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tothetune2009-11-12 04:40 pm
ofyourdeath.livejournal.com) wrote in tothetune2009-11-12 04:40 pm
Entry tags:
Rolling Stone Scan
Stripped Down, Cranked Up: My Chemical Romance Return
By Gavin Edwards
Album TBD
Due Out Spring
Producer Brendan O'Brien
Chemical Brothers Gerard Way with Bryar, Mikey Way, and Iero in L.A.
Early in the recording of My Chemical Romance's fourth album, the band gave mixer Rich Costey a preview. "Everything he heard was just noise and spitting," remembers singer Gerard Way.
Taken aback, Costy asked, "What are these songs?"
"They're protest songs," Way told him. "It's the sound of 'no.'" Only later did Way realize exactly what he was protesting: "I was protesting us."
After a grueling tour behind 2006's The Black Parade, MCR were worn out and fed up. "I thought the band was going to break up," says guitarist Frank Iero. "I was expecting a call from Gerard saying, 'We can't do it anymore.'" Instead, they took a year off and changed managers. This past February, they went into the old A&M studios in L.A. with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O'Brien.
"The plan was to knock it out and not to overthink it," says drummer Bob Bryar. They expected to be done by April, but the record ended up taking all year. The goal, Way says, was to drop the theatricality of The Black Parade - which had lots of Floyd-ian pomp and a Liza Minnelli cameo - and "to harness everything that's great about this band into shorter songs. Almost protopunk, like the Stooges or the MC5."
The song that pushed them in the right direction was "Trans Am." It begins with the lyric "I got a bulletproof heart" and then stomps through four minutes of fist-pumping rock.
With that new direction - impassioned but melodic - MCR put aside the noisier material they had been working on and wrote a new batch of songs: the fast-and-dirty "Still Alive," the anthemic "The Only Hope for Me Is You" and the super-catchy "Death Before Disco" (featuring the chorus "Everybody pay attention to me"). "We simply embraced rock & roll and where we're from," Way says. "We learned how to be an American rock band instead of a British rock band."
On an October afternoon in L.A., MCR are polishing the album. There's only a month or two of work left: some mixing, some overdums, and sequencing. Today, Way is working on that pivotal cut, "Trans Am" - which he thinks would be enhanced by "1.2 seconds of Queen."
So he warms up his vocal cords, slips on some headphones, and asks, "Can I get a little bit of reverb? Yeah, it's a crutch." Then he sings, "These pigs are after me, after you" a dozen times, creating a "Bohemian Rhapsody" harmony. His performance is sylized, almost like a yodel. With a grin, he announces, "When I start sounding teenage-girlish, that's the sweet stuff."
Way's in a good mood, and not just because he's almost done with the record. In 2007, he married Lyn-Z (bassist for the band Mindless Self Indulgence); this May, they had a baby girl, Bandit. Way took two weeks off and came back to work "like a zombie, long hair and unshaven." But fatherhood gave him a new perspective on his lyrics, which focused on despair and death. "I wasn't writing a record about becoming a dad, and I wasn't writing a record for my baby girl, but I was writing a record for the person that she would turn into when she was 15, if anything ever happened to me."
Thank you![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tabula_x_rasa!
By Gavin Edwards
Album TBD
Due Out Spring
Producer Brendan O'Brien
Chemical Brothers Gerard Way with Bryar, Mikey Way, and Iero in L.A.
Early in the recording of My Chemical Romance's fourth album, the band gave mixer Rich Costey a preview. "Everything he heard was just noise and spitting," remembers singer Gerard Way.
Taken aback, Costy asked, "What are these songs?"
"They're protest songs," Way told him. "It's the sound of 'no.'" Only later did Way realize exactly what he was protesting: "I was protesting us."
After a grueling tour behind 2006's The Black Parade, MCR were worn out and fed up. "I thought the band was going to break up," says guitarist Frank Iero. "I was expecting a call from Gerard saying, 'We can't do it anymore.'" Instead, they took a year off and changed managers. This past February, they went into the old A&M studios in L.A. with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O'Brien.
"The plan was to knock it out and not to overthink it," says drummer Bob Bryar. They expected to be done by April, but the record ended up taking all year. The goal, Way says, was to drop the theatricality of The Black Parade - which had lots of Floyd-ian pomp and a Liza Minnelli cameo - and "to harness everything that's great about this band into shorter songs. Almost protopunk, like the Stooges or the MC5."
The song that pushed them in the right direction was "Trans Am." It begins with the lyric "I got a bulletproof heart" and then stomps through four minutes of fist-pumping rock.
With that new direction - impassioned but melodic - MCR put aside the noisier material they had been working on and wrote a new batch of songs: the fast-and-dirty "Still Alive," the anthemic "The Only Hope for Me Is You" and the super-catchy "Death Before Disco" (featuring the chorus "Everybody pay attention to me"). "We simply embraced rock & roll and where we're from," Way says. "We learned how to be an American rock band instead of a British rock band."
On an October afternoon in L.A., MCR are polishing the album. There's only a month or two of work left: some mixing, some overdums, and sequencing. Today, Way is working on that pivotal cut, "Trans Am" - which he thinks would be enhanced by "1.2 seconds of Queen."
So he warms up his vocal cords, slips on some headphones, and asks, "Can I get a little bit of reverb? Yeah, it's a crutch." Then he sings, "These pigs are after me, after you" a dozen times, creating a "Bohemian Rhapsody" harmony. His performance is sylized, almost like a yodel. With a grin, he announces, "When I start sounding teenage-girlish, that's the sweet stuff."
Way's in a good mood, and not just because he's almost done with the record. In 2007, he married Lyn-Z (bassist for the band Mindless Self Indulgence); this May, they had a baby girl, Bandit. Way took two weeks off and came back to work "like a zombie, long hair and unshaven." But fatherhood gave him a new perspective on his lyrics, which focused on despair and death. "I wasn't writing a record about becoming a dad, and I wasn't writing a record for my baby girl, but I was writing a record for the person that she would turn into when she was 15, if anything ever happened to me."
Thank you
tabula_x_rasa!
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i sympathize, gee baby.
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