My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way recently admitted that with ‘The Black Parade,’ they wanted to have an approach similar to Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall.’
“Let’s be honest – did the world need just another rock album? It’s almost redundant to even make those anymore,” he said in a new chat with Music Radar. “It was like, are we gonna give them another punk album, another post-hardcore record, just another rock record? And the answer was, no – we’re gonna give them THE rock record!”
He also admitted that much of the emotional inspiration for ‘The Black Parade’ came from ‘The Wall.’ “I won’t lie. A lot of the feelings on ‘The Black Parade’ come from a similar place to ‘The Wall.’ There’s a degree of contempt in some of the lyrics on this record, and a degree of resignation. This record is like ‘The Wall’ in that it’s about alienation – alienation of a band, and then the claiming of one’s destiny.”
Way acknowledged the risk in taking such an approach but shared his confidence in the band’s vision. “It’s a huge risk! But here’s the thing – it depends on your outlook. It depends on having faith in the world. We had faith in ourselves, ultimately, but faith in yourself only goes for far, because then there’s that little trigger in your head going, ‘Oh, they’re not gonna understand.’ But if you remove that doubt, you go, ‘No, they’re gonna get it and they’re gonna fucking love it,'” he added.
For the opening of ‘Welcome To The Black Parade,’ My Chemical Romance drew inspiration from another name as well — David Bowie. The intro, ‘The End,’ starts with a heart monitor and builds up to a big climax before leading into ‘Dead!’
Way said the band wanted ‘The End’ to feel like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall,’ particularly the intro to ‘In The Flesh.’ They wanted it to feel like a journey was about to begin. The song also had a sound inspired by Bowie’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.’ The looping chords and the chanting of ‘Save Me’ referenced Bowie’s ‘Five Years.’
“I think we wanted ‘The End’ to feel a little bit like the beginning of ‘The Wall,’ there’s a song called ‘In The Flesh’. We wanted it to feel very much like that kind of beginning, like that you were about to get taken on a journey,” Way said in another interview.
While the band was influenced by classic rock, they didn’t just copy their heroes. Instead, they wanted to create a unique concept album about mortality.
