Author’s Note: This interview took place when I was in LA recently and appeared December 1 on MSN. Mikey seemed to be in good spirits even though we discussed rather dark subject matter – even gaving me some tips on what to do in the city (he suggested I check out Amoeba Records). The following is most of his diatribe about the distance his group is trying to put between themselves and the genre they helped popularize. On a personal note, I thought the second half of their last album, The Black Parade, was perhaps one of the best of the decade. As guitarist Ray Toro told Eye Weekly recently, “You always have to listen to an album front to back to really get a sense of it, because the second half is where the ‘deep cuts’ are.” If you’re a fan of either Queen or David Bowie, it’s worth checking out.

The article began its incendiary report rather matter-of-factly: “A girl of 13 killed herself after becoming obsessed with a fashion which links death with glamour, an inquest heard. Hannah Bond hanged herself from her bunk bed with a tie after becoming an ‘Emo.’”

The date was May 9, 2008 and the British paper the “Daily Mail” was reporting on the sudden suicide of a teenage girl after her parents wouldn’t let her sleep over at a friend’s house. Though her musical tastes were certainly put into question by the coroner, with its next sentence the paper would set off a firestorm of controversy and anger whose ripples can still be felt today: “Emo fans wear dark clothes,” it read. “Practise self-harm and listen to ‘suicide cult’ rock bands.”

The article went on to name only one band in its attack on ‘Emo.’

“One of the foremost of these “suicide cult” bands is My Chemical Romance, from New Jersey,” the last paragraph begins before describing the success the band’s concept album, ‘The Black Parade,’ had attained in the UK. It concludes with a final, ignorant interpretation of the concept: “The Black Parade is a nickname for the place where Emo fans believe they will go when they die.”

With that the members of My Chemical Romance — a band at the height of their fame whose message, especially on that album, their biggest commercial success to date, was of positivity in the face of death — affectively became the target for thousands of frustrated mothers looking for someone or something to blame. The fallout was epic.

“I thought if we made an album that tried to change the world, or give it hope, it would really happen,” lead singer Gerard Way recently told Spin Magazine. “But all people found was death and destruction and misery and self-hate. I learned the world doesn’t want to be saved, and it will f–cking punch you in the face if you try.”

It was with this mentality — emotionally broken, artistically strained — and at the height of their popularity, that the band began getting work on a follow up. With its lead singer and songwriter’s guilt weighing heavily on its shoulders, My Chemical Romance set out to create “the polar opposite of the Black Parade” and, in turn, release itself from the dreaded tag that hung like a noose tightly around their necks.

“When we sat down to make this record the only rule was we’re not making ‘The Black Parade,’” bassist Mikey Way — Gerard’s younger brother — says over the phone from his Los Angeles home. “We were wrongly pigeonholed into a genre that we didn’t have much to do with. Some people don’t realize that term existed way before us.

“Everybody was just dwelling on this one thing [Emo] and were exploiting it in the media and selling it to kids and we wanted to retreat from all that.”

To ensure the band would not ever fall into a similar thematic trap, they set guidelines for the next album.
“We set up all these parameters,” Way explains. “It’s not going to be a concept album, no costumes, no theatrics, just a write a rock album.”

Their plan was to create a straight up rock record that would evoke their proto-punk heroes, bands like The MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges. Heading into the studio with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brian, the group had high hopes for the project. A year later, when they heard the final mixes, it was painfully obvious that the group’s self-imposed restrictions had handicapped their creative process.

“It happened in the 11th hour. A couple days after mixing it we got together and came to the decision that something just wasn’t right and we didn’t want to put the album out,” Way recalls. “It just wasn’t us. We tried to find a middle ground. We set out to make the polar opposite of ‘The Black Parade’ and what we found was a different direction.”

Reconnecting with ‘Black Parade’ producer and Warner Brothers head honcho Rob Cavallo, the group refocused their efforts, keeping the frantic, harder elements of their new material while also embracing the grandeur of their best previous material.

Back too was the conceptual premise, one of the first things the group swore off of. But, as Way attests, this would be a different concept than its predecessor.

“There’s no narratives tied to the songs this time,” he says. “It’s pretty much just the video and the artwork that are tied to that universe. The songs themselves exist in this world. No song references another. They’re all kind of like their own planets.”

With a couple surviving tracks rerecorded along with a slew of new material, Gerard, the band’s creative mastermind and award-winning comic book writer, put the concept into play: a post-apocalyptic world where a nefarious corporation rules the survivors. The band is cast as a rouge outfit called The Killjoys and the action is played out via pirate radio broadcasts.

“It’s not a concept album so much as a high concept album,” Way explains. “After ‘The Black Parade’ Gerard said that he had a vision in his head of what the next album was. He said, ‘I see us on a desert road in a Trans Am, driving as fast as we can, running from I don’t know what yet’ and it grew from there. So we took the idea of a transmission from 2019 and injected some of our current songs.

“We went about it from point A to point C to point B. We ended up with a concept album but not a concept album.”

In stark contrast to ‘The Black Parade’s’ muted pallet, the new album, titled ‘Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,’ sees the band explode in a Technicolor burst of surrealist hyper-reality; a not so subtle response to the all-black genre cliché.

“People who wear black clothes seem like the cool kids; they’re not dangerous anymore. So we asked what the most dangerous thing is right now and the most dangerous thing is colour.”

Another not so subtle response is the album’s overriding theme of media abuse.

“You never truly know who the good guys and the bad guys are on the album, it depends on who you’re listening to,” Way acknowledges. “It’s a total reflection of the real world. Full of heroes and villains and sometimes the heroes are villains and sometimes the villains are heroes.”

Ultimately though, the question that remains to be seen is if all these efforts have allowed the group to escape the dense storm cloud that has hung over their head for the past couple of years. In Way’s estimation, they’ve succeeded not only through implementing the superficial changes for ‘Danger Days,’ but also because the genre as a whole has become passé.

“I think more and more each day people are forgetting about that word, which is awesome. The context in which people are using that word these days should be forgotten!” he exclaims. “When I was growing up the word Emo meant a great post-hardcore movement in the early to mid nineties. Then somewhere down the line the word got hijacked and got placed on a bunch of stuff that it has nothing to do with. Now it refers to fashion rather than music.”

“I think a lot of the bands have moved on and they’re sick of that word just as much as we are,” he continues. “People that are quote unquote in that genre say we don’t want to be in it either, it’s a mass exodus.”

Regardless of its use, the less Way hears of that word, the better. In his mind the measure of his band’s success is the day lazy journalists and frustrated parents stop referring to it as Emo. Perhaps that day is already here.

“Some people don’t realize that term existed way before us. They tried to pin that title on us and it didn’t really pertain to us. We ignored it for as long as we could and it finally disappeared.”