My Chemical Romance - the Beatweek interview
Before they could get back on top of the world, My Chemical Romance had to disappear for awhile. They’d seemingly toured their lives away on The Black Parade, and even after taking a year off and coming back together they had to make one album and scrap it before finding their new groove on what would become Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. With new songs like Na Na Na and Sing having topped the charts and pushed the band into uncharted territory, MCR is headed back out on the road for a tour they say will be just as comprehensive but smarter this time around. As founding guitarist Ray Toro explains to Beatweek ahead of the U.S. tour, My Chemical Romance is in the best place they’ve been as a band - and they’re thinking sufficiently long term that the theme of Danger Days is actually based around what the band might sound like in a decade.
On your last album you guys were on the road forever and then you disappeared for awhile. When that tour was going on, did you know you were going to have to disappear in between records?
I don’t think so. When we were touring for that record it just felt like it was never ending. Time went by really fast and at the end of it we realized, woah, two and a half years have passed since we put out this record. Then we started thinking about how much time we had had at home within those two and a half years. It was very minimal. It was weird too because after that tour was over, after the last show, we definitely knew that we needed some time off. I don’t know if we knew how much we needed before we were ready to start up again. Everybody expected maybe to take two or three months and it ended up being a lot longer because people just need to physically and mentally recover. It was definitely interesting. It was almost like life back at home, the life of our families and our fiancees at the time and wives, had kind of been going on while we were away on tour and we missed so much.
When you eventually came back together to start working on Danger Days, did things click right away or did you have to shake off the dust and kick the tires first?
I think if anything, songwriting wise I think we had to shake off the dust a little bit because even playing, physically, your fingers don’t move fast enough if you’re playing for an hour, hour and a half, it almost hurts to play guitar sometimes and you’ve got to get callouses back and get your fingers back in shape. I think for us though, it took a little bit to really get to the good songwriting. I think that’s why the writing process was kind of long for this record. We started out in I think February of 2009 and we wrote basically an entire record, and we scrapped it because I think toward the end of that year was when we were really getting our chops back as far as songwriting and creativity.
Of all the songs that ended up making it onto the record, which was the first one that came together for you?
The first one that came together was Na Na Na. That was the song that really changed things for us because the year prior we were writing with a certain mindset in mind. We had put up a lot of rules and walls on ourselves as a band about what we could be in the studio and what we could try. Then when 2010 started we recorded Na Na and that song was just really, really swinging. It said so much about how we felt, and musically it was more along the lines of our past stuff but also had a little bit of a new one as well. That really opened a lot of doors for us. That song was very, very integral for us even to be able to finish the record. If that song hadn’t come about, I don’t think Danger Days would be the way it is now.
Na Na Na is the chorus of the song, so it makes perfect sense as the title. But at some point you guys must have said “Hey, let’s put another nine Na Na Na’s in parentheses.” Were you just having fun with it?
The significance I guess, if anything, is it’s actually the correct number of Na’s that are said in the chorus. So we did count it out and put that. But really that was kind of a reflection of taking this phrase Na Na Na and almost making it as dumb as possible. It’s along the lines of the Ramones, where the Ramones have these choruses where it’s just woahs or heys, these really simple phrases. That’s where the idea for Na Na Na came from. I think it was definitely just a joke of ours to put a constant stream of Na’s after in parentheses.
There’s something of a structure to this album, or a theme, even down to the interludes. When you realized you could build that structure, was that something you decided right away you wanted to go with, or did you have to convince yourselves to with it?
That kind of came as we were recording the record. The problem I think we were having in 2009 when we first started getting together, we were ignoring that side of the band. We were ignoring the themes and the thematic side of it. We were just solely writing music, and we didn’t think about the art side of it. We didn’t think about the videos. We didn’t think about what the record layout might be like. Those are a lot of things that we think about while we’re recording, and maybe not a lot of bands do that, but we do. As 2010 progressed and Danger Days started to form, we started talking more about it. You’re right in that the record is definitely more thematic, and basically, the little piece of information that you’re given is that it’s a transmission. You’re listening to a radio DJ transmission from the future. With that little piece of knowledge, that helped us as a band put ourselves into the mindset, okay, well what might the radio be playing in 2019? What might My Chemical Romance sound like in 2019? That helped us find some of the sounds that we were looking for and influenced the song structure and the arrangements. I find we’re a band like that. We do need a little bit of inspiration on that side, and that’s something that we talked about and kind of formed an made bigger as the record went on. The idea for the radio DJ came pretty late, actually, but it was a great way to connect all these different musical styles on the record and connect it for the listener.
Sing became my favorite song on the record as soon as I heard it, so I’m selfishly glad that it’s the new single. It’s got this pensive verse and then this unbridled joyful chorus. Where that song come from?
That song was really interesting. I was the fourth song that we worked on with [Rob] Cavallo when we started recording Danger Days. The song that we had written before that was Planetary, and that was kind of a big departure for us because that song is more centered around a dance electronica beat. That was something that we had always wanted to experiment with in the past, but we had never gone for it all the way. So creatively, we had just been coming off that. We were in a spot where anything was possible.
So then with Sing we approached the songwriting for that song as strictly musicians as opposed to, okay, we’re a band that has done this before, this is our sound. We were in a great mindset to really try something different. That song really centered around that drumbeat that starts the song. It kind of has a swing to it. It’s a little bit hip hop. That’s kind of the beat that the whole song and sound was centered around. We had tracked it late one night. It was just kind of a sketch, and always what happens with the band is the sketches never sound like what the finished product sounds like, but there’s always little links from that. We had this looping drum beat and Gerard had sung some vocals on top of it. Every night we’d end at maybe two, three in the morning. We’d get a CD and listen to it on the way home, and then we’d listen to it on the way back to the studio the next day. Gerard had heard some chorus lyrics and a little bit of a melody, and him and Rob the next day spent like two or three hours just playing the piano over and over again, and Gerard singing that chorus until the right chords were found.
Then the lyrics started coming together. It’s such a great, meaningful lyric, I think. There’s such a world view on that song. The word “sing” you can take it as so many different meanings. To me it means people fulfilling or doing their best, whatever that happens to be. Just put your heart into it. That was a unique perspective, I think, for the band that we’ve never really come from before. It became one of my favorite songs as well because of that.
In the video for Sing it appears your characters are dead by the end. They’re in body bags. So is that the end of that storyline, or is the next video from this album going to see you reincarnated?
We have to figure it out (laughs). With each video we really were making it up as we went along. So the way Na Na ends, where the girl got kidnapped, that we really came up with on the spot. We knew we wanted to connect the Na Na video the next video, and so once that happened we were like oh crap, now we’ve got to figure out where is the girl and how do we get her back, why are we getting her back? So then Sing came about and we thought it would be a really moving scene to have each character kind of sacrifice themselves to save this person. So then we finished that and now, and I think maybe we thought to have a trilogy of videos and I’m not sure exactly if we’re gonna stick to the story on the next one or wait maybe one or two more. At some point we will definitely finish the trilogy. So we’re still planning it, but we’d love to revisit it because it’s such a cool world and cool story, and it seems people are into it as well.
You guys have pretty cleverly played up the whole Twilight thing with the Vampire Money song. But on a scale of one to ten, how hard of a decision was it to turn down the Twilight soundtrack?
For us that’s easy. We’re not fans of the work, and so for us that makes it pretty easy to decide if we want to be part of it or not. I guess some people might look at how it could benefit your career, it could help sell records, you’re doing this big movie. But we’re just not really fans of the movie or the books so that’s why we choose not to connect ourselves with it. The song, I guess it talks about that experience that we had with that, and it also I think is more universal in that Vampire Money could be anything. It’s like blood money, whatever it may be, doing something that you don’t want to do or are forced to do, but you get some kind of gain from it. And that’s what really the song is about. So it’s not just about Twilight and our experience with that, it’s about a whole number of things, I think.
Early this year you’re going on a big tour again. Knowing what you learned from last time where you spent so much time touring that you ended up having to take almost a year off from each other, are you approaching it differently this time so you can not be totally cooked when you get off the road?
Absolutely. It’s very different now. The biggest difference, really, is Gerard and Frank have kids at home. We all think it’s very important for them to get to spend time with their kids. They’re at an age too where it would be difficult to bring them out for extended periods of time on the road, so I think what we’re planning is maybe doing a month or a month and a half, and then maybe being home for a week or a week and a half. So however long you’re out on the road is relative to how much time you get off after that tour. I think the problem that we ran into last time was we literally went from tour to tour to tour, and it was all kind of connected into this really, really long stretch. Nowadays physically we can’t do that, but also mentally too. People need a break and need to recharge the batteries. I think ultimately that’s better for the fans, better for us, better for our families. So we are going to approach touring a little differently, a little smarter. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t play as many shows as we used to or hit as many countries, because we still want to. We just have to do it a little smarter this time.
Just the fact that you guys are even imagining what your band might sound like in 2019, that tells me that you guys intend to try to be around for the long haul if you can. Some bands hit age forty and they say “We’re done.” That’s not you.
Aw man, I didn’t even think about that because yeah in 2019, geez, we’ll be around forty. What’s really great right now is the vibe in the camp, the vibe with the band, the energy that’s around us, it’s so positive that you can’t not see yourself doing this for another ten or twenty years. If things stay the way they are, we will be more than happy, as long as fans are still coming out, to continue doing what we’re doing. We’re just at such a good spot in our lives, and in the band’s life, like I said, we could see ourselves doing this another ten or twenty years. Maybe on crutches, though (laughs). We’ll maybe need to be helped to stand up on stage, but we’ll still be doing it.
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