It doesn’t feel like that long ago when My Chemical Romance were sweeping through high schools across the country with angsty teenagers dying their hair black and swearing by the anthemic choruses of the 2006 rock opera The Black Parade. Perhaps nostalgia might blur those memories of the band’s breakout year, but MCR nonetheless maintained a rabid fan base until their disbandment in 2013.

The central figure of the band though has always been Gerard Way and while the direction of his first solo record, Hesitant Alien, might seem left of centre for some the fact that it exists in the first place isn’t the least bit surprising.

Way, who will be in town in 2015 as apart of the mammoth Soundwave lineup, might disagree with those sentiments as he articulates generously over the course of a 20 minute phone call from LA just how organic the recording process was.

The 37-year-old takes us behind the influences of his solo debut referencing Bowie and Brian Eno along the way as he discusses the experimental nature of the record and his role as a mainstream artist.

TD: How liberating was it to go solo after being in MCR for all those years?

GW: It definitely feels like, well it was the end of MCR, and it doesn’t feel like a hiatus, MCR wasn’t something I was interested in doing anymore. But the songs were just kind of happening. It wasn’t that stressful because I didn’t know that I was making a solo record. I didn’t know what I was making, I knew I was just compelled to get up and keep making music, so that part was the most liberating because I wasn’t thinking about an album, I wasn’t thinking about a band, I wasn’t thinking about a big machine that I was in, I wasn’t thinking about what a record label would think, I wasn’t thinking about anything, I was just making music. So that was probably the most liberating element of the whole thing.

TD: At what point throughout the process did you realise that it was going to be a solo record?

GW: It was probably about the time that I wrote ‘No Shows’, I think when I wrote that one I realised that this is really shaping up to be a collection of songs and more importantly is shaping up to be more ambitious than I had thought when I first started. I felt like at first I was solely making a garagey fuzz rock record and then it felt like it was really revolving. By the time I got to ‘No Shows’ it felt like I had invested more of a post punk energy or kind of no wave energy or new wave. Bands like Wire and that were starting to creep in.

TD: And so when did it become apparent that this was going to be a ‘Gerard Way’ record rather than being under a moniker for a new band?

GW: That happened really naturally over time. When I started I did think it was like ‘alright it’s a new project, so it’s fun for me to come up with what it looks like, what it feels like, what it’s called’, all that stuffs really fun, but I didn’t let myself get to wrapped up in it and just hit a point where; ‘why would I start another band right now? When I’m putting so much of myself in this and I’m really constructing this’. I had to take ownership over what I do and I think because of that the project said to me this is a solo album, this is obviously a solo album.

“It doesn’t feel like a hiatus, MCR wasn’t something I was interested in doing anymore”

TD: Does it make you a little bit anxious because you’re putting so much of yourself into Hesitant Alien and because it’s just yourself this time around?

GW: I’ve got to be honest it doesn’t feel like I’m putting any less of myself in this than anything else I’ve ever done, I feel like I always put an incredible amount of myself into anything MCR did to the point of designing wardrobe and sets and things like that so I’ve always felt like, I’ve probably been more anxious in MCR than I’m just being on my own because I don’t have this worry that what I’m doing, how it’ll effect people poorly that I’m in direct relationships with. If it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t connect it’s just on me. And I actually like that a lot better.

TD: How do you think fans of MCR have responded to Hesitant Alien so far?

GW: I don’t go looking for rejection or acceptance. But everybody has this way of feeling what it’s like with a reaction to something even if they’re not looking for it and the reaction that I’ve felt has been overwhelmingly positive to the point where I didn’t expect that positivity surrounding it as much what I’m seeing, which is this tremendous amount. The most important thing that I’m seeing is the people are open to receive what it’s that I’m bringing them right now.

They’re open to hear a record that sounds different from what they’re normally hearing on the radio or even in modern rock (and) that is exciting. There’s young people learning who Brian Eno is and Bowie and Iggy Pop and who My Bloody Valentine is and Jesus And Mary Chain and all that stuff and I think that it’s incredible and they’re all learning about glam and Britpop for the first time and they’re very open to receive that so that’s been the biggest victory, the biggest victory doesn’t have anything to do with me personally, it’s not an ego thing, the biggest victory is to see kids interested in totally different sounds, totally different things.

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TD: Do you think there was a lack of mainstream artists doing that sort of thing when you were young?  

GW: There wasn’t too many people in the mainstream cause grunge had hit really big, I went and found the underground thing so I’m obviously somebody that brings things to the mainstream. I’m a more mainstream artist, which I don’t think is a bad thing, but it gives me opportunities to be really responsible with that power: ‘this is what I’m going to show you. This is what I’m going to share with you. It’s going to be different from you’re used to hearing’. That’s my job as a mainstream artist to bring things they haven’t heard before.

Because as a kid it was a lot harder to discover it and there wasn’t anybody in the mainstream. Well there was, there was bands like the Pixies they’re alternative, I don’t know how mainstream they’re considered, but I learned about The Jesus And The Mary Chain from the Pixies cover and after that I was a Jesus And Mary Chain fan, so there were people in the mainstream getting you interested in things from the past.

TD: Did you ever think that a solo career would ever be on the horizon?

GW: It wasn’t no. It wasn’t something that I thought was really ever going to be a thing, I actually didn’t think – I thought if MCR ever stopped I would just go on and do something else that wasn’t music related, so when it did stop to keep making music that was really startling to me because that had never been the plan in my head, but it was really the fact that I just didn’t realise that it’s just what you do like you’re compelled to make music, you may want to make lots of other things like books or comics or TV shows and you can make those things, but music is the one thing you wake up and you automatically do it.

TD: Ok so let’s talk about the record, on Twitter the other day you said that a lot of the media have been focusing on the Britpop element and forgetting the glam aspect of Hesitant Alien do you think the media are just skimming the surface when it comes to the album? Are we being a little bit lazy?

GW: A lot of the pieces that I have read on the album they’re very thoughtful and they’re very in depth, I think it’s exciting to a lot of people in music journalism right now though that somebody is referencing Britpop in their music so I think that’s such an exciting thing for people that they tend to focus on that. I don’t have an issue with that I just think, I guess my opinion is that it misrepresents the album to only dwell on that because it feels to me at least seven or eight different things going on despite Britpop. Again, it’s not an ego thing, I wouldn’t want to miss sell this album to somebody.

TD: What are some of the other influences on the record that are perhaps being missed?

GW: I think the biggest influences have been Tony Visconti and Brian Eno and David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Visconti and Eno making Bowie records and you had Bowie living in Berlin with Iggy and they were making to me and to a lot of people who are die hard fans the most interesting records of their whole career, the most experimental and that was a period I really focused on once I wanted to glue everything together on this album. There were some holes on the album, it was developing a sonic identity, but it didn’t have that glue. To me I found the glue was the oddness or the weirdness. So the weirdness creeped in from Bowie’s Berlin period.

TD: Have you always been a fan of the ‘Berlin Trilogy’ or did you just get into it more recently?

GW: I’d always been a fan of it, but you know what’s funny? When you’re a musician or an artist you hear records like that and you say to yourself like ‘that’s so amazing they got to do that and go so off the rails’. From my own personal experiences you say to yourself as an artist ‘I wish I could be able to make a record like that or I wish things were the way they were so I could do something like that’. But you can’t and you just have to do it and have to be really strong about it and you have to not let anybody tell you different and you can make albums like that, but you also have to be open to receive that energy, you have to be open to experiment, try new things, have to be open to failure, you have to be accepting of all these things and this stuff in order to make compelling strange music, but I’d always been interested in the Berlin trilogy.

TD: Was there ever a point where you had to reel yourself back in from the weirdness, from being too experimental?

GW: I found that I actually had the opposite problem that it was so easy to fall into old habits in terms of songs structure and writing big choruses I’d gotten so good at that epic chorus thing withdrawing that from my repertoire was the hardest part. There were songs that didn’t make the album because the chorus was too big, it reminds me too much of what I used to do, it’s not finding anything new so I wanted to go way further. I’ve seen people complain about – and it doesn’t bother me – where the vocal sits on the record and that’s kind of fuzzed out and believe me that’s a compromise from where I wanted it. It was some murky sounding stuff a year ago.

TD: Do you think you’ll experiment even more on future solo releases?

GW: Absolutely, I’m making music right now that feels already pretty different, but at the same time when you start putting out music more frequently and that’s your goal and making art more frequently and you’re not trapped in this situation where your kind of doomed to repeat this cycle of two years of tour, two years of making an album. Like basically putting a record out every three and a half years. I feel like right now I just have to keep making music. But I think having said that I’m going to push harder and experiment more on the next one, sometimes that can manifest itself in really different ways I’m looking at late 60s soul right now cause to me that’s something that’s new to me.

TD: You said in the album’s presser that your intention was “to make 100 percent uncompromised art using the least radio friendly instrument, the guitar”. Why was that so important to you?

GW: It was important to make something really uncompromising because I feel that I had made compromises and I wasn’t happy with the results so basically I was at a crossroads as a solo artist so it was ‘I walk away from this band there’s two options I can make what I want or I can make what other people make what they want me to make and then there’s almost like a third option I could make pop music which is what certain people want me to make and have that and work with hit makers and things like that’. So I was faced with this fork with this three way split and I decided to make what I wanted because it felt like it had been a really long time since I’d done that.

TD: Would you ever consider going down the pop route?

GW: Only if it was experimental and different. I feel like if I could learn something from doing that, cause arguably even David Bowie he had a period where he was making pop music and it was genius and experimental, it was maybe lost on people, like on commercial listeners, maybe they didn’t pick up on the experimental nature of what he was doing, but if you knew Bowie and what he was doing and were a fan it was experimental to you. I think nothing’s off the table. If I did make a pop record it would be because I wanted to and because it was on my terms and because I was working with who I wanted to work with.

 Hesitant Alien is out now through Warner, and he’ll be performing as part of the Soundwave 2015 line up.

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