh, and don’t be fooled by some of the bizarre voices in this song, most of them are Gerard playing characters.

7. There’s a “Woody The Woodpecker” reference in a song about death

Cartoon bird Woody The Woodpecker has a distinctive laugh in both rhythm and pitch. Imagine it. Now, go to your handy-dandy streaming platform of choice, turn on “Dead!” and listen to Ray Toro’s ripping guitar solo at about 2 minutes in again. You’ll never unhear it. You’re welcome.

8. The album was literally written in a haunted house

The Canfield-Moreno Estate in California, also known as “The Paramour” is notorious for being haunted as shit. The band report having had doors slammed in their faces throughout its halls and a profound dark and heavy feeling that hung within bassist Mikey Way’s room. Other bands who have recorded there report the same things. Papa Roach, for instance, said they heard footsteps and singing in the house.

9. Gerard Way’s short white hair was a means of method acting

MCR got really into the vibe of this album, especially Gerard Way, who decided he needed to look the part of The Patient to really get into it. In a press conference the band held prior to the release of the album, he said, “To me, I wanted this short white hair so I would look like the character The Patient, who I imagined had gone through some sort of illness or chemotherapy. When I first did it, I looked sick, and it really helped me channel that character.”

10. Tim Burton-favorite Colleen Atwood designed the band’s uniforms

If you’ve seen the whimsical costumes in Edward Scissorhands (1990), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007) or Big Fish (2003), then you’ve seen countless examples of Academy Award-winning costumier Colleen Atwood. Where you may not have realized you’ve also seen her work is in My Chemical Romance’s music videos and onstage at their earliest Black Parade tour dates.

11. The album caused protests in the U.K.

In 2007, notoriously garbage U.K. paper The Daily Mail set off a worldwide outrage among fans when they began railing against “the cult of emo,” going as far as to blame My Chemical Romance, who staunchly rejected the label, for a specific young woman’s suicide. Fans gathered in London to protest the scapegoating, the band lead “Fuck the Daily Mail!” chants at music festivals, and eventually the shitrag shut up about it.

12. Metal fans really fucking hated it

While some U.K. music fans were fighting for My Chemical Romance in 2007, some metalheads were literally waging war on the band. During their Black Parade -era set at Download Festival, the band had all manner of projectiles pelted at them, including but not limited to fruit, garbage and bottles of urine for committing the perceived crime of headlining over Megadeth.

13. Ozzy Osbourne played a role in their completing the album

Little did these metalheads know, guitarist Ray Toro frequently expresses his love for heavy metal and you can hear it resounding in his playing style. In fact, it was his playing songs from Ozzy’s Bark At The Moon that helped jar the band out of a dark point when they were living at the Paramour. Gerard had overheard him playing those songs, slower and darker-sounding, alone, and it broke his heart knowing Toro truly wanted to be playing their music. Eventually, they sat down together and started writing again. Thanks, Ozzy.

Every My Chemical Romance Song Ranked

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Welcome Back To The Black Parade: MCR is Touring Again

Ashton Collins , Staff Writer | March 11, 2022

With two years of delay and worrying about COVID procedures, My Chemical Romance (MCR) is returning back to the spotlight by heading back out on tour.  The well-known 2000’s band that helped put pop punk on the map will tour locally on August 30th in Albany.

The current make-up of the band includes original members: Gerard Way, Mikey Way, Frank Iero, Ray Toro, and Jarrod Alexander. Tickets go on sale today at noon for all new dates of the tour including Albany. 

MCR dominated 2000’s mainstream music, combining punk, metal, and emo styles of music to create masterpieces of work such as “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” and “ The Black Parade”. Those years of music were saved by punk being resurrected into a pop style with bands such as Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World, Good Charlotte,  The All-American Rejects, and My Chemical Romance. 

We have shared some MCR songs below that will get you excited for August or for the students and teachers of Weedsport to relive the nostalgia and youth of the 2000s. 

My Chemical Romance- The Ghost of You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66_NiTJSTc

My Chemical Romance- Welcome to the Black Parade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-I9csAflBs

My Chemical Romance- I’m Not Okay (I Promise)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxz1uDl3_7U

Springtime Brings Flowers… and New Music Too

A Look Back at All Shook Up

Comic Punch: A New Johnny Green Comic Strip

Prom is Coming! Where Are You Getting Your Nails Done?

Weedsport’s Ava Keller Captures Life Through Her Lens

Amodei and Manna On The Way To Lemoyne Together

Weedsport Senior Zoey Powers is Working Toward a Stylish Future

Weedsport Hosts All County Music Festival

In Defense of the Aesthetic

Cady Working Her Way to a Bright Future

“Memory Project” Makes the World Kinder Through Art

“Priscilla” Displays the Power of Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

Bernstein Brings New Energy to Weedsport Music Department

Shiv Roy: Succession’s Resident Girl Boss

A Love Letter to Syria

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Entertainment

The Enduring Legacy Of My Chemical Romance’s ‘The Black Parade’

Here are your front row tickets to the penitence ball

Once an emo kid, always an emo kid. The rise of pop-punk and its eyeliner-inclined sibling paralleled the rise of Myspace and the teenage urge for connection and validation. As a human that was a teen during that time, searching for connection and validation through basic HTML code and Picasa-edited selfies, pop-punk became the most immediate outlet for frustration and apathy. Fueled by Ramen acts like Paramore and Panic! at the Disco kept life fresh and colorful; Underoath was just a tad bit too aggressive; The Used tapped into teenage angst; My Chemical Romance embodied and packaged it with a jet-black and smokey-eyed wink.

Their sophomore album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge , shot them to fame, but their third album, The Black Parade , made them pillars of their generation. The sprawling, 14-song deep album turns 10 today, on October 23. My Chemical Romance is no longer, but The Black Parade marches on because it still sounds like nothing else. Though Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge  played out like a graphic novel, with a solid beginning, middle, and end, The Black Parade took the idea of a concept album and exploited it for the digital age. The band's members traded their black button-downs and red ties for gothic military garb, and lead singer Gerard Way's newly-bleached hair heightened their ghostly aesthetic. "When I grow up, I want to be nothing at all!" Way sang on the album's opener, giving thousands of lost souls a new rallying cry.

What follows is a rock opera as ambitious as any post-Queen rock opera could be. It was a critical success; Rolling Stone  praised the band for its unabashed rock leanings, giving it four out of five stars. The album spawned cynical anthems, like "Teenagers" and its title track. It's Way's theatrics, however, and how they fearlessly charged ahead of the rich orchestrations that made The Black Parade so goddamn timeless. Our post-ironic culture bawks at seriously listening to bands like MCR, but we all know our teenage taste in music stays with us, whether we like it or not. I, for one, wear my love for the band on my sleeve. My Chemical Romance— The Black Parade specifically—was my antidepressant before I was put on antidepressants. What's more, Gerard Way's showmanship gave my closeted soul space to come out as  The Black Parade era carried with it an air of flamboyance and gothic glam that captivated me. (The fact that it was unacceptable for me to wear anything from Hot Topic made my escape into MCR's universe that much more addictive.) Side note: Why "Mama" was never a single baffles me because, ahem, Liza Minnelli, and the composition and delivery of it all begs to be turned into a mini-movie music video. Had visual albums been a thing a decade ago, you best believe The Black Parade would have made for an epic one. 

The Black Parade is an album of resilience, fate, and pride. "We wanted to make a record you could pass down," MCR's guitarist Ray Toro said back in 2006 . And they did. They really did. My Chemical Romance made it okay to be angry. My Chemical Romance made it okay to be sad. And, in a world that increasingly favors the bold, My Chemical Romance's  The Black Parade made it okay to be over the top. Now, like the album's title track asks us to do, we carry on.

Welcome Back to the Black Parade: The Return of My Chemical Romance, Music's Biggest Cult

Conceptual, theatrical and feverishly beloved, MCR are much more than just a band

BY Cam Lindsay Published Aug 24, 2022

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MCR Reunion Tour: The Resurrection of the Black Parade

(NEWARK, NJ) --  My Chemical Romance  brought their Reunion Tour to Prudential Center on September 20, 2022 and Jennifer Petrics was there to cover the show and take photos. The Homeless Gospel Choir and Thursday opened the night. After more than a decade without touring (and band-made jokes that the  Black Parade Is Dead ), the parade marches on.  And My Chem fans couldn’t be happier to be in the procession. 

Hailing from Newark, NJ, the band was welcomed home in true reunion fashion, at their home base, The Prudential Center, to a swarming reception, swelling with Jersey pride.  Joined by openers The Homeless Gospel Choir and Thursday, the bands performed to a packed arena.  Thursday’s Geoff Rickly (also from NJ) interchanged sets with Gerard Way of MCR, for a song apiece, singing together on  Jet Black New Year  and  This Is the Best Day Ever , respectively.

Minutes before My Chemical Romance took the stage, eager fans were waiting, while surrounded in wall-shaking noise bass:  a full reverberating, buzzing distortion, which felt like a mothership landing over the Prudential Center.  Presumably, this was symbolic of the SWARM… the images which pervaded all over the merch stands (of seeing large fly prints).  Welcome to the SWARM… perfectly on brand for the first song.  The stage was soon engulfed in fog, and the dystopian backdrop of a city in ruins set the tone… right out of the comic book pages from  The Umbrella Academy  (a comic and Netflix series written by Way, and of which a 4th and final season is on the way).  MCR’s opening song was appropriate for the mood too,  The Foundations of Decay .

Fans were excited and buzzing over what outfit singer Gerard would come out in, and, for Night One of the home shows, he did not disappoint.  He emerged on stage as a formidable black shadow, decked out in black shades, a black catsuit with a full cape (which resembled bat wings with arms outstretched), and black knee-high artillery boots.  More powerful than this presence, though, was how Way was heavy into sound production and effectively created a sense of theater with his voice/mixer, experimenting with things like pitch/echoes and filling the arena with really impressive vocals.  Like a true rock band, there was no need for special effects; the band was more than enough... and MCR put on a rock show!  They brought the punk of the Ramones with the flare/spirit of Bowie, the gusto of Queen, and the rock of the Smashing Pumpkins.  At times, during stage banter, Gerard sounded like Vecna from Stranger Things with the low, rumbling growls… which made me think that I would love to see the actor (also musician) Jamie Campbell Bower as a guest on stage with MCR!  One day!

Before the show started, as legions of MCR fans were queuing up, it was evident that it’s one fan base that can be who they truly are and express themselves genuinely and uniquely.  It felt good to be in good company, and I’d like to think of us all as “beautiful misfits”… or just real people.  The intro to  The World Is Ugly  resonated here, because Gerard was offering up the affirmation that, in a world that can be so ugly, this song is about staying beautiful, no matter how ugly it gets.  And one of Way’s universal themes (like in The Umbrella Academy) is creating beauty out of destruction and loss.

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I asked one of the biggest fans a generalized question:  “Why do all the millennials love MCR so much?”  And the answer was simple, “Because we’re all depressed.”  This is a testament to the enormous success their single  I’m Not Okay (I Promise)  has seen, which broke the band into the mainstream.  We are living in a time of unparalleled stress and frustration, from which we are desperately seeking release.  Music heals the soul and serves as a therapeutic device, of which there is psychological-backed evidence.  Music acts as an agent to purge negative emotions, regulate mood, and provide comfort.  At the biological level, it produces the hormone prolactin, which helps counteract pain/loss and reduce stress.  Likewise, it allows listeners to disengage as well as mitigate feelings of loneliness, isolation, and depression.

Speaking on release, MCR’s most iconic song in the band’s history,  Welcome to the Black Parade — the song which catapulted them to meteoric heights—embraces this theme on many levels.  Given a succinct interpretation by the fan I spoke with, the black parade (like the funeral march) symbolizes the transition into death, or the passage out of life.  It has become the band’s longstanding emo anthem of the century, reflective of grief and loss.  Way says that a theme that he’s explored in ‘Black Parade’ was “the triumph of the human spirit over darkness, over tragedy.”  And digging into the archives of interviews a bit, I learned some haunting and chilling facts.  The album was recorded at a haunted mansion called The Paramour, where darkness permeated through the life of the album (and the band, having experienced strange occurrences while staying there).

Other chart topping, favorite MCR songs in the setlist included  Famous Last Words ,  The Ghost of You , and  Helena — which the crowd received with unbridled energy.  During Teenagers, strobe flashes accented the bass drum like muzzle flash and swirling plumes of smoke.  The first of the encore songs,  Demolition Lovers , was the first performance of the song since 2004, and at the very end, the audience was so hyped that security guards found themselves catching swarms of crowdsurfers spilling over the barricade.

If fans wanted to get their hands on the coveted Prudential Center exclusive limited edition MCR x NJ Devils shirt, they had to wait in swarms of lines which wrapped around the whole arena.  The night had shifted into the Black Friday Parade… everybody wanted one!  Apparently the shirt sold out within the first 30 minutes on both nights, and the resale price is outrageous.  I heard a rumor that there will be a limited amount available at the Devils opening home game, on October 15th at the PRU, (it is not my intention to spread misinformation, but just in case) so keep your eyes out!

In short, MCR had the perfect homecoming (Night One of Two); it was an epic parade of loyal fans in NJ who welcomed their liege bandleaders with open arms.  A major cause for celebration after a long awaited return.  THANK YOU, MCR!!!  We’ll carry on!

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The 'Parade' Begins: My Chemical Romance Announce U.S. Tour Dates

For a band that released one of 2006's most ambitious and anticipated LPs -- the concept album The Black Parade -- My Chemical Romance didn't tour much this past year. Aside from scattered strings of dates and the occasional rock radio-station-sponsored holiday concert, the Garden State post-hardcore luminaries spent much of their promotional time overseas, playing for fans in Europe.

But MCR's American fans weren't being ignored -- they were just expected to be a little patient, with the promise that yes, Gerard Way and company would be returning to the road in 2007. Well, it appears My Chemical Romance are indeed a band of their word.

Starting in late February, the long wait will be over. With Rise Against along for the ride, My Chemical Romance will launch the first leg of their tour on February 22 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Seventeen dates have been scheduled thus far, running through March 16 in Reno, Nevada.

According to the band's management, additional dates will be announced in the coming weeks -- and the next batch will feature openers Muse. News of the tour follows the release of the video for "Famous Last Words," the second single from The Black Parade, which has sold more than 550,000 copies since its release two months ago (see [article id="1544562"]"Hannah Montana Rains On My Chemical Romance's Parade "[/article]).

The trek will also lead the band into its headlining slot at this year's Bamboozle festival, which will be held May 5-6 at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey. MCR will close out the fest's first night, while Linkin Park have been tapped to wrap up the second (see [article id="1546364"]"My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park, Surprise 'Idol' To Rock Bamboozle '07"[/article]).

For more on the making of MCR's The Black Parade , check out "A Night at the Opera With My Chemical Romance."

My Chemical Romance tour dates, according to the band's management:

» 2/22 - Manchester, NH @ Verizon Wireless Arena

» 2/23 - Uniondale, NY @ Nassau Coliseum

» 2/25 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Liacouras Center

» 2/26 - Cleveland, OH @ Wolstein Center at CSU

» 2/28 - Detroit, MI @ Joe Louis Arena

» 3/1 - Rosemont, IL @ Allstate Arena

» 3/3 - Lincoln, NE @ Pershing Center

» 3/4 - Denver, CO @ Magness Arena

» 3/6 - Salt Lake City, UT @ EnergySolutions Arena

» 3/7 - Las Vegas, NV @ Orleans Arena

» 3/9 - Glendale, AZ @ Jobing.com Arena

» 3/10 - Inglewood, CA @ The Forum

» 3/11 - Anaheim, CA @ Anaheim Convention Center

» 3/13 - San Diego, CA @ ipayOne Center at the Sports Arena

» 3/14 - Fresno, CA @ Selland Arena

» 3/15 - Oakland, CA @ Oracle Arena

» 3/16 - Reno, NV @ Lawlor Events Center

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A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: My Chemical Romance – “The Black Parade”

Why hello there, my dear emo kids at heart! It’s time to bust out the ol’ black nail polish and eyeshadow, because we’re going to dive deep into one of your classic childhood/adolescence records today: The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance , who I will assume don’t need much of an introduction from yours truly at this point in time. Indeed, this is one of the most enthusiastically received records among those who like to participate in the little feature of mine, at least in recent memory, and so it comes as no surprise that the contributions you will find below are charged with emotions and memories galore.

Jake Walters

‘ come one, come all to this tragic affair.. .’.

15 years have passed since My Chemical Romance gave birth to their legacy in the legitimate rock opera, The Black Parade . Filled with drama, decadence, and death, these 14 tracks work together to make the defining album of their career, and dare I say, a generation. More often than not if you play a single high G note on a piano, several heads in the room will turn, expecting the intro “Welcome to the Black Parade” to follow. But before we jump to that track, let’s not forget that this one doesn’t show up first. After the somber but inviting “The End.” kicks things off, “Dead!” is a full-on rock and roll anthem with blues rock licks, mixed with punk riffs and harmonized vocals that no one expected from these emo punks who just a few years before were getting airplay with dramatic tales of youth on Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. This was some sophisticated stuff with pianos, horns, and intelligent but still delightfully edgy lyrics. I remember hearing this for the first time and being blown away by how diverse and authentic this felt. I could tell this was coming from a brilliant set of minds that had a lot to say and a lot of naysayers to prove wrong. The fact that we’re here a decade and a half later still talking about this means that MCR had the last laugh.

‘ When I was a young boy… ’

This album hit me as I was reaching for heavier music as I was growing out of the music of my youth and even away from more of the punk-forward genres into more post-hardcore and metal territory. So in some ways I was growing up with the band a bit, and while this is certainly still considered and emo classic, there’s far more to this album than just that. “Welcome to the Black Parade” is a genuinely grand and beautiful song that weaves several genres together and makes a tapestry that could be hung just about anywhere. “I Don’t Love You” is another song that shows just how good MCR were at songwriting. They were still firmly using their emo and punk sensibilities in the vocal approach and lyrics, but the song was written as a contemporary pop song with familiar progressions that made it insanely catchy and memorable. It’s still one of my favorites on the record for that very reason.

‘ Turn away. If you could, get me a drink of water… ’

“Cancer” is literally the saddest song that I know. Yes, there are tracks that are more subtle, tragic, and balanced. But the head-on approach of this song still, to this day, haunts me. It’s a fearless look into the eyes of the disease and doesn’t shy away from the horrors and reality of one experiencing the effects of it and its treatment. There’s something to be said of such bare-knuckle bravery when broaching this topic, and that’s why it’s always stuck with me.

‘ I am not afraid to keep on living… ’

“Famous Last Words” is arguably the heaviest track My Chemical Romance ever released – the driving beat, the riffs, and the massive chorus just seal this as one of my favorite tracks on the record. There’s a beautiful sense of finality as well, and it’s properly situated at the end of the album. In the years that have passed since this album released parts of it have lived in my head, rent free. That’s a testament to the songwriting and power of this album. Yes, it’s the emo kids’ Dark Side of the Moon , but it’s also the best album to ever come out of that scene. It transcended, grew, and secured itself in the pantheon of great rock records of the 21st century.

Alex Sievers

2006 was a big-ass year for rock, punk and post-hardcore: Louder Now , A City By The Light Divided , Still Searching , Decemberunderground , Crisis , For Blood And Empire , and Billy Talent ’s killer second album . Even in metalcore, it was a very notable year with Define The Great Line , Redeemer , As Daylight Dies , and more. Again, HUGE year! Yet My Chemical Romance’s third album stands tall out of that year in scope, success, and cultural influence. A band that came from sweaty New Jersey basements in 2002, gained Warped Tour prominence in 2004, and went on to find international stadium stardom and pyrotechnics galore with this conceptual beast. Seminal doesn’t even begin to capture it accurately.

So where do you even begin with The Black Parade ? Well, there’s the usual notes writers pontificate about when covering this 2006 cornerstone. G notes and ‘ When I was a young boy… ‘ jokes abound; the military jackets and Tim Burton-looking aesthetic; Gerard Way’s iconic white hair and impeccable vocal performance; a pop-punky rock-opera about death and reflection; drummer Bob Bryar’s first album with MCR ; and Chris Lord-Alge mixing this behemoth, making it sound larger than life (say what you want about CLA due to his contributions in the Loudness war and his preset-heavy plugins, but his work behind the boards here is fucking immense).

It all comes down to the songs. “I Don’t Love You” is a mid-paced, acoustic-tinged power ballad about being honest with someone you no longer love. The two mega-hits of “Famous Last Words” and “Welcome to the Black Parade” have been discussed to death by now, but I bet you thought about both choruses when I mentioned them. The Bowie and Queen -esque overture “The End.”, followed by the dual Frank Iero/Ray Toro riff-driven “Dead!” is an incredible double-whammy. “House Of Wolves,” with its big band drum fill, on-edge cabaret mood, and Way rolling his a’s, is a stellar deep cut. As is “Mama”, this war-time lamentation piece about fractured family relationships that even features Liza Minnelli’s dramatic vocalizations during the climax. And then there’s “This Is How I Disappear” – what a fucking song! My favourite MCR tune next to “ Destroya ” and “ Headfirst For Halos ”; my soul leaves my body every time when its bridge, and how said part transitions back into the final chorus, hits.

The Black Parade is a classic record for 2000s alternative music, but it ain’t perfect. “Cancer” is a beautifully direct song about cancer itself… when performed live . On-record, it’s sonically grating due to the weird effect placed upon Way’s voice, a vocal production that isn’t found anywhere else on the LP. (Though his performance otherwise is gut-wrenching in the best way.) Then there’s “Teenagers”. Sandwiched between two of the album’s finest songs – the meteoric impact of “Sleep” and the bittersweet revelations in “Disenchanted” – rests a rowdy but shallow rock number about not understanding the youth of today, with an extremely annoying hook to boot. Yet the album still persists beyond musical and generational boundaries, as the rest of this album’s 11 tracks (12 if you count “Blood”) are just that good. Even my mum loves this album!

For MCR , The Black Parade was them breaking through, proving to the world that they could do bigger and better things, that “Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge” wasn’t some fluke. We’ve seen this happen with other alt artists: Twenty One Pilots with Blurryface , Fall Out Boy with Infinity On High , Paramore through their self-titled album, and so on. There are countless bands – from a range of different demographics and styles – that wouldn’t be the same without this album. Hell, I wouldn’t be the same person I am now without first discovering it in early 2008 – I hadn’t heard anything like it back then and it blew my mind. Throughout my teens, I considered this my all-time favourite record. Now that I’m 26? I don’t place it quite so high but still love it dearly ( even The Melon loves it !). For myself and so many fans, and for so many artists in the 15 years since, there are two clear periods of their musical lives: before and after The Black Parade .

Billie Helton

We talk a lot about really influential and iconic albums in A Scene In Retrospect , but this one feels so much different to me. The Black Parade is hands-down one of the most iconic and formative albums for my teenage years. This album came out in 2006, at the peak of middle school for me. I was a social outcast; the quiet nerdy kid who sat in the corner and read books and got picked on for it.

While it’s not from this album, I feel like I can’t discuss my relationship with My Chemical Romance without starting with “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”, the powerhouse of a single from 2004’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge . I was misunderstood and slowly becoming emo without really knowing what it meant. Seeing the music video for that song and the band of outcasts who made it look cool was beyond iconic for me. That song became my anthem, its parent album the backdrop of my adolescent angst.

Naturally, when The Black Parade came out, I was hype as it gets. However, I absolutely hated this album at first because of its popularity. It didn’t feel fair that so many people were enjoying this group who had become so integral to my existence. I got mad when Fuse was regularly playing the music video to “Welcome to the Black Parade” and kind of shut MCR out of my little emo brain for a couple years.

My cousin Leigh Ann had a huge emo phase at the same time as me, and being barely a year apart in age, we were really tight at this point. We’d listen to sad music and talk about how nobody else understood our individual problems and have a good time whining the night away. This was an admittedly… cringy time in young-teenage-Billie’s life, and I own that. Anyways, she showed me “Teenagers”, and as a fresh teen, it was like MCR was speaking to me individually all over again. “Teenagers” was the anthem to our teenage rebellion, and we even made up a fun and angsty dance to go along with the lyrics!

The Black Parade was so much more than just a music album, and it still feels that way. It’s a damn good rock album, and I still think Gerard Way has one of the most distinct and memorable voices in rock music. I say rock music because The Black Parade really isn’t that emo, musically, for being the most emo album of all time. It’s a great debate that I don’t feel like getting into, honestly, but I always love hearing opinions on if MCR is actually emo music or not. I’ll say this much – regardless of if their music is emo enough for you, they are the kings of 2000’s emo and completely redefined what the term meant on a musical and cultural level. Emo kids like me wouldn’t exist without MCR . My entire sense of style and my entire teen years identity would simply not be what it is today if it weren’t for this powerhouse of an album.

I have simply too many memories of sneaking to try out make-up and talk to girls with my limited texting minutes while “The Sharpest Lives” blared in the background. “I Don’t Love You” punctuated my first major break-up (and every single one since if we’re being honest). Maybe the most important to this day, however, is the unstoppable force that is “Famous Last Words”. If I had a dollar for every time I screamed myself hoarse singing along to this chorus, I would be able to buy my weight in tacos. In retrospect, The Black Parade is probably the most important album of my generation for emo kids. I have more memories associated with this group than I was prepared to explore for this piece, and it’s crazy how 15 years later it still keeps flooding back.

Rodrigo Torres Pinelli

When I signed up for this feature, I, entirely confident, rested upon the thought of an immediate word plethora coming out whenever I started working on it. As I write these lines, I can assure you that the confidence has evaporated, and so have the words. ‘Cause in a feature like this, dealing with an album as accompanying as The Black Parade is to me, appealing to fact-checking and listing things we already know is not the way to go. It rather is a moment of heavy reflection on the brightest and darkest points as an earthling, where this album has been present since 2006, always there for me.

My Chemical Romance was present in my life before I even spoke this language properly. I was 8 years old the first time I watched “Helena” on MTV. My afternoons at that age consisted of coming back from school and watching MTV’s Top Ten Videos. There were episodes where MCR got three simultaneous videos airing at the same time: “The Ghost of You”, “Helena”, and “I’m Not Okay”.  So yeah, they became massive to me, as they did to tons of others, in the earliest stages of our coming of age.

As I said, at the time all I saw was a bunch of guys in weird suits playing in a church while people danced beside a coffin. I loved it. No clue I didn’t even grasp the musical, lyrical, and aesthetic rivets MCR painted on The Black Parade until much, much later.

All the imagery they elaborated on was perceived by me from a childish perspective. There was no room for rationality or concept. I can vividly evoke memories of “Cancer” playing on my iPod nano while traveling somewhere, always hiding my iPod whenever that song played. I didn’t want anyone to see I was listening to a song named after the disease. I also skipped the first part of “Sleep” too many times because I was afraid of the intro. I remember the woman with a gas mask in the “Welcome to the Black Parade”. She freaked me out, but I loved the song anyway because Ray Toro had curly hair as I did. These are just little memory frames I can trace when listening to the record. They were heroes. Weird ones, but heroes still.

Instead of having teddy bears or journals, I had albums. Many of them I did not let go of as I grew up, and I probably won’t at all. Not a single album from other bands in that scene offered that to me. This one was compelling. It is, still today, as emotionally crushing as it was fifteen years back. Therefore, countless opportunities for reconnection with MCR ‘s magnum opus arose with time.

Reconnection, in effect, comes along with the transformation of the self. Inherently shaped by life experience, my encounters with songs like “Disenchanted”, “I Don’t Love You”, or “Famous Last Words” rendered sentimental maturity in my teen years. Pop punk had lost strength, as MCR faded into a lesser frequent act in my daily jams. I had now incorporated the desire to play music with a band, as I discovered the world of heavy metal. It took me many years to understand that The Black Parade acted as the extremely early gateway to Iron Maiden , Metallica , Queen , Rush – you know, bands that mark you forever.

In retrospect, my late teens were characterized for having too much arrogance and a close-minded approach to music. I guess metal had absorbed me exceedingly. It created barriers to other genres, due to their ‘ unworthiness ‘. Purist bullshit, right? During that time, I shamed myself for listening to bands like MCR , Sum 41 , or Simple Plan . Now, I almost shame myself for shaming myself in the past.

It wasn’t until I started music theory lessons that I had the chance to make peace with my arrogance, set it aside, and humble myself down a bit. Along with a fellow student, now a dear friend of mine, we embarked upon a journey that would revitalize my link to The Black Parade : harmonic and melodic analysis. It did affect my rusty relationship with Linkin Park ‘s Minutes to Midnight and Thirty Seconds to Mars ‘ A Beautiful Lie as well. However, neither of those had the amount of cloth MCR brought to the table in terms of how music theory could massively improve your appreciation of their craft. The arrangements were far too appealing compared to other popular songs. Different leagues entirely.

Since then, The Black Parade has become a musical landmark, a contention device, and a friend. This is the ultimate takeaway that I’d like to offer: that of finding whatever it is that creates a special connection with you. Something that you can recycle forever. Embrace it. Own that connection and let it own you. Let it push you forward or lie you back. Let it motivate you, inspire you, content you. That is what The Black Parade is to me today and, hopefully, for many days to come.

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Dominik Böhmer

Pretentious? Moi?

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A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: Hacride – “Lazarus”

Very thorough. Now that you are older what do you think of The Black Parade as a stage musical? Check out this fan generated script with embedded audio. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcrmusical?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Hi Dale! First of all, thanks a lot for taking the time for commenting on our page. On my side, I’ve never conceived TBP as a musical in the same way you would consider The Phantom of the Opera or Hamilton, you know? However, its thematic narrative, aesthetics and style is practically undeniable. It’s actually no surprise that a fan eventually reimagined the album as a theater play. Will definitely check out! Thanks again. Rodri.

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