The Black Parade |
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Released: October 23, 2006 Peak: 2 US, 2 UK, 2 CN, 3 AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 4.0 US, 0.9 UK, 5.82 world (includes US and UK), 4.70 EAS Genre: emo/alternative rock |
Tracks:
Total Running Time: 51:53 The Players:
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Rating: 4.009 out of 5.00 (average of 23 ratings)
Quotable:Possibly “the most important album to the history of the emo music genre” – Wikipedia.orgAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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Following Expectations After Their Second AlbumGerard Way was “an animator who decided to abandon illustrations and do ‘something with his life’ in the wake of 9/11.” AM He became the lead singer and songwriter with My Chemical Romance. They released their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, in 2002. Neither the album nor its singles dented the charts in the U.S.However, the group “rose to prominence among the emo and neo-punk bands that cluttered the rock landscape of the 2000s” AM with the release of their second album, 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. It sold three million copies on the strength of four singles, including the top-10 alternative rock hits “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “The Ghost of You.” Still, “anybody who didn’t follow the fashions of emo and punk closely might have ignored the group’s tragic, romantic neo-goth image and merely assumed that MCR was another good poppy punk one-hit wonder.” AM This left the band worried about being a flash-in-the-pan. They set out “to write an enduring piece of music, a piece of music that could define the youth of a generation and live on long past their lives.” PP A Concept AlbumA The third studio release from My Chemical Romance is a concept album about life and death, focused on a man known as “The Patient” who is dying of cancer. He reflects on his unremarkable life and the traumas he has endured. When death comes, it presents itself “in the form of his fondest childhood memory: his father taking him to see a marching band while he was a child.” WK It has been called “one of the best stories told through song form.” WGThe band took a lot of influence from notable concept albums such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. They also were strongly influenced by Queen’s A Night at the Opera. The band even adopted all-black, emo-looking versions of the costumes the Beatles donned for Sgt. Pepper’s. Houston Press’s Clint Hale described it as a “rock opera done right.” WK AllMusic.com’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine asserted that the band “openly steal from their holy trinity [Bowie, Queen, and Pink Floyd], then graft it upon the sound they’ve patented. Often, it seems as if they copied The Wall onto tracing paper and placed it upon Three Cheers.” AM Just like the central character in The Wall, the Patient runs “through a litany of childhood and adulthood traumas; absent fathers loom large; many of the main character’s flaws are cruelly deemed the fault of the mother.” AM Erlewine’s TakeMy Chemical Romance has “a love of classic metal that manifests itself in both pummeling riffs and soaring guitar solos, plus they also have a flair for melody, two things that give their solipsistic rock muscle and grandeur. If MCR didn’t have these gifts, The Black Parade would collapse in a pile of drama club clichés, sophomoric self-pity, and an adolescent obsession with death, yet they manage to skirt such a disaster even if they flirt with it shamelessly.” AMErlewine asserts that “that doesn’t necessarily mean that the album is a triumph. For one, The Black Parade plays a lot straighter than it reads. Sure, it has the marching bands, overdubbed choirs, radio-play theatrics, and Liza Minnelli cameos…but all of that winds up being window dressing to music that often isn’t far removed from what My Chemical Romance has done before.” AM “For all the emotion poured out by their ever-earnest lead singer, there’s little grit in their sound.” AM “Rob Cavallo’s brittle production doesn’t help, as its wall of digital sound emphasizes the sonic similarities between the songs instead of their differences.” AM Still, this is the band’s “strongest, most cohesive yet, even if it isn’t quite as weird or compelling as it should be given the group’s lofty ambitions.” AM The Album’s LegacyEd Thompson of IGN called the album “a rock and roll gem that celebrates everything that was over the top about the 1970s rock scene.” WK Of course, it has been celebrated as more than a visit to the past. Kerrang! hailed it as an album that “defined a generation and changed the landscape of rock forever.” WK It has been called “My Chemical Romance’s defining work” WK and “one of, if not the most important album to the history of the emo music genre.” WK It has called the emo equivalent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. WK Alternative Press said it would “carry on forever as the most technically ambitious and thematically magnificent record in all of emo.” WKIn 2020, Rolling Stone ranked it as one of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” In 2022, they said it was one of the best concept albums ever made. WK NME’s Dan Martin compared the album to Green Day’s American Idiot, saying “it’s a piece of work that will challenge every preconception you ever had about the people who made it.” WK A piece in The Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, said emo culture was characterized “by depression, self-injury, and suicide” and accused the band of “promoting suicide” by encouraging fans to join the black parade. WK More than 300 fans protested outside the newspaper’s London office. The newspaper later edited the story and issued an apology. WK The RecordingThe album was recorded from April to August 2006 and produced by Rob Cavallo, who had worked with Green Day. Most of it was written and recorded at Paramour Mansion, which some claimed was haunted. The band said the “scary and uneasy” nature of the mansion “bled into the sound of the music itself.” WK Gerard Way struggled with night terrors while living at the mansion and Mikey Way suffered from depression and alcoholism because of the toll of living in the mansion. WKWendigoon’s Alternate Track ListingWhile insights are presented for each track on the album below in the order they appear on the album, it also bears noting that the YouTube channel Wendigoon asserts that the album’s story is not told in chronological order. He also asserts that there are two characters who sing throughout the album – The Patient and the other is Death, or a spirit who is guiding the Patient to the other side. WG If a song starts with acoustic or simple chords, it is a song from the Patient’s voice but if it starts with metal or parade instrumentals then it is one of Death’s songs. He suggests that the song order goes back and forth between the Patient’s voice and Death’s, following the structure of a three-act play with a set-up, conflict, and resolution. WGTo that end, here is the track listing he proposes:
Act I: The Set-Up
* These were bonus tracks not on the original album and Wendigoon says they aren’t necessary to the story. NotesA tenth anniversary edition of the album combined the original album with a second disc entitled Living with Ghosts that featured eleven demos and live tracks, many for previously unreleased songs. It also had “The Five of Us Are Dying,” the early version of “Welcome to the Black Parade.”The Songs:Here’s some insight into each of the individual songs on the album.“The End” The song is a “call back to Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Five Years’ and even opens on the same two chords.” PP “The opening also draws from the ‘In the Flesh?,’ the dramatic intro to Pink Floyd’s The Wall” PP and even re-creating the “churning heavy guitars that come crashing in halfway through.” AM The band noted that they wanted to create the same feeling as with The Wall “that you were about to be taken on a journey.” PP “Dead!” “This Is How I Disappear” “The Sharpest Lives” “Welcome to the Black Parade” “It’s also the lyrical crux of the album” PP The song “focuses on the Patient’s childhood memory before his death.” WK The song puts forth the idea that one’s last thoughts before death will be that of a strong memory, in this case The Patient reflects on a parade he went to as a young boy with his father. Wendigoon sees this as the final song on the album because it is the final send-off for the Patient. WG It is “a grand-scale song that incorporates several aspects of various rock music sub-genres.” WK Kerrang! called it one of the “biggest, best and most important rock songs of the 21st century.” WK It has come to be viewed as “an emo anthem” and “rallying cry for all who feel the world’s dealt them a cruel hand.” WK It has also been hailed as “My Chemical Romance’s best song.” WK “Some have even called the song a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for a new generation.” PP
“I Don’t Love You”
“House of Wolves” “Cancer” “Mama” Wendigoon suggests this song is from Death’s point of view and how he became a lost soul. Wendigoon says the Death character was a soldier during World War I who is killed and his mother mourns his loss. WG It is essentially Death’s version of “Teenagers.” WG “Sleep” Wendigoon says if you listen closely, you can hear someone in the background screaming “wake up!” Wendigoon says this is Death, finally reversing gears and instead of mocking the Patient, he now wants the Patient to embrace life. WG “Teenagers”
“Disenchanted” “Famous Last Words”
Wendigoon suggests that the Patient and Death are arguing. The Patient says he isn’t afraid to die and Death says he has to fight it. WG Wendigoon also talks about how the album version of the song ends with a choir while the radio edit ends with guitars. He talks about how many have interpreted the first as representing the Patient going to heaven and the second suggesting the Patient goes to hell. WG
“Blood” “Kill All Your Friends” |
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First posted 6/3/2026; last updated 6/8/2026. |
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