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Welcome to my first ever shrine! I've never really made a fansite like this, but I'm having fun figuring out the html and everything. Of course my first time making one of these had to be for my favorite band: My Chemical Romance!

All opinions and interpretations here are my own! Meaning not that I wasn't influenced by reading and talking about the band, but rather that if you disagree with something I've said, that's cool, and doesn't make either of us wrong. It's just for fun! I don't go into a lot of detail, but I do make a lot of sweeping statements.

My relationship to MCR

Gerard Way

Ray Toro

Frank Iero

Mikey Way

I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love

MCR's debut album Bullets came out on July 23, 2002. It was produced by Thursday frontman and New Jersey sweetheart Geoff Rickly.
This record is their most raw and the closest in style to their hardcore influences. It's also my favorite! 50 minutes of heartwrenching whoop-ass that feels like an October evening in the parking lot of what used to be a mall.

Demolition Lovers

Everyone has an opinion on what the first installment of the Demolition Lovers storyline is. I personally think it’s way further up in the album, but the last track is the first time they’re named, and it’s just also a fucking banger. A slow, excruciatingly sad banger. The story of the demo lovers is actually told in their next album (it’s them on the cover!), but this song pretty much sums it up. A man, a woman, and the corpses of a thousand evil men.

It ALSO brings us to one of my chem’s fundamental themes, one that’s been here from the very beginning and follows us all the way to 2022’s Foundations of Decay, and that’s vulnerable, painful, dangerous sincerity. The song (and the album) end on Gerard screaming “I mean this, forever”, and then uncomfortable silence as your cd spins into nothing, your life fundamentally changed by—fine, maybe that’s not everyone’s experience. But that’s what the band is about. Sincerity.

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is out!! Rejoice, for the season of emo has finally begun!

I can finally go into a bit more detail about the demolition lovers. The album as a whole follows their story, but each song is also to be taken as a standalone story, and also as a metaphor for something else entirely, and probably a fourth secret thing.

The demo lovers storyline goes like this: a guy loses his wife and makes a deal with the devil to get her back. He has to kill 1000 evil men. He gets to #999, and, whoops, turns out the 1000th evil man is himself. He’s doomed to hell or whatever, they’re all ex-catholic which you have to keep in mind (not that you could forget).

That’s the main interpretation of the storyline, it’s not even canon canon because Gerard is, before anything else, a liar. MY interpretation is that the demolition lovers are the same person through a mirror. It’s a trans fucking discography they’ve got, and I will go on about it if asked.

I'm Not Okay (I Promise

This song is so iconic to me that I just think at this point people are just born with a flash drive with this song on it in their hand. This is one of the songs that made them My Chemical Romance, for better or for worse. In the iconic (again) music video, they paint themselves as complete outcasts fighting against jocks, but not in a “nerd gets the girl” way. In fact, people accused them of being gay for the scene where Frank ignores a cheerleader who wants to kiss him, which is delightful when you consider that seconds before we see a guy actually check out another guy, so. Priorities.

It’s camp! It’s an outsider anthem! It’s what you scream at the top of your lungs when you’re not, in fact, okay! It’s an arena, in 2023, full of people singing those same lyrics from the other side, screaming we made it! We got through!

The Black Parade

To record this album, the band rented and locked themselves in the Paramour Mansion in LA, a house known for being haunted as hell. This went very poorly for all involved, though the intensity of the experience ranged from “I think there’s a raccoon somewhere” to a full-blown psychotic break.

I’m not trying to be flippant, it’s genuinely hard to ride the line between clinical detachment and genuine horror at the fact that they thought they had to put themselves through that. This is the part where I kill every person who’s ever made someone feel like art can only come from a place of suffering.

It’s their greatest album. It’s one of the greatest albums of our generation. I still don’t think it’s worth it.

Welcome to the Black Parade

Talk about a song that changed everything. The Black Parade is a rock opera that tells the story of a character called “The Patient”, who is dying of cancer. We follow him through death into the afterlife, as he is welcomed into the black parade—that’s this song! This is the track they’re known for, and g-noting (playing a g note, the first note of the song) became a trend after the break up, something between a rickroll and a call to arms for emos who mourned the band for years.

This isn’t their first concept album but it’s their first one with such a strong visual identity, black and white marching band outfits and Gerard’s cropped white hair being iconic to this day. 16 years later, you can still walk into any hot topic and buy one of those jackets.

Interestingly for a song hailed as the emo anthem, Welcome to the Black parade isn’t a sad song, it’s a song about hope. In fact, the whole album is about hope, about mourning but moving on and remembering the good things from life: “we’ll carry on”. Gerard has said that the song was inspired by “the triumph of the human spirit over darkness”.

In later interviews, the band would explain that they felt the album, which remains their best selling and highest charting, was misunderstood by the public.

Famous Last Words

Remember when I said my chem’s main theme was sincerity? I lied again, it’s also staying. Alive, together, just a bit longer and against all odds, despite everything the world throws at us. We’ve seen that a lot already but I think the track that exemplifies it the best is Famous Last Words. Gerard wrote this song while they were still at the Paramour Mansion, after Mikey had to leave because his mental health had reached a breaking point. It’s. Well I think the lyrics kinda speak for themselves here.

As a live performance, this song is beyond beautiful. It was never one of my favorites (just like musically speaking), but I can’t really listen to it the same now! The band stops playing and just lets the audience sing it, and there’s a lot of words I could use to describe it but it’d just come off as sappy or overly dramatic. Which, I guess, is the whole point of the band. Sincerity at any cost.

Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys

My Chemical Romance took a break after The Black Parade, which many thought was the end of the band. Gerard took a trip to the desert, had a couple weird chats with narrative foil and soulmate/nemesis Geoff Rickly, and a few wild oversimplifications later we have their most controversial (at the time) album, Danger Days.

This album brings us banger after heart-wrenching banger, but what people heard was pop, oversaturated, and happy. To me, the terrible irony is that this is in fact their saddest record. It’s full of hope, sure, and the message remains (“keep running”), but they’re tired. They’re angry at the industry, at their label, tensions are forming within the band, and Gerard is becoming obsessed with the visuals for the album, with the characters. They’d go on to talk about getting lost in Party Poison (their red-haired laser-shooting alter-ego), in looking at himself in the mirror and not recognizing himself. This is the album that killed My Chemical Romance.