‘Famous Last Words’: My Chemical Romance and their defining lyric
Concept albums are never about the story. When a band puts a concept album together, they are always covering up depths they don’t want to go explicitly. The Who’s Tommy isn’t about “that deaf, dumb and blind boy”. It’s about learning to open up emotionally after childhood abuse. Green Day’s American Idiot isn’t about St Jimmy or Whatsername or Jesus of Suburbia. It’s about the existential panic of young adulthood becoming actual adulthood. My Chemical Romance may say that The Black Parade is about The Patient being led to the afterlife by the titular parade, but it’s not. It’s about addiction.
The tour for the band’s previous album, goth rock masterpiece Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, was brutal. The band spent nearly a year and a half straight shackled to the road, including a hellish run on the Warped Tour. They were also dealing with the pressure of the record becoming a hit bigger than anyone involved in the production could have predicted. Above all this, the Way siblings were still grieving the loss of their grandmother, who inspired the entire album. This drove Gerard and Mikey to develop a crippling alcohol addiction.
After some time off the road, Gerard was eventually able to kick the habit, something Mikey found a lot harder. They went back into the studio (or to be more precise, haunted mansion), to record their follow up. At the time, Mikey himself talked about the unexplained phenomena that surrounded them, “Dogs barking at thin air, doors slamming in front of people and bathtubs filling with water when no one was home.” This, along with Mikey’s struggle to stay sober and a terrible flare-up of his chronic anxiety and depression, caused him to leave the band.
With this, the band started work on a song at first called (hilariously) ‘The Saddest Music In The World’. Originally a song about Gerard realising he needed to end his long-term relationship, the entire song was coloured by Mikey’s departure. It became not a song about breaking apart from the one you love but about loving someone too much to see them in the state they’re in. It was Gerard writing an ultimatum to his own brother. “I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone / honey if you stay, I’ll be forgiven / nothing you can say can stop me going home.”
About the song, Gerard told Tom Bryant, “Right away, I felt like I was singing about the thing I was most afraid of. It felt like what it meant to be in this band; it felt like it was about Mikey, and it felt like it was about our lives.” The gambit worked, and Mikey rejoined the band to finish the album. The reason it’s a defining song for this band, however, has as much to do with what it’s become as its origin.
This song began life as a way of saying goodbye to loved ones and about staying strong even without support. Today, this is a song that hasn’t saved lives, it’s given people the strength to save their own. It’s written in people’s skin, it’s screamed out loud, and those become words to live by for so many people. To me, that’s why this is My Chem’s defining lyric.
It’s a song wrought from some of life’s darkest moments that gave light and strength to millions of people who needed it. Exactly what My Chemical Romance have done and continue to do to this very day.
