Welcome To The Black Parade is the sound of a band reinventing itself.
By the time they were working on 2006 album The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance were already one of the biggest names in the emo and punk world.
For their third full-length, however, the New Jersey quintet were dreaming of a sound that would catapult them into the higher echelons of alternative rock.
The lead single and title track (of sorts) from that release was their chance to show the world just how charismatically daring they could be – taking more influence from 1970s rock masters like Queen and David Bowie to create a potently eclectic and vividly immersive listen.
The Black Parade was a concept album centred around the story of a dying man known as ‘The Patient’.
Singer Gerard Way likened The Black Parade to Pink Floyd’s legendary 1979 concept album The Wall.
Way told Q magazine: “This record is like The Wall in that it’s about alienation – alienation of a band, and then the claiming of one’s destiny.”
Referring to his lyrics in Welcome To The Black Parade, Way said: “This record is largely about destiny, but when I ask the question – ‘Will you be the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned?’ – it’s not for me. I’m not some kind of messiah figure, as has been misinterpreted.
“It’s simply enough to ask the question – of myself, of you, everybody in our audience – ‘What are you gonna be?’”
In the lyrics to Welcome To The Black Parade there is a flashback of the lead character being taken “into the city to see a marching band” with his father.
The song starts with single notes played on a piano with a generous helping of reverb, before marching band-style snare rolls are introduced alongside orchestrations arranged by David Campbell – a composer and conductor also famous for his work with Metallica, Radiohead and The Rolling Stones.
This opening section is in the key of G major, with the chords moving diatonically through G/D/Emin/Bmin/C/Bmin/Amin/D.
Lead guitarist Ray Toro joins in the fanfare soon after, playing a lead melody in the E minor pentatonic position found up at the twelfth fret, which would be the relative natural minor mode to G major.
Some of his phrasing can be likened to Queen legend Brian May. “What I like about Brian May is that he views the guitar like an orchestra,” Toro once said. “His guitar playing is very symphonic. I’m just a huge fan of how he layers and harmonizes things like an arranger or a conductor.”
In the video for Welcome To The Black Parade, Toro can be seen playing an Epiphone Wildkat Black Royale, though the band have gone on record to confirm that the bulk of the album was recording with their touring gear.
In Toro’s case, it probably would have been an early ’90s Gibson Les Paul Standard fitted with either Seymour Duncan Phat Cat P90-style pickups or a stock neck humbucker with a Seymour Duncan JB SH-4 in the bridge.
After Toro’s Marshall JCM2000 DSL broke down during rehearsals, the Les Paul was fed into a 100-Watt Marshall JCM800 belonging to producer Rob Cavallo, which Toro later described as “the loudest and ballsiest amp I’ve ever heard”.
The recording sessions for the album took place at Eldorado Studios in Burbank, which had famously given birth to classic albums for Alice In Chains, The Offspring and Slayer.
As for rhythm guitarist Frank Iero’s tracks, they were most likely recorded with the same JCM800 belonging to the producer.
Though he tended to use both Gibson and Epiphone Les Pauls and SGs on stage, Iero can be seen holding an Epiphone Sheraton II in the Welcome To The Black Parade video.
The band chose Samuel Bayer to direct, a cinematographer who got his big break working with Nirvana on their legendary Smells Like Teen Spirit video, and would later end up working with Iron Maiden, Rush and Lenny Kravitz.
A little under two minutes into the song, the quintet break into an up-tempo, palm-muted punk rock verse that sets the tone for the rest of its three minutes, save for a half-time bridge section that ushers in a key change, moving up a full step from G major to A.
In 2007, Ray Toro spoke to Seymour Duncan about the lengthy writing process behind the track, citing it as his band’s attempt to write a genre-crossing masterpiece like Bohemian Rhapsody and praising it for being “probably the most epic song on the record”.
He explained how the song’s origins went as far back as the band’s earliest days and how it started life as a “very slow and very chordal-based” idea with an uncanny similarity to Frank Sinatra hit My Way.
The track was originally titled The Five Of Us Are Dying, though it wasn’t ready in time for the band’s 2002 debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, nor its 2004 follow-up Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.
“That song had about five or six different movements,” Toro explained. “The closest thing I could relate it to is Green Day’s Jesus Of Suburbia where you have all these different parts of a song which all work together.”
Even as the group were finalising this ambitious album, certain aspects of what would become Welcome To The Black Parade weren’t quite sitting right.
By changing one note in the chorus, singer Gerard Way was inspired to take the song in a different direction, which led to him finding its main hook.
![My Chemical Romance - Welcome To The Black Parade [Official Music Video] [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/RRKJiM9Njr8/maxresdefault.jpg)
In 2006 Toro said of the track: “It’s been a part of this band for five years, and it took that long to really finish the song and define what it truly was about. Then on top of that, the song was just so much fun to record with all the horns, the piano, backing vocals, and do all the layering with the parts.”
He continued: “It was a very complex and fun song to record. Five years ago we would never have thought that the song would have ended up becoming what it did.”
Ahead of the album’s release in October 2016, Welcome To The Black Parade was issued as a single on 12 September.
In the UK it went all the way to No.1.
It was a coming-of-age emo anthem that captured the hearts and minds of a new generation.
It also cemented the band’s stature as modern torchbearers of rock ’n’ roll.
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