My Chemical Romance Returns in Colour

My Chemical Romance talks about their latest album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.

It’s been five years since Jersey rockers My Chemical Romance released their platinum-selling third album, Black Parade. A lot can change in five years, and that statement couldn’t be more true in the case of the band’s latest musical endeavour.


2006’s Black Parade was characterized by darkness, the band members reflecting that theme in their uniform of black. But in the years touring to promote the record, the band had grown up and changed – the look and feel no longer seemed to fit. My Chemical Romance was ready for a fresh start.


That fresh start is embodied on the band’s latest release, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys – and My Chemical Romance is ready to burst back onto the music scene in colour.


Youthink was lucky enough to sit down with lead vocalist Gerard Way and bassist Mikey Way on the Vancouver tour stop of their world tour to find out more about the band’s new album.


YT: Danger Days marks a new path for MCR. Musically, how did this come about?

GW: I think when we made the first attempt of the record and something didn’t seem right, and then we started messing around and mixing that record with keyboards [and] it felt like we had missed something big.

MW: Yeah, once we had broken that seal, we were like, “Wait a minute.” It opened up a can of worms, really. Like we were mixing and [we] started bringing out keyboards and it was a very exciting thing because we were like, “Wow, this could really change everything,” you know? And it did! And through that, we explored with instruments that we had never touched before and it freed us up in a ton of different ways.



YT: With a more exuberant sound compared to your past albums, were you 
guys nervous about how your fans would receive the new album?

GW: I kinda felt that, or hoped at least, that what we wanted was kind of what this older fan that had grown up a bit had wanted as well, and maybe a newer type of kid had wanted as well.


YT: You’ve referred to Danger Days as a new start for MCR. What are you most looking forward to about this new beginning?

GW: I guess possibility. There are so many more possibilities now, I think, in rebooting your band and taking all the rules away. You’re like, “Oh, wow, now it really feels like you could do anything.” I guess the only hope now is that we get to make more music more often. 

MW: It’s like the sky’s the limit at this point, you know? We broke every wall down with this record. So we could literally create absolutely anything from this point on.


YT: This album is a concept album that features your four alter egos, The Fabulous Killjoys, fighting against an evil corporation. Gerard, was your passion for comic books the inspiration behind this?

GW: It is a big part of it this time… re-engaging myself with comics and writing comics again and drawing and all of that stuff. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it until we were touring on Black Parade and really started doing Umbrella Academy [a comic book Gerard released in 2007] and then had this idea for this comic called True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys that it just kind of fed into everything that I wanted to say at that moment of my life.


And so pretty early on, Grant Morrison [a Scottish comic book writer], who is like my hero in comics, had seen that and he pointed it out. He said you’re basically making the record version of this comic, so you should just tie them all together and I’m glad we did. And it’s cool because I don’t feel like the plot is so heavy because everything on the record is the truth. It’s all very real things.



YT: You guys are embarking on your U.S. tour. What do you like 
and dislike the most 
about hitting the road?

GW: Obviously the thing you dislike is missing your family. If it’s a long tour, you miss having any kind of a normal life because it’s just not normal out here, you know? What I like the most about it is it’s such a great way to see the country. You stop at all these cities and they are really like old friends. You know all about the city. You know where your favourite place to get coffee is, you know where this comic book shop is, you just know everything about that city. 


YT: As a result of a Twitter campaign to aid the Japanese earthquake relief effort, you released a version of your single, “SING,” called, “#SINGItForJapan.” How 
did it come about?

GW: When [the earthquake] happened, obviously we were devastated because we are so close to Japan, and we’ve always felt really close to that country and even on Danger Days, there’s a lot of Japanese influence. And so, we’ve just been there and then that happened! And it really touched us all and it really fired Ray [Toro, guitarist] up, and Ray kinda took this whole thing by the reins and he did this beautiful string arrangement [of SING], and he was the one really paying attention to the Twitter hash tagging and stuff and he said “Well, I want to do something now.”


YT: The album’s story is set in California in the year 2019. Where do you 
see MCR in 2019?

MW: Hopefully there’s not a cataclysm! Hopefully we’re not on the run! Imagine if it actually happens!

GW: Yeah, hopefully nothing like that. I’d like to think we’ll still be a band. Who knows? That’s eight years ahead. I definitely feel like we could do this for another 10 years. That’s a huge part of your life though. If you look at it that way, that’s a chunk of life – that’s our whole adolescence – our whole growing up into adulthood was this band. But I still see us doing it.

MW: Oh, absolutely. We’ll probably still be touring, and we seem to age at a slower rate, so we might actually look similar like we do now!

GW: Ha ha! Yeah.