60 Songs That Explain the '90s - My Chemical Romance—“Welcome to the Black Parade”

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

We should have known that, despite the irony, the kid from New Jersey who defended the purchasing of serial killer comics would grow up to become the defender of the broken, beaten, and damned. Today, Rob recollects the discovery of his emo phase with the enduring anthem “Welcome to the Black Parade,” by My Chemical Romance. He recounts the rise of the young band in a post-9/11 New Jersey and the pinnacle of their success with the grandiose showmanship of the 'Black Parade' album. At the end, he is joined by former My Chemical Romance producer and mentor Geoff Rickly, lead singer of the band Thursday, who knew early on that the band would be a global phenomenon. Host: Rob Harvilla Producers: Olivia Crerie, Julianna Ress, Chris Sutton, and Justin Sayles Guest: Geoff Rickly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/60songsthatexplainthe90s/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@60songsthatexplainthe90s?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends, a quick note to say that 60 songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube, and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion,

and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube. Check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A. But maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well. Thanks for listening and or watching.

And we'll see you on the internet. Do the words Nickelodeon super toy run mean anything to you? Does this phrase resonate? Did your inner nine-year-old just freak out just a tiny little bit? Because mine did. When I think of heaven, deliver me in a black-winged bird to a Nickelodeon super toy run. Once a year, two kids in America. Get out a little bit.

Get to live out the ultimate dream. I still don't believe it. I think I'm going to wake up in about two seconds. It's Nickelodeon Super Toy Run, a game-grabbing toy snagging rampage through a KB Toy Works Store. Nickelodeon created it, and only Nickelodeon's got it. Did you get everything you wanted? Yeah, and more. The boy.

The deflated melancholy in that last kid's voice, though. Did you get everything you wanted? And more. That's heavy. That's real. Also, the initial black and white footage of excited children really confuses me. Nowadays, when I see black and white stuff in commercials, I just assume it's a political attack ad.

So Nickelodeon, the kids' kids' kids. cable TV channel, back in the 80s and 90s, mostly. So like pre-Spongebob. Nickelodeon had this shopping spree contest where you enter via postcard and if you win, you get five full minutes to run through a toy store and fill as many shopping carts as you can with all the toys you want. Either KB Toys or Toys or Us, depending on the year. They even flew a kid out to Hawaii to do this. Get set. Go! In a five-minute rampage, Doug found toy paradise in tropical paradise.

Videos, sporting goods, telescopes. He grabbed it all. He even got stuff for the kid next door. And when it was all over, Doug it bagged almost $10,000 worth of toys. Yeah, good for you, Doug. Keep it to yourself. I was crazy jealous of Doug. Dude, that would have been the best day of my whole life. Five minutes to grab all the toys you wanted. Imagine, there's me, sprinting down the Toys R Us aisle that had all the Transformers and G.I. Joe guys with both my arms outstretched going just scooping them off the racks and into my ninth shopping cart.

But G.I. Joe guys, those are pretty cheap, though. Like three bucks a piece maybe. That is not an economically efficient use of my five minutes. I can't help but notice that pretty much every Nickelodeon super toy run winner ends up with almost $10,000. worth of stuff. 9,000 bucks in change. Suspiciously uniform totals year to year. I need a moneyball type analytics breakdown of every year, every kid, and the retail price of every item. How does one approach this situation if you're just trying to make as much money as possible and hypothetical resale value? How many 10-speed bikes can you fit in a shopping cart? Like maybe 12? I would not thrive in this environment.

It's too stressful. I used to go to buffet restaurants with my buddy Tommy, and Tommy was adamant that you had to beat the buffet, right? You pay $35? All right. Now you've got to eat more than $35 worth of food. You got to make this restaurant lose money. You got to beat the buffet.

So we eat high value food only. I'm sitting at the table, munching on a dinner roll, and Tommy slaps the dinner roll out of my hand. No bread. That's empty calories. Bread is worthless. I'm like, dude, you need to calm down. I take a sip of Dr. Pepper. Tommy slaps the Dr. Pepper out of my hand. No soda. That's empty calories too. Go grab some crab legs. Beat the buffet. Okay, okay. I lack that killer instinct. I fear I would have paralyzed myself trying to defeat the Nickelodeon super toy run. And somehow I'd have ended up owing Toys R Us money. Grudgingly, I must admit, I'm better off living vicariously through these people.

Quick question, where'd you get a human skull? Yo, I must have overlooked the KB Toys human skull aisle. Back in 2015, the AV Club interviewed a couple mid-90s super toy run winners, including Doug, and it's legit fascinating. An article written by my friend, Mara Eakin. It turns out that you can't spend the whole five minutes going do-do-do-do-do-to-do-in the video game aisle because you'd make too much money and it would look boring on TV. Also, your typical 9-year-old kid does not have the upper body strength to even do that because the toys are too heavy.

So the kid would just go, I imagine Carl Marx watching some Little League punk pancake himself trying to golewing the remote control car aisle. It's a rich text. In that AV Club article, the winners talk about how their friends and classmates treated them differently. Once everyone found out about the super toy run, you get kids outright asking for toys, or just acting super weird and obsequious, suddenly even the bullies are refusing to hit you during dodgeball games, etc. A lot of jealousy and cattyness. Kids are dicks, basically. One of the winners, Andrew Moose, 1995.

Sacramento, Andrew says, quote, it also helped me figure out a lot about who my close friends were. The people who were close to you beforehand, before any of this happened to you, if it was still unchanged afterward, you knew. It's the kind of life lesson that sticks with you as you learn about people's intentions as you meet them and think about what possible motivations people might have when they meet you. End quote. Yikes. This kid spends five minutes in a toy store and he walks out talking like Drake. But no, I'm sure that's true. Sincerely, I bet that whatever you may have imagined, the lived experience of a super toy run is bizarre and uncomfortable and profoundly alienating.

So it's for the best that the closest I ever got personally to doing a super toy run was in 2006 when the Lincoln Center Tower records in New York City had a going out of business sale, and basically all the CDs were five bucks. And trust me, that was plenty weird enough. That's the cool little circus-type opening riff to the song I'm about to talk about. A remarkable cocktail of whimsy and pompousness in that little riff. No, you sit up a little straighter, but you also somehow recoil instinctively. You are suspicious. You're like, oh, something really bizarre and uncouth is about to happen. This shit is going to be both awesome and ill-advised.

It's like your ringtone when your most toxic high school X calls you out of nowhere 10 years later. We'll talk about this song in a second. I just wanted a little musical thing there. Okay. In 2006, I'm living in New York and Tower Records goes bankrupt. Tower Records, the once monolithic internet. National record store chain with iconic U.S. locations coast to coast from Hollywood to Manhattan. Growing up in the 90s, back in the peak CD era, back when CDs cost 1799 apiece and everyone loved it,

and therefore the recorded music industry was going to be booming forever. Back then, in L.A. especially, Tower Records is a cool, vital part of music history. Sure. But Tower Records is also definitionally a chain, a monolith, a corporate bully, an existential threat to cool independent record stores like other music. That was a cool New York record store or Empire Records. That's a movie. But now it's 2006 and we're post-Napster and mid-Itunes and pre-streaming era. And somebody could, hypothetically, download 80 gigs of classic tropicalia records. off the illegal torrent site oink for free. And the music industry has imploded. And yeah,

oof, even Tower Records is out of business now. Sorry, guys. My bad. Tower Records is functionally holding a going out of business sale. And so I tuned on up to the Lincoln Center store on the Upper West Side because I ain't ever been there and it's about to be too late. And pretty much all the CDs are $5. Holy shit. Unlimited $5.00. Oh look, here's the 1974 album Kantar from Brazilian singer and Tropicalia icon Gau Costa. Oh, weird. Actually, I don't need to buy this CD because I already downloaded this record from somewhere, though I forget where exactly. Oh, that's too bad. Nonetheless, this song is called Lagrimas Negras.

That means black tears. I think you'll soon find that this song is thematically appropriate. I just dig that song and Those lyrics are in Portuguese and translate roughly to He is the astronaut of longing With a mouth all red, black tears fall, flow, and hurt Thematically appropriate. You'll see.

Okay, maybe I don't need that album for some reason, but holy crap, this should be the single greatest moment of my life. This is totally the rock critic equivalent of a super toy run, except I walk around Tower Records that day, and I feel this heavy, deflated melancholy. Like, civilization is collapsed. Like, I'm trapped in the belly of a dying beast, and I'm helping kill it one $5 CD at the time. I'm at a funeral. That's what it is. I have unwittingly joined a funeral parade. We are beating the buffet to death. Part of the subconscious thrill of a super toy run is watching a kid stick it to the man. Right? Back when a giant national toy store chain was a robust money printing colossus. But now here in the 2000s, forget rampaging

contest-winning children. Now the biggest threat to Toys or Us is, you know, private equity. And CD stores are dying to and we killed them and we should feel bad and maybe we even do feel bad. I wander into the Lincoln Center Tower Records hip-hop section and I see two friends of mine, two big shot music writers and critics and culture writers and future podcast stars. And I go, what's up, fellas? And they turn around and they're both holding giant towering precarious stacks of $5 CDs. And they look at me like, oh, shit, they are alarmed at my presence. and they're like, hey, man, how's it going?

There was just such a striking mixture of glee and shame on their faces. I'll never forget it as long as I live. It was as though I'd caught them raiding my refrigerator. It felt like I was approaching two raccoons that were eating giant stacks of pancakes out of a garbage can. They're like, oh, we were just, I'm holding a giant stack of $5 CDs as well. Obviously, I'm buying all kinds of shit. This is one of the best days of my life, even if it does feel unnatural and surreal and finereal and vaguely depressing. I'm on a super emo toy run.

I'm on a super emo toy run that's so emo that that day I accidentally buy, for $5, one of my absolute favorite albums of the 2000s. The band is called Say Anything. That's also a movie. are a rock band from Los Angeles. A rock band and yeah, kind of objectively, an emo band. Emo being an extra intense and emotionally direct offshoot of punk rock with multiple waves and iterations. But at its mid-2000s commercial peak, Emo is basically sad, angry boys writing mean, angry songs about girls. That's what Emo is. I have friends who listen to this show who get mad if I don't

explicitly define every subgenre. They've been asking me what goth means for years. And I'm like, dude, I'm not defining goth. Go look it up. Say anything are an emo band led by a reckless and fearless and filterless singer-songwriter named Max Bemis. And yeah, wow, Max just said the full name of his ex-girlfriend, Molly Connolly. And then he does it again. This is called every manch money you spend. Because for you, I won't ever have rough sex with Molly Connell. This song is called Every Man Has a Molly. Reckless.

Uncuth. Ill-advised. Okay, so I would hasten to add that Molly Connolly is not her real name. And also, she maybe hopefully doesn't really. exist. We're doing emo meta commentary here. We're taking things too far on purpose. There's a great book called Where Are Your Boys Tonight, the oral history of emo's mainstream explosion, 1999 to 2008, by the music journalist Chris Payne. And in that book, Max Bemis says, quote, emo was always exaggerated. I'm going to fucking die if you don't go out with me. I was like, what if I took this even further and

intentionally? End quote. Yeah, man. What if? Chorus. And in that book, where are your boys tonight? The great rock critic and friend of the show Ian Cohen jumps in and he says, quote, a song like every man has a Molly. If you approach it from a certain perspective, you're like, oh, this is everything wrong with emo. But Ian says, Max knows exactly what he's doing. He's not condoning being that kind of person, you know? That's what I hope people understand, end quote. And I agree, but also this song, we're doing the thing, right? You see this a lot. We're doing the thing where we identify a bad thing, rampant invasive, hyper-personal misogyny in emo lyrics in this case. There's a bad thing. And then, having identified the

thing, we then ironically critique the thing by creating a super exaggerated parody of the thing. But now, in addition to shrewdly critiquing and mocking the thing, we're also just doing the thing now. Yes? We're doing a supercharged, extra uncouth version of the thing under the guise of denouncing the thing. It's a real conundrum. Anyways, I buy this say anything record for $5.

And dude, I fucking love it. Yeah! That is the triumphant climax of a song called Belt. Belt is track one on the Say Anything album is a real boy. And the record begins with a song of rebellion. It's the terrifyingly exuberant gang vocals there. The mob, the riot, the battalion, the army, the nation of millions that screams, my friends in unison.

the ironically bro-ish frat-house Greek chorus going, yeah, yeah, on a whim as Tower Records crumbles all around me. I acquire the 2004 Say Anything album, Is a Real Boy. That's the title. Is a Real Boy. It's a Pinocchio reference. You can tell it's a Pinocchio reference because the album cover is a drawing of Pinocchio's nose lengthening because he's been lying.

Pinocchio's got a very long nose. This is not a subtle enterprise. And you guessed it, that's why I fucking love it. Is a Real Boy has extreme, try-hard, uninhibited, ultra-verbose rock opera energy. The final track, track 13, is called Admit it, three exclamation points. Here comes a whole lot of words. Hit the deck. I worry about how this album will sell, because I believe it will determine the amount of sex

I will have in the future. I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety. That is 200 pounds of emo in a five-pound bag. Right there. We have reached bold new frontiers of knowingly toxic oversharing.

Say anything frontman, Max Bemis struggles very publicly with emo-seen fame with substances and with bipolar disorder. The agonizing mental health struggles and triumphs of Max Bemis will be the prime. animating force of say anything's whole weird sprawling, discomfiting, er-emo, frequently

awesome body of work. But this is a real boy record is singularly bonkers. This song is called Alive with the Glory of Love. And when our city, vast and shitty, falls to the Axis. Yeah, he means the Axis powers in World War II. They'll search the buildings, collect gold fillings, wallets and rings. Oh yeah, that all means what it means. Max Bemis is Jewish. It comes up a lot. There's a 2002 say-anything EP called Minora Majora. That's good. That's pretty good. Here's Max in that Where Are Your Boys Tonight oral history book. Quote, When I wrote Alive with the Glory of Love, I had just seen the pianist or some Holocaust movie. It immediately made me think of my grandparents.

What was it like to be in love during that time? The Holocaust was deeply ingrained in me from a young age. My first serious fear was people coming to my house and taking my family away. It was this apocalyptic thing I knew personally because my grandparents had been through it. I wanted to do some Moulin Rouge kind of song about that, alive with the glory of love is about love in the face of the apocalypse. Let's take this as far as it can go." End quote. Not all of Max's bandmates in Say Anything were aware at the time that Treblinka was the name of a concentration camp.

And what is there to say, really, beyond, oh, wow. It turns out you can say anything in an emo song and then go yeah at the end and maybe it'll work. I loved this record, the grandiosity, the absurdity, the audacity. It induces awe in me, and not for nothing, it also induces profound and genuinely impressive discomfort in me. I cannot believe any of this is real, and I'm not 100% sure that it should be. In that book, Max Beemus talks about how his mother is Jewish, and Max's maternal grandparents basically disowned his mother for marrying his Irish Catholic father. And so by extension, Max's grandparents disowned him. Max says, quote,

I didn't meet my grandma until alive with the glory of love came out. I played it for her on her deathbed. It was a huge compliment for her to recognize me as, not a mistake? I know that's so dark, but it's true. I saw she appreciated me, and appreciated the music. She loved it. She cried. She said I was beautiful. End quote. Oh, wow. I read that quote, and I put the book down, and I just thought about that for a while. So that's the scale, the emotional

pitch we're working at today. Let's take this as far as it can go. Let's take this as far as emo can go, as far as rock and roll can go, as far as any one album can go. Because that day in 2006, at Tower Records, as I did my little sheepish funeral march with a giant stack of $5 CDs. It wasn't just a funeral for a record store or a funeral for the record business. It was a funeral for the album. It was a funeral for the album as a concept,

as an entity, as the default unit of musical greatness and lasting human achievement. Music is cheaper now. Music is free now, basically, usually. That's the good news. We got everything we wanted. But it turns out what we really wanted was more.

When I was My father took me into the city to see a marching band. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 46th episode of 60 songs that explained the 90s, Cole in the 2000s,

and this week we are discussing Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. From their 2006 album, The Black Parade, Dig the truly phenomenal snarl In my chemical romance frontman Gerard Way's voice right here

when he sings the words To join the Black Parade Because one day It's up to lead you in the summer To join the If Gerard Way did a Nickelodeon Super Toy Run He'd just have six shopping carts

Full of human skulls Gerard Way going down the human skull aisle. Total retail price, $9,200. Ad break. I just reached out to one of my buddies who I saw at Tower Records that day, sheepishly holding a giant stack of $5 CDs, like a pancake-eating raccoon. Don't tell him I described him like that. And I was like, remember when we raided the Tower Records going out of business sale and it felt super weird?

And he was like, what a glorious sad day that was. He says, that day, I bought a CD from a rapper who's in prison for killing and eating his roommate. And I was like, that day, I bought a CD with this cover. And I sent him to say anything Fallick Pinocchio album cover. And oh, how we laughed. Dudes rock. You know, let's not ever lose sight of the fact that dudes rock. Speaking of dudes rocking, every time I hear the stark, eerie,

solitary, iconic piano line that kicks off. Welcome to the Black Parade. I think of one of my all-time favorite TikTok videos. If you're not watching this, it's fine. It's just a dude sitting on his couch playing video games while he's listening to his friend's new mashup that involves welcome to the Black Parade. And the camera zooms in on the dude's face as he listens. That's the setup. Here we go. In the instant that the smash mouth guy goes somebody. The dude listening, he rolls his eyes so hard. His eyes roll so far back into his head. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the internet. I love it very much. Okay. Have you ever seen My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way appearing on Sally Jesse Raphael as a teenager?

I had not. Gerard Way is born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1977. and raised in nearby Belleville, New Jersey, with his younger brother, Mikey Way, who's born in 1980. On the first real page of that emo oral history book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? Mikey Way says, quote, Growing up in Belleville, certain parts weren't the safest, so you had to create escapes. You had to live in your head. Kids would ride bikes and play with friends, but that wasn't an everyday thing because of the neighborhood my brother and I lived in was more dodgy.

That's where the fantasy and world building came into play. We were always massive fans of fantasy, sci-fi, comic books. Through that, we got into Dungeons and Dragons and all that stuff. Everything we were into was tailored to somebody who didn't like to go outside anyway. End quote. Now it's 1993. Sally Jesse Raphael is the host of a medium, trashy, daytime talk show called Sally. It's like Geraldo or Jerry Springer, but nobody throws chairs.

I don't think. There are fewer, if any, thrown chairs on Sally. Today's episode of Sally concerns Boneyard Comics, an underground publisher doing a controversial series of comics about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. And some lady named Grace Ann thinks it's terrible that kids might read this and she is leading the charge to censor these comics. That's the gist. Anybody in the audience got anything to say? Hi, I have a statement. I'm 16.

I write for Boneyard Comics. Basically is Grace Ann. Why don't you go after the media? Why don't you go after the other things? Why just comics? Comics aren't just for adults. Comics are for everybody. And there he is.

16-year-old Gerard Way of Belleville, New Jersey. Comics aren't just for adults. comics are for everybody. The two best comments on this YouTube video in no particular order are, number one, quote, When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see Sally Jesse Raphael, end quote, excellent. And number two, quote, sharp kid, I'll bet when he grows up, he'll be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned. End quote, also excellent. You can hear the New Jersey and Gerard's voice.

And you can hear the teenage nervousness and hesitance in his voice as well. The New Jersey will stay with him. The nervousness and hesitance will not. And there he is. Gerard Way, less than a decade later, on a demo recorded by a young, fresh, unsigned rock band in an attic in New Jersey in late 2001 or early 2002. All the music is recorded in the drummer's act. All the vocals are recorded in the drummer's bathroom, and all of it sounds like it.

But the thunderclap of the word break right there in the line, you're not in this alone. Let me break this awkward silence. The way you snap to attention when he hits the word break, that's your first indication that Gerard Way is going places and taking you with him. He's going to push you down a mountain in a shopping cart full of human skulls. Here we have a song called Turnstiles, a song later renamed Skylines and Turnstiles, as it appears on the 2002 demo recording from the New Jersey punk slash goth slash emo slash metal slash arena rock band, not quite yet known as My Chemical Romance. Three existing songs on this demo, which is called either the attic demos or the dreams of stabbing and or being stabbed EP.

That's the actual title. Dreams of stabbing and or being stabbed. And that phenomenal title is your second indication that these fellas are going places. Although for right now, they're stuck in an attic in New Jersey, screaming and thrashing and staring out at the newly fractured New York City skyline. Dig that rad, weedly-de-de-ly electric guitar, though. Three people in this band right now. Gerard Way on vocals. Matt Plessier on drums. Matt won't be around forever, and drummers will be a lifelong issue for this band, but it's his attic. And Ray Toro on guitar. Ray Toro has long, flowing, majestic, wavy hair, and he shreds like Brian May from Queen, and he looks like a Simpsons character. Ray looks like Nelson's way cooler, older brother. I'm into it. As for these lyrics, it reaches in and tears your flesh apart. as ice-cold hands rip into your heart. Yeah, this song Turnstile sounds like a punk-slash-metal song from a bunch of comic book and D&D types.

This is Primo Horror Movie imagery. But see, the thing is, by late 2001, that ain't necessarily just horror movie imagery anymore. Horrible apocalyptic reality isn't just for adults. horrible apocalyptic reality is for everybody. And I'll be honest and say that the first time I heard those lines as ice cold hands rip into your heart. That's if you've still got one that's left inside that cave you call a chest.

I assumed these were sad, angry boys writing mean and angry songs about girls, right? Heartless girls with caves inside their chests. Yet another man denouncing yet another Molly. But no, the important part of what Gerard just sang is, and after seeing what we saw, can we still reclaim our innocence? He's talking about 9-11. On September 11, 2001, Gerard Way is a 24-year-old cartoon network intern and graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He recently pitched his own animated TV show, and he's heading from New Jersey into the city that morning for a meeting, but the city shuts down before he can get there. Talking to Newsweek in 2019, Gerard says, quote, one of the biggest reasons I started my chemical

romance was because I was one of the people to witness 9-11 in New York City. That felt like the end of the world. 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, end quote. So yeah, Gerard thought about it, and then he started a band with a bunch of songs about vampires. The doctor ain't going to help.

This song is called Vampires Will Never Hurt You, and it appears on a 2002 EP called Like Phantoms Forever, the formal debut recording on Super Cool New York City label Eyeball Records from the band now officially known as My Chemical Romance. Gerard Way on vocals, Ray Toro on guitar, Matt Plessier on drums, and two important new guys. Frank Airo, also on guitar, and Gerard's brother, Mike. way on bass. The classic iconic My Chemical Romance enduring lineup is set. Gerard, Ray, Frank, Mikey, and A drummer. Dig the sauce, Gerard Way is about to put on the line, Can You Stake My Heart? He is the astronaut of longing with a mouth all red, black tears fall, flow, and hurt. multiple people in that emo oral history book lovingly call early My Chemical Romance a vampire rock band.

But see, these are songs about vampires animated by real-life violence, real-life unimaginable tragedy, real-life apocalypse. And the gnarlier the imagery gets, the realer it feels. And as the fragments of my skull begin to fall, fall on your tongue like pixie-dice. Just Think Happy Thoughts. That jaunty little tune is called Head First for Halos, and it appears in the debut album from My Chemical Romance released in 2002 and called, I brought you my bullets, comma, you brought me your love. An album produced notably by Jeff Rickley, frontman for the phenomenal New Jersey rock slash punk slash emo band Thursday. For your reference, here's what Thursday's

singing about a year later in 2003. That's the title track of Thursday's 2003 album called War All the Time. It is unpleasant to think about how that title and those lyrics do not qualify as fantasy or science fiction or overblown, made-up emo melodrama. No, that song is just straight news reporting. It's war reporting. Two of the best songs on the first MyCem record illustrate this blood-red blur between fiction and non-fiction. Fictionally, we got a super-screamy ballad called Early Sunsets Over Monroeville,

inspired by the famed gnarly 1978 George A. Romero zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead. That's about as black as Gerard's tears get and as red as Gerard's mouth gets. The crucial flip side, though, is a song called, called cubicles, which feels very truthful in real life to me anyways, and it's about having a crush on your co-worker, but it turns out that there's not enough room in this hell for the both of you. Yeah, I really dig how early my chemical romance can veer expertly from, Hello, We Are Vampires, to, oh no, there are zombies, to, ah, shit, my office crush quit or got fired. I dig this band immediately for evoking the crushing melodrama of

both the inhuman and the painfully human experience. Truth is stranger and gnarlier than fiction. Okay then, time to make these dudes famous. You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini, and Croquet. You can't swim, you can't dance, and you don't know karate. Face it, you're never gonna make it. I don't wanna make it. I just wanna.

Here we have the opening seconds of the Blockbuster video. for My Chemical Romances Breakout Hit called I'm Not Okay, parentheses, I promise. Close parentheses. And I just love this brief dialogue between Ray Toro, who says, you're never going to make it. And Gerard Way, who says, I don't want to make it. The way Gerard is just staring, dazed off into space. Meanwhile, Ray even sounds like a Simpsons character. I love him so much.

Croquet. Do these guys really like croquet? In 2004, My Chemical Romance released their major label debut and breakout album called Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. This is the first song of theirs I ever heard. And my immediate reaction was, you guessed it, oh, wow. And that, my friends, is a monster chorus, a monster punk rock chorus, a monster arena rock chorus, a monster emo chorus. The three cheers for Sweet Revenge album peaks at number six on the Billboard album chart.

My Chemical Romance are rock stars now. They are a fixture on TRL on MTV. They are starting to get major attention in the splendid Cleveland-based emo-friendly magazine alternative press. And they are star attractions at the fabled extra mainstream 2005 edition of the Warped Tour, the fabled summer punk slash emo, apocalyptic heat teenage wasteland blowout, tearing shit up alongside Fallout Boy and a young paramour and whatnot. Now, in the mid-2000s especially, emo is not cool or critically acclaimed. And if I had to quickly illustrate what made my chemical romance uncool, I'd have to say it was the delightfully unhinged quality of the bridge to this song.

I'm not okay, I promise. The strokes don't comport themselves in this fashion. You know what I'm saying? They're actually playing croquet during that part of the video. Huh, they must really actually like croquet. But yeah, also, that's extremely awesome, that bridge. Yes? That bombastically reckless and uncouth bridge.

Three cheers for, Sweet Revenge was initially going to be a comic book-informed concept album. The liner notes describe this record as, quote, The Story of a Man, a Woman, and the Corpses of a Thousand Evil Men. End quote. Use your imagination. But once again, plain old, grim, tragic, nigh unbearable reality keeps intruding. You may be familiar with Track 1 called Helena and named for Gerard and Mikey's beloved grandmother.

who died midway through the writing process for this record. And suddenly this whole comic book type story starts feeling kind of dumb. Girard talking to Alternative Press magazine in 2004 about his grandmother's death. He says, quote, 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? And then I came to grips with it. and said, fuck it. I'm going to write the songs that I want, end quote. And then, naturally, he wrote the first capital G great song of his band's career. That ascending chord change on the line, things are better if I stay. That's the shit right there. The part that goes, da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-that part.

Also, at this point in the Helena video, Gerard is scream-ssinging singing in the rain while he and the band are carrying a funeral casket down the steps of a church. As rock and roll music, as thematic lyrical content, as a heavily comic book stylized visual proposition, my chemical romance are outrageously uninhibited and exaggerated. According to Chris Payne's emo book on the 2005 Warp Tour, Frank Aeiro went to the doctor because he thought his sinuses were bleeding, and the doctor was like, dude, it's your makeup. But his band is outrageously embodying the horrors of real life. We are living in an era of war all the time.

We do not need to invent new sources of human anguish. In fact, for our next trick, why don't we write a whole concept album about the original and forever undefeated source of human anguish? Have you heard the news that you're dead? The third My Chemical Romance album is released in 2006 and is called The Black Parade. This song is called Dead. Dead exclamation point. We are through fucking around, my friends. The Black Parade is a maximalist arena rock opera about the patient, the patient with a capital P,

who is lying in a hospital bed, dying of cancer, cancer, and while he's dying, he's just, you know, thinking about stuff. Dead exclamation point is track two. Track one is called the end, the end period. And I have to confess, the end period never meant all that much to me until very recently when I saw my chemical romance played the Black Parade front to back at a Columbus, Ohio, hard rock festival. And then suddenly, the end period meant a great deal to me, especially the part where they yell, save me repeatedly. The organ, the maximalist Hammond B3 organ, blaring in the deep background there, the organ really does it for me.

We got Big Shot super producer Rob Cavallo behind the boards now, best known for his work with Green Day. We got Bob Breyer on drums now. Bob will play drums in my chemical romance from 2004 to 2010. You know what else really does it for me? Gerard on a song called This Is How I Disappear, screaming, so I can't hurt you anymore. A lot of Iron Maiden in that high note. A lot of Judas Priest, a lot of King Diamond, a lot of Queensreich, perhaps.

A lot of 70s and 80s metal. A lot of kiss, for that matter. Dig the Detroit Rock City type excellence of this song, House of Wolves. There is not an ounce of restraint in the Black Parade, nor an ounce of concern about confining its influences to the warped tour, to emo, to punk rock, with or without the scare quotes. My Chemical Romance grace the cover of Alternative Press magazine in 2006, and Ray Toro talks about some of the band's influences lately. Queen, Journey, Pink Floyd, Credence Clearwater,

revival, but also various 70s musicals, including Annie, cabaret, and all that jazz. Oh, and also Phantom of the Paradise, the 1974 Paul Williams rock opera rewrite of Phantom of the Opera. A little bit of cold play on the Black Parade. Also, if you want the truth, tell me this song, I Don't Love You, doesn't sound a little bit like cold play. We should talk some time about, about how every major 2000s rock band has at least one cold play song, Lincoln Park's Shadow of the Day, et cetera, another time. But yeah, 70s musicals are not necessarily cool rock band influences, whether you're into the Warp Tour or not. In alternative press, Ray Toro says, quote, the intention was to make something that was classic, something timeless,

something that 20 or 30 years from now, parents could play for their kids and say, this is what I was listening to when I was your age. Check it out. It's still fucking cool. We wanted to make a record you could pass down. There's a lot of music out now that doesn't feel like that. End quote. Mission accomplished, Ray.

But also, kids, do not be frightened if your mother plays you the song called Mama. This is my current favorite song on the Blanky. Black Parade, simply for how gleefully deranged it is. Live in 2026, here's the part of Mama where the on-stage pyro really kicks in. They light somebody on fire and they run across the stage. My Chemical Romance Live are not fucking around, dude. Also, here's the part of Mama where friggin Liza Minnelli shows up. It is objectively funny to me that my.

My chemical romance got the Liza Minnelli to sing on this record. And right after she sings, Gerard goes, But there's shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun, etc., etc. That is quite a flex. That is a flex that has never been and will never again be attempted. My previous favorite song on the Black Parade was Teenagers, which is just ludicrous. Do teenagers now even know who George Thorogood is? George Thorogood, the 80s bubblegum blues rock star dude?

Was he really born in Delaware? That's funny. George Thorogood from Delaware? Bad to the bone? Bo bo bo bo bo bo. Teenagers always struck me as George Thorogood with a mall goth makeover. But this chorus that starts with Teenager's Skulls. scare the living shit out of me. This song also points us toward the end, right? Not just the end

is in death, but the end is in the end of my chemical romance. This band's got one more full album in them. Danger Days, calling the true lives of the fabulous killjoys in 2010. It's extra trashy and chaotic. It rules. My current favorite Danger Days song is called Vampire Money. And then they release a lower stakes compilation of older singles called conventional weapons, and then My Chemical Romance Break Up in 2013. The teenagers scared them off. The fame, the pressure, the escalating adulation, the inescapable sense that the Black Parade can never be topped. Even the critics and cool kids came around on the Black Parade. This is a fully canonized all-time great album now. So of course, it's extremely rad that the band reunited in 2019, and now you can go see Gerard and Ray and Frank

and Mikey and A drummer play the Black Parade live front to back and they light someone on fire and all of it rules. And because they follow the track list exactly, they don't necessarily save their biggest song for last. Look out for Track 5, my friends. It's a doozy. Track 5 is called Welcome to the Black Parade. Yeah, this album is so thoroughly consecrated that even the visual iconography is famous now, right? The ultra-goth, Sergeant Pepper uniforms, the black and white silent film visual style, the parade float of doom, but also hope. Plus, Gerard's slashed and dyed hair, because as he explained to the New York Times,

quote, I wanted to appear white and deathlike and gaunt and sick-looking. end quote. That's the vibe now. And consequently, we are 75 seconds into this song, and Gerard Way is already scream singing his ass off. But please let's give it up for the drummer as well. Bob Breyer on drums. Bob sounds like he's sitting behind a 200-piece drum set, but somehow he's also falling down 15 flights of stairs. Bob gets his own ultra-goth, Sergeant Pepper uniform, but my chemical romance almost from the beginning is set in stone structurally as Gerard and Ray and Frank and Mikey and a drummer. Bob left the man in 2010 and he died on November 24th, 2024. He was 44. Bob Breyer is the first major player on the Black Parade to pass away. I didn't want to think very hard about that,

honestly, but it gives me a very heavy feeling. Drummers are an eternal problem for my chemical romance, but that doesn't mean they're not vitally important. Here's a truly shocking fact about the song Welcome to the Black Parade. It is only five minutes and 11 seconds long. I would have honestly guessed it was twice as long. You could have told me this song lasts 45 minutes. This is 200 pounds of song in a five pound bag. The easy comparison is to call Welcome to the Black Parade, the Bohemian, the Bohemian,

Rhapsody of mainstream emo. But the fact that it's easy doesn't make the comparison wrong. Welcome to the Black Parade is the sound of a band truly going for it. There is an epic scale. There is a naked ambition. There is a sense that you've got five minutes and 11 seconds to grab all the toys you can. Another truly shocking fact about this song is that the chorus might be the least interesting part of the song, despite kicking plenty of ass all by itself. It's a fantastic chorus. Don't get me wrong. It's a classic warped tour decimating sing-along chorus. And my chemical romance has got tons of these, but few of these that are this fantastic. But I confess that when I listen to Welcome to the Black Parade, mostly I'm just sitting around

waiting for this part. And there's, unfortunately, really no recreating the first time you hear. Welcome to the Black Parade. And no recreating the first time you hear this downward spiraling coral breakdown in particular. The sheer audacity of this song can only be experienced at maximum power once. This is Oh, wow, incarnate. Here is Gerard Way talking to alternative press. Quote, I don't know why people want to be small.

I'd ask them, what are you here for? Why do you want to be mild? The bands I loved never wanted to be average. Why should we contribute to the redundancy? End quote. And so they don't. I'd never focused on these lyrics, really. Give a cheer for all the broken.

listen here because it's who we are. And after seeing what we saw, can we still reclaim our innocence? This song is somehow both dead serious and absolutely preposterous, just like the era that birthed it. But the Black Parade at its core is about our oldest, deepest, and darkest fear. The great poet and author and friend of the show, Hanif Abdur Akeem, talking about this album in that emo book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? Hanif says, quote, people don't know what death is like. We don't know what waits for us when we die, if there's anything. I think approaching that with some understanding is frightening. And I appreciated the Black Parade for trying to, in a high concept way, not be very comforting about the fact we're all going to die. So I don't really feel comforted by the Black Parade, but I do feel comforted by the vision and the goal, understanding that.

that, if there is something that waits for us after we die, it could be artfully articulated with a human imagination." Speaking of being artfully articulate, Ray Toro's guitar here kicks ass. And I can confirm, having experienced, welcome to the Black Parade very recently, live, in the midst of many thousands of people, I can confirm that the words I don't care, are very pleasing and rousing to scream in unison with many thousands of other people. But part of the visceral thrill of screaming, I don't care, is that of course we do. And of course this band does.

And that's the whole ball game. We scream because we care. The world and the afterworld shows us no comfort, but we make our own comfort together. It felt in that moment, truly, like each and every. one of us had won. 108 video games, one house, five bikes, eight board games, seven dolls, one mitt, three beanbags,

six action figures, eight stuffed animals, five models, one human skull, two sleds, and nine radio-controlled cars. And the total retail value, of course, was priceless. We are so thrilled and honored to be joined today by Jeff Rickley, front man for the fantastic, beloved New Jersey

rock band Thursday, in addition to being a producer and friend and mentor to my chemical romance. Jeff, it's so wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. You know, I'm thrilled to be here, Rob. Awesome. We're thrilled to have you. I'd love to talk first about New Jersey, like just the formative experience of being a young band from New Jersey. Like, I've read that even if you can see New York City across the water, like it feels so far away. You feel as far away from the action as if you lived in Kansas or something. Like, what does New Jersey do to a young band exactly?

Well, I think, you know, the proximity is actually what makes it so hard in some ways. It's sort of like a class divide where you can see it right there, but there's nothing you can do to be a part of it. So, as a, you know, as a kid, it was like I would take the bus into the city and go to CBGBs or go to, you know, all these great shows. and I loved it so much, but I never had any idea of how to get access into the world to play there to be a part of it. It felt so far away. And I think because of that, you know, New Jersey bands often were kind of forced into starting their own little weird DIY spaces.

I remember going to a garage in Westwood when I was a kid and seeing like AFI and people like that. And then, you know, basement shows in New Brunswick before starting basement shows myself in New Brunswick. And the cool thing was, I think a lot of bands on tour also felt sort of like stalled out before getting a big show in the city. You know, it's a lot harder to play in the city with the economics of having a club open and filling clubs and stuff like that. So a lot of bands would stop at our house and play there, you know. Did you get people from New York coming to New Brunswick? Like, did it ever work that way? Maybe it didn't.

That's a long journey, I suppose, for someone living in Manhattan. It did. Yeah, bands like SESHA and stuff like that. would come and play. I mean, basically, if you played ABC, no Rio, you might also play our basement at some that's good. It's a very convenient. It's a very cool way to frame it, I guess. So does that make you tougher as a band, you know, that you've had to develop your own scene, you know, your own space to play? Like, was there a quality that you could hear or you could feel in New Jersey bands that they had to create this whole infrastructure, you know, just to have a place to play? Like,

Like, was there a quality consistently that New Jersey bands seemed to have? I have a good friend who was a big part of the New York hardcore scene that used to say that what he loved about our band and about other bands from New Jersey was that there was a sort of like hardness that you would expect from a New York City band. But there was also this kind of like suburban longing and romanticism that was absent from some of the New York bands. And when he said that, something about that rang true to me. Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. You produced the first full-length, My Chemical Romance album, I brought you my bullets. And my favorite song has always been early sunsets over Monroeville, which is this super anguished ballad. Like, Gerard, he sounds like he's crying or possibly almost dying. Like when you're producing, when you're guiding a young band in the studio like that,

is it more of a therapeutic role than a technical role? Like how much of what you're doing as a producer is sort of just managing the emotion of it. I think most of being a producer is managing emotions, to be honest. I think there are moments where you're called to be more of an engineer and to say, I don't like the way that sounds. It's not working for me. Can we rehang the mic? You know, stuff like that.

But I do think that the big dividing line for a producer is, you know, kind of zooming out and looking at the whole. And often the whole, you know, is more affected by the band's emotions and thoughts. and belief in themselves, the choices that they're making in real time, then any of the actual sounds on the record. The record sounds the way it sounds because John McClario, the engineer, did such hard work on it on a very, very small budget. But yeah, I'm really glad to hear you say that that's your favorite song on the record.

That's the one that I'm most proud of for my contribution to the song, which I really went deep with them on. And specifically with Gerard, you know, the ending has this sort of like swelling crescendo and then a dip, and then it swells and then it dips. And it kind of has this like journey that it's going on.

And when we started it, Gerard was following the swells and the dips. And I said, you know, what if you never dipped? What if you were always going up? So that even when the music starts to fall away, you just kept on pushing harder and harder till at the end, you probably won't be able to do it anymore.

You'll probably have to kind of like burn out, you know? And I watched him rise to the challenge so beautifully. You know, this is the thing that I kept seeing with Gerard over and over again was that there was nothing that I could ask him to do that he couldn't do better than what I was asking. And it really started where his, you know, his ideas were repetitive, his melodies were in a small range. and I've never seen somebody just you prompt them a little bit

and they just completely unfold into this world that you didn't see coming from them and that song I remember lying on the floor I had taken a cigarette break with Mikey the bass player George's brother and we were talking about how tough this song was and then I remember lying on the floor

and hearing him raise himself to this challenge and the beauty of the song coming together and when we went for another cigarette break, I said, I had a vision. I had a vision. You're going to be the biggest band in the world. And he was like, like as big as Thursday? And I was like way, way bigger than Thursday. What are you talking about?

We're like a niche band. I love Thursday, but we're like a very specific niche band. You're going to be huge. And he was like, how big? And I was like, like, good Charlotte big. Like that's as big as I can imagine. Like, I don't know. That's pretty big.

Yeah. It's pretty big. But I did have. have this moment where I pictured, like, literally I feel like I looked through time and saw them playing MetLife Stadium that we played with them last summer. And I saw it. I saw that it was going to happen for them. And there were years in between where I thought, like, maybe, you know, maybe it'll stall out a little before that. But I really see it. And now all these years later, I think, wow, they really did. Like, maybe I did see the future. Who knows? It seems like you did.

Did that seem more a matter of talent or like aspiration? You know, like do you see the seeds of the black parade? Does it seem like they know where they're heading or maybe Gerard especially? Like he knows where he's heading from the beginning and he has that ambition and just the desire to get that huge and to get to that point is as important as like musical talents. Like when you saw the future for them, was it more a matter of like this is a great band or like this is a band that's really, really going to go for it beyond even. what great bands usually try. Oh, no, I feel like I'm about to give like a really woo-woo answer, and I don't know if I want to say it out loud, but I do think that, you know, the difference between a band that's just really

great and that has a very small following and a band like My Chemical Romance, who's one of the biggest bands in the world, has so little to do with talent or even drive. I think everybody that stays in music for a long time just has a passion to do it and to, you know, a calling, you know, an almost religious, like, calling to do it. But I think that some bands are just standing, like, in a spot in the subconscious, you know, the collective unconscious. It's just really close to something that is there already, but has been unspoken, you know. And I think that envisioning them being this huge band was more seeing how they were uncovering an idea

that felt like it was inevitable. You know, somebody was going to find it. It was right there, and they just sort of grabbed it out of the air and said, like, we've got it, and we're not going to let go of it. You know, we're going to hold on to this thing and bring it into the world where it belongs. And I do kind of feel like somebody probably would have done it if they didn't do it. So, yeah, but all that, of course, they needed the talent to be able to do it. They needed the drive to keep with it when it's hard because it's so, so hard to make anything happen in the world, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. But really, like, I started to see them connecting with it. And it was just like the life was breathing through them. You know what I mean? These ideas were just, like, coming out so fast. It was they couldn't even control it. Did you think that you saw it before they did?

You know, just Mikey being like, we could be as big as Thursday. We could be as good Charlotte. Like, I always sort of separate Gerard, maybe having more of a big picture vision than the rest of the guys. But, like, did you see that greatness in them generally before they did? were close to something, even if they didn't realize it yet. Way before they did, I think. That's the producer's job, I suppose. Yes.

Yeah. And I tried to just kind of, one, be their cheerleader who said, like, you can do it. And two, you know, I was pretty heavy-handed at times. I'd say, like, you need another guitar player. Like, because when we started, you know, Frank wasn't in the band yet. And I was like, you're playing two parts on everything. Like, I'm already thinking about you doing. this live, I'm already thinking about you sacrificing without another guitar player. I'm already

thinking about, like, you need somebody who can sing with Gerard and back him up and feel like he's another member of the gang. You know what I mean? You need like a gang when you're in a band. Right. And I also just thought, you know, that I could be quite harsh. And I was like, this drummer's not going to cut it. You know, like, I was like, literally before we start the first record, you should fire him. And they were like, that's our boy, you know, like, he's from the neighborhood. he's our guy. And I was like, this is going to happen eventually. Like, it's not going to work eventually because he was also really, like, stubborn as a drummer.

And I was like, I can see that Ray and Gerard are the guys with the vision. You know, Ray is like the musical director. Gerard is like the everything else director, the executive producer, whatever you want to call it. So you're going to have to, like, have somebody who falls in line. That's really important. So, you know, it's like a mix of those things. But I knew, like, this band's going to go somewhere and you got to, like, get a all this stuff together so that it can work.

I guess now is the time to ask. Bob Breyer is fantastic on the Black Parade, but Bob Breyer didn't last as the drummer either. Like, what is it with this band and drummers? You know, is this the band's fault, or is it drummers as a category of human? Well, I think each thing that happened with her drummers was different, and that makes it feel like a curse.

You know what I mean? It's like not the one's so difficult. It's not that one's not. You know what I mean? It's like you can Goldilocks, and it's still not working. Bob is a great, Bob was a great drummer. I remember meeting Bob.

We toured with Thrace extensively, and he was working for Thrice at the time, and he used to set up the drums and play like Converge. And we'd be like, whoa, like your drum text is like really good, you know. But, you know, personalities are such a thing in bands. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said his band broke up and told me the story. And I said, man, it's amazing when a band doesn't break up. You know what I mean? Like, there are so many personalities.

Like, I can't believe bands ever last. You know, I can't believe mine has lasted. We all, like, butt heads. So, yeah, I think he's certainly a good enough drummer that he could have been their drummer forever. I'll put it that way. Okay. You've talked about hearing, I'm not okay, I promise, for the first time. You were really not psyched.

Like, you've said, like, you thought they were dumbing themselves down. Like, was your concern that they would, you know, go pop in some sense. Did you see the mainstream universe as more of a threat to them than a goal for them? Yeah, I mean, you know, looking back on this, I do have a little bit of a like, I wince a little to think of it that I didn't trust my friends more than just hearing the first song and thinking like, that's not. I expect more is basically my thought.

And my thought is like, every song should be reaching for changing the world. You know, like, I don't want to hear anything that can fit a radio format. And if it does hit a radio format, like, it better be born to run. You know what I mean? It needs to be something that you're just like, geez, okay. I guess you can put that on the radio, but like, that's bigger than the radio, you know. So, yeah, when I first heard I'm not okay, I kind of, I heard a song that would fit next to blink one or two on the radio.

Definitely. I hadn't heard the rest of the record yet, so I didn't know how subversive I'm not okay kind of was. as like sort of a Trojan horse to get them on the format and then set them up and knock them down with Helena. You know what I mean? I do feel like maybe I should have believed in them a little bit more than kind of being like, Mikey, what is this?

This sucks. And by the time I saw the video. Yeah. Well, at the time, still you have to remember, I still was kind of like mentoring them. Exactly. Yeah. You know, if you're going to ask my opinion, I'm going to give you my opinion, which maybe sometimes you don't want to hear my opinion.

Now I love that song. And to be honest, as soon as I saw the video for it, I got it. You know what I mean? I got that it wasn't the format. It was sort of their weird. Here's a bunch of losers trying to make a hit song, you know, kind of together. I got the spirit of it after I saw the video and then I was quite embarrassed for having been so hard on them.

I'm sure they appreciated it more than they resented it. your hardness on them. I think I think you can say that your mentorship was a huge success overall, even if you didn't agree with every individual step that they took. Yeah. Well, I think it's also important to step out away from your mentor too. Everybody needs a point where they can say, like, maybe I don't need to listen to everything that you say. And that, you know, like as history has proven with I'm not okay, I mean, I love that song every time I DJ put that song on. So I think, think it's really good that I gave them a swift kick out of the nest and they flew, you know? Yeah.

Well, you talked about hearing Helena for the first time as like the opposite reaction that you loved it immediately. And like, that's what you sort of wanted for them going forward. What is it about Helena that made that song great and made it like the direction that you wanted them to be heading in? Well, there was never another song like it before. You know, I think that's important to me. is like if you want a hit song, yes, it should be immediate. It should grab you.

It should tell you like, this is the song that belongs on the radio. But I also want it to be that feeling of hearing, you know, smells like teen spirit for the first time where it was like, what is this? You know what I mean? Like, this changes everything. And that was always my thought with what we were doing, what Thursday was doing, what all our friends were doing was like, you know, great bands asked us to go on tour

with them. bands like, you know, Lincoln Park and the Red Hat Chili Peppers. And my thought was like, that's what came before. Like, if we're not in this to completely destroy the 90s and start something new, then we're a bunch of losers hanging on the coattails of our, like, forebearers. You know what I mean? Like, out with the old, kill our idols. You know, let's get out of here.

And so that was kind of my thought with I'm not okay. And why Helena was like, yes, new, new. We got to go new. It's got to be something new. Yeah. Well, I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that welcome to the Black parade has born to run energy to it. Like in the sense that like this is a song that doesn't feel like it would work on the radio or it wouldn't work on MTV or whatever. But it makes the format, you know, adjust to it.

It's a song that's so huge and so weird, but yet so undeniable that it becomes, you know, a classic, a pop song, a classic rock song, you know, even despite itself. Like, did you get that sense from Welcome to the Black Parade that they'd made it? Yeah, I mean, I just can't even tell you the joy that I felt the first time I heard Welcome to the Black Parade. I was literally in tears. And part of it was, you know, that so much water had gone under the bridge, you know, when they became a huge success, you know, they had had lawyers and managers and all kinds of people. And, like, there had been some strain on our relationship.

and not terrible strain, but enough that it was like, well, they're doing their own thing and I just got to be over here doing my own thing and I can watch from a distance, but like, I'm not involved in the day to day with them anymore. We say hi, we check up on each other. We love each other still. You know, we've played tours together. Right. But like, you know, there's plenty of daylight between us. And so I saw and heard Welcome to the Black Parade like everybody else did and it just it just floored me because they had gone to where you know beyond where I even dreamed of them going uh every every little thing that I had hinted maybe they should do you know one of the things I told Gerard is like you know you're a great comic book artist you're a great

writer like treat this band like that like I want to see you right yourself as a character in a movie that you want to you know one that you want to see he did it and black parade, boy, did he do it. And it was so grand and so beautiful. And I remember we got asked to their first UK and European tour, which, you know, is probably where their biggest the UK and playing Wembley a couple nights with them and just watching these set pieces and the fire and like the, you know, being rolled out on a stretcher. And like, it was just like, I don't know. I just can't describe it. I just felt like I can't believe I get to be a part of this. Like I can't believe that I was that I had some small hand in shepherding them in.

It's like, it's pretty incredible feeling, I have to say, yeah. Yeah. I've always thought of the Black Parade and like war all the time, the Thursday album. Like they're sort of twinned in my mind. Like Gerard very famously started the band after witnessing the 9-11 attacks and realizing I have to do something with my life. You know, there's always a real life core of apocalypse behind everything that they did and everything that you did.

Like, what's it like trying to be a band, you know, making intense, cathartic, emotional music, you know, during wartime, during this national tragedy? Are you inspired and fueled by that reality? Are you weirdly almost competing with that reality? That's a really interesting question, because I think a band, like Thursday, needs music to be, you know, personal and also have space for. ambiguity and dreaming and complexity and subtlety. And I feel like often like protest music can be quite one-dimensional if it's effective protest music, you know what I mean? So I really was like, I really struggled with how to process, you know, the feeling of being in the studio while watching my country invade a, you know, another country that

probably has nothing to do with this tragedy that's unfolded and just feeling like, oh, I think we're turning into the bad guys. Like, I don't know what I thought of America growing up in New Jersey, but, you know, I was always kind of anti-jingoist nationalist sentiment, but like this was like a real like dread. You know, like you said, it felt apocalyptic. And I think that war all the time really captured that in a beautiful way. And it's it's funny to think back that war all the time came out before three cheers. And so Black Parade was still a way off. And I think, that you can tell that war all the time has a sort of immediate kind of confusion and chaos and reckoning of this thing that's happening now. And welcome to the Black Parade very much feels like it's been considered and it's watched like the effects unfold around them. And so they're very different points in the timeline of this sort of like post, I don't know, post-America landscape that we found ourselves in. And, uh, and, uh, and I, I really love that about both the records as they have these, you know, separate reckonings with this event.

So, yeah, it's interesting. I know, you know, when they started touring, Welcome to the Black Parade recently, that they started by, you know, talking about for the workforce drowning and war all the time and, like, keeping, like singing little parts from our songs in their songs. and I always thought that that was such a beautiful, um, it was a beautiful nod to, you know,

to us and, uh, did they tell you they were doing that? No, I just saw a clip of it one day and was like, whoa. You know what's going on here? Um,

and you know, they've been taking Tucker, our drummer on tour with them as part of the stage show. So it's, it's been really cool to watch and, uh, I'm actually trying to figure out if I can change some flights and some upcoming touring so that I can see some,

some more, shows because I want to catch it before it's done. You know what I mean? Who knows if they'll ever stage something like this again. Right. I saw that tour just a couple weeks ago and, you know, they played the record in exact track order, you know, and they treated it like a theater piece, you know, as you said, the fire, you know, the costumes, everything.

But, like, you know, Thursday is done, you know, tours, honoring albums, you know, anniversaries, things of that nature. Like, is it, do bands like doing tours where they play an album? like an exact track order? Like is that fun invigorating for you? Or does that threaten to get a little boring? I think it's a pretty mixed reactions from different bands. I personally love it.

I really love revisiting records in a whole. It brings me right back to where I was when I made it. And it's like this amazing time capsule that like most people don't get in their lives where they can like sort of like relive moments. and you sort of measure the distance between where you were then and where you are now in that moment of like inhabiting both. And I love it. And I also think like you got to play it in order. It's got to bring it.

It's really got to like it's got to get you there. But I'm also very specific that I believe that music is a kind of live music is a kind of ritual that you're enacting and that like every night it should be the same and you should be sort of losing yourself and forgetting who you are while you're playing. You shouldn't be thinking about like I want to add this part. I'm so anti that. Like, you know, and there's a lot of people who live for kind of like the live music changes night tonight. Like, yeah, improvisation. I'm not down with that. Like, I want my brain to disappear and I want to lose myself in something that's been enacted over and over again.

And I want to be a conduit for other people to lose themselves in it. And so for me, it's like, I think it's the greatest thing ever when you can do a record and people care. I would choose that over playing like a bunch of new music any night. So I'm pretty different than a lot of my peers. I'm thrilled to hear you say that. I was worried you were going to say, oh, man, it's so boring and I hate it, but we got to do it. But I just, I'm so glad that you love it. That's really wonderful to hear, actually.

Lucky for me being that people still care about the old records that we put out. So it's very lucky that I like it because otherwise what's the point, you know? I love Danger Days, you know, the last full of my chemical romance album. But like looking back now is everything that. as band did after the Black Parade, like a little anticlimactic? Like, is that album in that moment just so huge and beloved that it's hard to live up to or move past it? Well, it's interesting you say that because I think there are certain records that are just

such clear artistic triumphs in the way that we were talking about before where I was saying like it was like close to the collective unconscious and it just resonates and it's like this magic moment. And then there's there's things beyond it, which I often find as compelling or more compelling because it does speak to late style, you know, the kind of like the Edward Said phenomenon of getting weirder and deeper as you get older. And so for me, that's like, that's the band's kind of music. You know, other musicians go like, it was really cool. Like I know people didn't get it, but it was like really cool. And that's how I feel about Danger days. I think there are songs like Scarecrow and stuff like that are just like, that's like the best thing they've ever done.

What are you talking about? I love that record. I love that. And there's nah, nah, nah, you know, them really embracing some of the like post-punky, glammy stuff that they always love. Like, the brothers have such weird, cool taste in music. So you got like Ray on the one hand who's like a queen, Iron Maiden kind of like came from the metal world.

And then you've got like Mikey who's just like a Brit pop kid. And then Gerard in the middle is like obviously kind of like a David Bowie type himself. So I just like, I love Danger Day. because it was this real, like, carefree abandoned, like, let's have some fun type of a record. And I remember we had made No Devolution, and they had made Danger Days, and I remember sitting with Gerard in front of his house.

We went to the car to play music because it sounded so much better than our stereos inside, and we were just going song for song, playing each other's stuff, and cracking up. We were both having similar ideas about, like, really bending the form and putting pop elements in, and putting electronic elements in, and noise and this and that.

And, like, we went in totally different, different ways because, you know, Thursday's a lot noisier and Mike Kim's a lot more, like, legible in some ways. But we were just like, you know, it's just one of those moments where we're like, oh, you're still having fun. I'm still having fun, you know? Yeah. That's beautiful. That's incredible. I was going to say, like, Gerard is called Thursday his all-time favorite live bands, you know, and you've been instrumental with this band from the very beginning. Like, what ultimately do you think my chemical romance learned from you with all your mentorship? And what do you, what did you learn from them? Oh, um, you know, I hope, I hope that they learned from us just to

commit fully and don't look back. You know what I mean? I think that's like a big thing. Like Thursday has always left everything on the stage. We've always like committed fully to a new direction or a new sound or a new album and kind of just said like, it is what it is. Like you can come with us, but we feel called to go in this direction. And there's not really any denying the call. You know what I mean? I've, I've been thinking about this a lot today and last night that if you're given the privilege of kind of like having a muse and seeking something through art or music, then like there's no, there's nothing that can take you away from that. You know what I mean? You can't look at it and say like, but I think people like this other thing better. It's like, hey, what the muse gives, the muse can take

away, right? So like I better just stay over here and keep going with what's calling my name. And And so I hope that they took that, but like, I've taken so much from them. I've learned so much about myself. I've also, like, learned why Thursday wasn't going to be the band that changed the world to the extent that Mike M. Which is that, like, I don't have the personality or the desire to be famous. I think I would, I think it would literally kill me. I've already come close to managing to not survive Thursday.

So, you know, the idea of like magnifying everything that I find painful about being a known figure, you know, the, the ways in which I'm misunderstood, magnifying that times, you know, a million or 10 million. I just can't imagine it. So I've learned a lot from them. I really, I love and adore that band. And yeah, every day I feel like I learned something new from them personally. Well, they wouldn't have made it without you. I think we can say that fairly, that it's, it wouldn't, none of it would have happened, if not for you.

I think that's very sweet. I always think they would have made it somehow. Anyway, that's what I always think. Like, they really, like, they just had this drive. And I always think, like, they would have made it without me. They may have been different and it may have taken them longer, but I just think that they're pretty undeniable and that they were going to be my chemical romance at some. point. Yeah. But I appreciate being a part of it. I think you can take some of the credit.

Maybe not all of it. I think you can take a goodly amount of the credit. This has been wonderful, Jeremy. Thank you so much for talking. Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having me. I love this show. So it's such a pleasure. Thanks, man. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Jeff Rickley. Thanks to our producers Olivia Creary, Julianna Ress, Justin Sales, and Chris Sutton. Animations and graphics by Chris Callaton. And special thanks to Cole Kuchner. And thanks to you for listening. And now let's all go listen to Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.

We'll see you next week.