My Chemical Romance has to be one of the best bands out there, and for sure we still have their lyrics right in our tongues. This band was everything to the teenagers who grew up in the 2000s. Their songs have reached out to our hearts and soul.
One of the best albums to come out in 2006 was, “The Black Parade” and it was the third studio album of the band. This album is one of the most successful albums of the band with over 3 million copies sold in the US alone.
With The Black Parade turning 15 years in October of 2021, Gerard Way has revealed his favorite song from the album. In an interview with Travis Mills on Apple Music 1 about the record turning 15 years, he was asked about his favorite song on the album in terms of its lyrical content.
He answered, “I really like ‘Famous Last Words’, but I think my favorite is ‘Mama’. Oh no, it’s ‘Sleep’,” he said, before adding: “That’s what my favorite always is. ‘Mama” is really up there, but ‘Sleep’. ‘Sleep’ is my favorite. It’s my favorite alongside ‘Mama’ to play from the album. I just have a completely nuclear guitar sound.”
He kept on going, “It’s just a complete brutal wall of brutality. I like the subject and it’s a really just great one to play live. You could really lose yourself in it and feel it. ‘Sleep’ and ‘Mama’ tend to be the two of them are my favorites.”
Gerard also shared the story being the making of Famous Last Words, saying, “It’s still a very powerful song to play live. It still really makes me feel a lot of very intense emotions. The story behind the song, interestingly, is when we were at the Paramour in pre-production basically still writing, things got kind of dark. I know that Mikey [Way] struggled with some mental issues. The place, we liked it, but it had this weird energy that it was kind of haunted. Things would occasionally kind of get kind of dark.”
“One night I’m up really late because sometimes we would work well into the morning and just with Ray [Toro] and I think he was kind of playing something and basically this song started to kind of take shape, or at least emerge, and then we all started playing it together.”
“I think one of the things I like so much about this song is I like the verses a lot because even in the studio, I remember thinking that I wanted those verses to feel very Judas Priest. I kind of wanted this old-school driving metal sound, like almost early days of metal sound, just to have that kind of swagger that Judas Priest has. But it was written at a dark time. I think that’s why there’s so much emotion in that song…”
With talks about the album going on, he also added how cool it was to be working with popstar Liza Minelli. She made a guest appearance on ‘Mama’. He said, “It was just an amazing experience, she is the sweetest, coolest person and so talented.”
Gerard also discussed how they recorded the song, “We had to record her remotely, actually. We were in LA and she was in a studio in New York with an engineer and we had to basically do it remotely through the control board, but it was super fun and she just went for it and she was so enthusiastic. Then we got to meet finally when we played New York.”
He went on to add, “She ended up becoming a person I got to know. I think she got as much of a kick out of ‘Mama’ as we did. That was a really great experience.”
My Chemical Romance has been an inspiration for a very long time for a lot of people who grew up in that era. He mentioned a lot of other stuff in the interview like how the classic song from the album ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ almost didn’t make it into the album.
Be sure to listen to the full interview on Apple TV.
Also, you can listen to ‘Mama’ on YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, and other major platforms.
