Gerard Way has revealed that My Chemical Romance almost left ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ off their third album and I’m very grateful they saw sense and didn’t do that.
Way was speaking to Travis Mills on Apple Music 1 in an interview released on Wednesday, October 20th, reflecting on the 15th anniversary of The Black Parade. That’s when he shared the revelation that their classic hit almost didn’t make the final cut of the album.
The reason? Because ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ was “the hardest one to finish.” He continued by saying that the song “ended up becoming deconstructed and kind of broken and in order to rebuild it into something better.”
Way soon realised the value of the song though. “I had felt that we needed that one song on the record, that touchstone, that kind of introduces your concept and then the lyrics and the themes of that song kind of embody the themes of the whole record.”
Though the band all enjoyed the song, Way admitted that he felt no personal connection to it. “It didn’t feel like it was going to be on the album because all the other songs had really strong themes and titles and things like that,” he remembered.
“But we didn’t want to just give up on the song. Then I started to bring the concept into the musical side of things where I was like, ‘I want to call this Black Parade. I want there to be a parade on the record.’ Then we started to kind of breaking the song and then reconstructing it,” the singer explained of the process.”
He added: “It was around this time that I wrote the opening melody for piano that Rob played. Then once we re-approached it from the perspective of starting with a completely new introduction and a new way to start the song, it helped us fix the rest of it.
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Anytime it got brought up before we started breaking it, any time it kind of got brought up, especially by my AR, Craig Aaronson, I would just kind of shoo him away about it and be like, “Yeah, that song’s about nothing. I’m not interested in that one.”
My Chemical Romance are set to play Black Parade and other fan favourites on a huge 2022 tour, which hits Australia and New Zealand next March.
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Check out ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance:
