#stop recovering from ur grief it makes u boring

[haganez]

yoosung was already normalcore then the was lamecore

[vampire-himbos-of-santa-perdita]

the only mcr songs i’ve listed to r black parade and na na na na na but u make me wanna listen to them lol do u have any suggestions? what r ur favorite songs of theirs?

Oh boy. Alright. Ok. Everybody sit down, we’re about to have a masterclass in everything MCR.

The thing about My Chemical Romance is they’re a concept album band, which means each of their albums tell a story as a whole. For that reason, I can’t just recommend my personal favourite songs because they’re all part of a big whole. I’ll do my best to break them down in order of personal preference.

TL;DNR: For those of you who don’t have all day to scroll through full album analyses:

My Faves:

(Absolute all time faves are in bold; *** indicate I love these songs too much for my own good and I must be stopped.)

The Black Parade:

***Teenagers***

***Mama***

***Welcome to the Black Parade***

Famous Last Words

Cancer

Disenchanted

The end. / Dead! (you can’t really listen to one without the other)

Kill All Your Friends (TBP B-side)

Heaven Help Us (TBP B-side)

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge:

***Helena***

***I’m Not Ok (I Promise)***

Ghost of You

***Cemetery Drive***

You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison

Thank You For the Venom

To the End

The Jetset Life is Gonna Kill You

Hang Em High

I Never Told You What I Did for a Living

Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys:

***Planetary [Go!]***

***Na Na Na***

SING

Bulletproof Heart

The Only Hope For Me Is You

Party Poison

Vampire Money

Conventional Weapons:

***Tomorrow’s Money***

Boy Division

AMBULANCE

Kiss the Ring

Make Room!!!

Miscellaneous:

***Desolation Row***

Fake Your Death

Common People (BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge Pulp cover)

***Hazy Shade of Winter***

Happy Together*

*these last two are just Gerard Way covers, but considering they’re featuring Ray Toro, that’s half the band right there…

The Black Parade

Concept: A man known as The Patient dies and accounts his life and death, dealing with his struggles with war and disease, and his fears about where he’s going to go in the afterlife.

Track Listing:

The end.

Dead!

This is How I Disappear

Sharpest Lives

Welcome to the Black Parade

I Don’t Love You

House of Wolves

Cancer

Mama

Sleep

Teenagers

Disenchanted

Famous Last Words

Blood

The whole album is honestly so good. It’s worth a listen from start to finish at least once. I’ve got absolutely no bad things to say about the songs that aren’t my faves, as they’re equally as explosive as everything else. That said…

Personal Faves:

Mama

Teenagers

Cancer

Famous Last Words

Welcome to the Black Parade

Dead!

Disenchanted

If you want the stuff that’ll psych you up/empower you, go for Welcome to the Black Parade, Teenagers, Famous Last Words, Mama, and Dead. If you want some real sad shit, go for Cancer, Disenchanted, and I Don’t Love You. I have yet to find out how to not weep all the way through WttBP, Famous Last Words, or Cancer, so you have been warned.

Dip your Toe in the Water With…

Welcome to the Black Parade

Teenagers

Famous Last Words

Things to Keep in Mind

Mama’s got an extra special guest appearance by one Liza Minnelli, and oh man, is it absolutely worth checking out. Next to Welcome to the Black Parade, this one might just be the most theatrical song in the entire album??? Bold statement, but I like to call it the Bohemian Rhapsody of MCR. It’s SO. GOOD.

Blood is the hidden track at the end of the album. There’s about 2 minutes of silence in the original album before it starts. If you want the version without the false start, nab the version from The Black Parade is Dead live album.

If you’re madly in love with this album, you can find their Black Parade concert live in Mexico, The Black Parade is Dead for free on their youtube channel. Throw it up on your tv screen and it’s like you’re there in person.

B-Sides

Kill All Your Friends

Heaven Help Us

My Way Home is Through You

All the Black Parade B-sides are great, but Kill All Your Friends is the real standout (and has the biggest connection to Umbrella Academy, if that excites you reference-wise).

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

Concept: This is a bit of a split narrative, partially a loving tribute following Gerard and Mikey Way’s grandmother’s passing, and partially a revenge plot. The full plot Gee had in mind took a bit of a backseat after they shifted focus on the grief side of things, but the full original concept is worth the price of admission either way. The revenge plot follows a man who makes a deal with the devil to reunite with his lost lover, if he can collect 1,000 evil souls. He sets out on his murder quest and finally reunites with the woman he loves, only to find she never loved him. He vows to take her down with him, but discovers he’s the 1,000th soul.

Track Listing:

Helena

Give ‘Em Hell, Kid

To the End

You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison

I’m Not Okay (I Promise)

The Ghost of You

The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You

Interlude

Thank You for the Venom

Hang 'Em High

It’s Not a Fashion Statement, It’s a Deathwish

Cemetery Drive

I Never Told You What I Do for a Living

This one is loud and dark, and fast as fuck. I use it almost exclusively as workout music because it will make you want to punch everything in the face. You wanna feel like you could take down all your enemies at once? Listen to this album. This one’s a lot easier to break down in terms of listening to songs here and there instead of all at once.

Personal Faves:

Cemetery Drive

You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison

Thank You For the Venom

I’m Not Ok (I Promise)

Helena

Ghost of You

Some Underrated Gems:

The Jetset Life is Gonna Kill You

To the End

Hang Em High

I Never Told You What I Did for a Living

Dip Your Toe in the Water With…

Helena

I’m Not Ok (I Promise)

Ghost of You

Things to Keep in Mind

Helena is essentially what got the band off the ground. The music video is really something and really set the tone for what early 2000s emo culture would become. If I didn’t love The Black Parade as much as I did, I’d recommend starting with Helena above everything else.

The Ghost of You music video is also a masterpiece. Gerard went to his director and asked for Saving Private Ryan, and that’s what he got! This video also happened to come out around the same time Green Day’s Wake Me Up When September Ends video came out and Gee was worried the anti-war rethorics in both would be too similar, but Billie Joe Armstrong sat him down and gave him a pep talk about how even though their concepts are similar, they’re always going to be coming at it in different ways. 

If you want to get a really solid insight into where the band came from, see the boys goofing off, and see how Gerard’s struggles with mental health and addiction drives so much of what he does, check out Life on the Murder Scene, also free on youtube. It also gives a brief sneaky peek about early days concepts for the Umbrella Academy comics!

Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

Concept: In a post-apocalyptic California in 2019(!!!), four rebels who call themselves the Killjoys (Party Poison, Fun Ghoul, Kobra Kid, and Jet-Star) set out to recover a young girl from the evil corporation, BL/ind. Their progress is narrated by Dr. Death Defy, a radio dj who maintains public morale in an otherwise gloomy new world where electricity is a rare commodity and people worship at the hands of Destroya, a giant dormant robot expected to deliver everyone from evil.

Track Listing:

Look Alive, Sunshine

Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

Bulletproof Heart

SING

Planetary (GO!)

The Only Hope For Me Is You

Jet-Star And The Kobra Kid/Traffic Report

Party Poison

Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back

S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W

Summertime

DESTROYA

The Kids From Yesterday

Goodnite, Dr. Death

Vampire Money

This album is radically different than the others in that it’s much mellower. The songs are interspersed with narrative interludes by Dr. Death Defy to better explain the storyline. Danger Days came after one scrapped compilation album (which I’ll get to soon enough…) At this point, Gee’s comic career had started to take off with Umbrella Academy, and things had started to naturally wind down with the band. Gee’s mindspace was clearly in comic-mode, and he upcycled a comic book idea he had kicking around with a comic writer friend of his, Shaun Simon for the new album. After the band’s breakup, Gerard took whatever concepts they couldn’t realize through the lyrics and music videos back to Shaun Simon to make a Killjoys comic. Much of the concept backstory explained above is pulled from this.

Personal Faves:

Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

Bulletproof Heart

SING

Planetary [GO!]

The Only Hope For Me Is You

Party Poison

Vampire Money

This is the album where I tend to get bored halfway through and switch over to The Black Parade (whoops…) But it is 100% worth listening to it from start to finish, again, at least once, if anything, because Destroya and Vampire Money are something else… Bulletproof Heart, SING, and The Only Hope for Me Is You are, at least in my opinion, the standouts of the more mellow songs. S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W, Summertime, and The Kids From Yesterday are also super mellow if you’re into the vibe of the previous three and want more of that. 

Planetary Go! is… possibly one of my favourite MCR songs of all time??? (Considering how much I love The Black Parade, that’s a pretty bold statement). It’s the only dance track they ever made, and is it ever a Bop. This is one of my go-to’s when I just need to take a break from whatever’s stressing me out and have a silly little dance party. 

Dip Your Toe in the Water With:

Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

SING

Planetary [Go!]

The Only Hope for me is You

Bulletproof Heart

Things to Keep In Mind:

Danger Days is an incredibly visual album! You really need the music videos to get the whole story. Na Na Na and SING tell the whole story pretty succinctly.

If you’re really feeling that cliffhanger from the end of the SING music video, check out the Killjoys comics. It’s a single volume under the same name as the album, following The Girl a few years after the music videos’ timeline.

S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W was inspired by Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds by the Beatles, which really speaks to the overall vibe of the song.

Something I literally just discovered now, looking up the album, there’s an EP of basically fight scene tracks off a special edition of Danger Days called The Mad Gear and Missile Kid. I’ve not listened to them yet, but from the looks of things, it’s got a pure punk rock vibe and they’re apparently what the band imagined the killjoys listened to on the road.

Fun trivia that I personally get a kick out of: Vampire Money was written out of spite after Gerard refused to contribute a song to the New Moon soundtrack for Twilight (Stephenie Meyer was a huge MCR fan and approached them numerous times to get involved in the films). 

Conventional Weapons

Here it is! The scrapped compilation album! These songs were written pre-Danger Days and were presented at a concert in Japan, at which point, Gerard realized it wasn’t the sound they were after and it was promptly nixed. It’s a real shame, because there are some jams up in here, but at least they (or their record label, I can’t remember which at this point) eventually did decide to release the full “album” in 5 two-single EPs at a time.

Number One:

Boy Division

Tomorrow’s Money

Number Two:

AMBULANCE

Gun.

Number Three:

The World is Ugly

The Light Behind Your Eyes

Number Four:

Kiss the Ring

Make Room!!!

Number Five:

Surrender the Night

Burn Bright

Personal Faves:

Tomorrow’s Money

Boy Division

AMBULANCE

Kiss the Ring

Make Room!!!

Things to Keep in Mind:

I often like to give a shout out to AMBULANCE and Kiss the Ring for having opening chords that sound exactly like they’ve come straight off a Queen and Green Day album respectively.

See Tomorrow’s Money for the spectacular way they rhyme “vampire/empire/brush fire/tap wire” all in one verse.

See also Gun. for the far sillier way they rhyme “gun/sun/fun/run”. 

You can tell with some of these songs that there was the stirrings of Danger Days in here. Make Room!!! is the most obvious, with the same mantra of “everybody wants to change the world” from Na Na Na making an appearance toward the end.

I think in some iteration between Conventional Weapons and Danger Days, there were some songs that did make it to the Danger Days album that were called something else. Party Poison, for example, had originally been Death Before Disco.

Covers

My Chemical Romance, in one form or another, have done some spectacular covers over the years. I’m including the Umbrella Academy covers Gerard did with Ray because that’s basically half the band right there.

Desolation Row (Watchmen soundtrack)

Hazy Shade of Winter (Umbrella Academy)

Happy Together (Umbrella Academy)

Common People (BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge)

Under Pressure (ft. The Used)

Those are the ones I’m aware of. If there are more good-quality covers I’m missing, please, send them my way– I would love that!

I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love

Ok, look, I’m gonna upset some people by having this on the bottom of my list. I’m sorry, I feel bad about it, but the fact of the matter is, I’m only now getting into their earliest stuff. Bullets is a bit of an acquired taste because it’s incredibly raw both sound-wise and in terms of content. They recorded it before they had the resources to really put out a crisp sounding album, and they were still learning about how to construct songs, but there’s still a lot of beauty in that that I know plenty people appreciate far more than I do. MCR wouldn’t have gained an underground following without this album, after all!

I have exactly zero stakes in this album, so I’m sure someone else out there has a better grasp of this one than I do.

Concept: I know very little about what’s going on in this album, aside from the fact that Gerard was driven to create the band after being in New York, watching the Twin Towers fall during 9/11. A bunch of his more end of the world storylines from many of his works (including Umbrella Academy) are inspired by 9/11. This is a prevalent thread throughout the album, though I’m not familiar with the how beyond Skylines and Turnstiles.

Track Listing:

Romance

Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us

Vampires Will Never Hurt You

Drowning Lessons

Our Lady of Sorrows

Headfirst for Halos

Skylines and Turnstiles

Early Sunsets Over Monroeville

This Is the Best Day Ever

Cubicles

Demolition Lovers

Personal Faves:

Headfirst for Halos

Honey, This Mirror isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us

Vampires Will Never Hurt You

Our Lady of Sorrows

I’m playing fast and loose with my faves here. I’ve only heard these songs a handful of times, but they’re the ones I’m inclined to at least listen to for the guitar work, which at times, is quite fantastic. I will say though, from what I’ve seen of the lyrics, there’s some stellar stuff in here I hope to properly get into some time soon.

All the guys are still plugging away and releasing music either in their own bands (most recently, Frank Iero andthe Patience and Mikey Way’s band, Electric Century) or solo (in the case of Gerard Way and Ray Toro). I wish I was more well-versed in their goings-ons, but I’ve not been following their musical careers beyond Gerard’s (come back and talk to me if you want to get into his Hesitant Alien solo album and his more recent releases).

And that is your crash course in all things MCR.