Gerard Way and Rolling Stone Magazine

"We definitely want the album to come out next year so I think we are nearly done," he told us recently. "But there will have to be a point where we make the conscious decision to stop. One of my addictive things is that I always think there is another song around the corner, there is always one more song. After we get that song then I think there is one more after that, and another after that, I think if I ever stopped feeling that way we would be in trouble. I’m always chasing that next great song." - Gerard Way.

My Chemical Romance Slam Fame-Hungry Musicians on New Album

After going the concept route -- or at least making a linear work on 'The Black Parade' -- My Chemical Romance are going in another direction on their forthcoming album, due early next year. Spinner visited the group in their L.A. studio to get an early preview and we were left suitably blown away by the nine very disparate songs we got to hear. The tracks ranged from the atmospheric 'Light Before Your Eyes,' a song frontman Gerard Way describes as Pink Floyd-ish, to the '80s-flavored 'Trans Am' and the punk/dance party tune, 'Death Before Disco,' which starts off with a Judas Priest 'Living After Midnight' vibe and turns into a lyrical salute to the Stooges, Velvet Underground and MC5.

Way tells Spinner the as-yet-untitled album is a definite answer to 'The Black Parade.' "Every single record we make is a response to the last," he says. "But sometimes it's not only a response to the last record -- it's a response to the opinion of that record or a response to the world at the time of that record."

What he sees and documents on the new album is a lot of rockers who are in music for the wrong reason. "There's a definite undercurrent of fame versus working class, people having stuff handed to them with zero talent versus working class kids that start a band," he says. "Rock 'n' roll is not red carpets and MySpace friends -- rock 'n' roll is dangerous and rock 'n' roll should piss people off. Right now, there's not a lot of that happening. What it is is a lot of people trying to be famous. That seems to be the goal."

In Way's opinion, that desire to be famous is messing up the sanctity of rock ''n roll. "It's bled into rock. It came from other places, but it's bled into rock 'n' roll and kind of tainted it a bit," Way says. "This record is really a response to that as well."

MCR certainly have the resources and notoriety to bask in that fame as well, so how do they resist that temptation? "Instead of us panicking and trying to see where we can grab the money or grab the opportunity, we just wrote music instead," Way says. "We tried to write a great record; that was our response to things. I think that writing a great record will sell records these days, as opposed to doing every other f---ing thing that people seem to be doing to sell a record."

My Chemical Romance talk Stooges and MC5-influenced new album

My Chemical Romance have unveiled further details about their forthcoming fourth album – and admitted the band almost split up last year.

Singer Gerard Way said the follow-up to their 2006 concept album 'The Black Parade' has been influenced by The Stooges and MC5.

"We wanted to harness everything that's great about this band into shorter songs, almost protopunk, like The Stooges or the MC5," he told Rolling Stone.

The singer also revealed a new track 'Trans Am', which is likely to feature on the new record, containing the lyrics: "These pigs are after me, after you".

He admitted the band nearly split after touring their last album in May 2008, saying: "I thought the band was going to break up," although he did not elaborate on the comment.

Their fourth LP, which is being recorded in Los Angeles with Bruce Springsteen producer Brendan O'Brien, is due in spring 2010.

THE DAY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE'S FRANK IERO MET THE MEN IN BLACK

HOMELAND INSECURITY: THE DAY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE'S FRANK IERO MET THE MEN IN BLACK

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE are putting the final touches to their follow-up of 2007's majestic The Black Parade. During a break in the studio, guitarist FRANK IERO recalls some of the great highs and lows he experienced during their break. Some of those experiences--good and bad--revolved around writing, recording and touring with his side-project, LEATHERMOUTH, whose debut album XO, appeared on Epitaph earlier this year. The good was that he honed his home-recording skills, did a lot of writing (which has helped inform MCR's next disc) and became a maniac frontman while Leathermouth were on tour with REGGIE AND THE FULL EFFECT during the summer of 2008.

The bad? Well, as the guitarist has made clear in interviews, Leathermouth are his vehicle for unfiltered ranting (i.e. "Sunsets Are For Muggings," "Your Friends Are Full Of Shit"). But it was track No. 4 on XO, "I Am Going To Kill The President Of The United States Of America" (about George W. Bush), which earned Iero a visit from the Secret Service. Wondering what happens next?

"The government comes to your house, searches everything and talks to your wife for hours," says Iero, adjusting the sleeves on his hoodie. "Then you have to get a real expensive attorney to keep you out of prison for five years. I had a long talk with the gentlemen of the Secret Service. [It was the] straight-up dark suits, sunglasses, Men In Black-vibe--I thought they were going to do the mind-erase thing [like in the movie].

"They said, 'Why did you write the song?' And I told them the truth. I was on tour [overseas] with My Chem at the time, and every time I turned around, there were Anti-American rallies. I wrote a song from the standpoint of the rest of the world. It wasn't from my personal point of view--it was just from someone who sees warmongering going on. I wrote the song, and the title is as blatant as humanly possible, because I wanted it to be that way. The Secret Service asked, 'Do you think someone is going to hear this song and kill the president?' And I said if they're going to kill the president, they're going to do it without listening to this song. That's like saying everyone who reads Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is going to eat a baby. They didn't think that was too intelligent, so they said, 'Well, if you re-release the record with the song on it or perform the song live ever again, you'll be arrested."

What's really perplexing about the whole incident is how the agency even learned about the song in the first place. Iero says he's not sure who it was, but opines that it was a British writer who contacted the Office of Homeland Security looking for a comment. Clearly, Iero could've turned the whole thing into a massively public freedom-of-speech argument; now, he's just happy the whole thing is behind him. "I'm married and I want to have kids," he resigns. "I don't want to go to jail for five years." --Jason Pettigrew

My Chemical Romance give up the emo woe

NO MORE angst. No more whingeing. No more playing the victim. When My Chemical Romance re-emerge in early 2010 with their fourth album, any trace of "woe is me and it's all your fault" will be replaced by such self-aware and self-sufficient themes as "strength" and "self-preservation".

Yup, emo is dead. Long live My Chemical Romance.

"I didn't want to set kids who like to wear black back 20 years, that wasn't the point. Because it's taken us so long to be able to wear black every day."

Gerard Way lets out a laugh. The singer is standing outside Sunset Sound Studios in LA, where his band is in the final stages of mixing the new, as-yet-untitled album with producer Brendan O'Brien.

"But I guess if you're gonna dress like you listen to The Cure all the time, you're gonna get s... for it."

Way wasn't happy with reports that black-clad kids were getting beat up when the band played at Big Day Out in 2007. And he describes hate crimes aimed at emo kids with asymmetrical fringes that swept across Mexico in early 2008 as "a human rights issue".

"It literally didn't make any sense to me," Way says. "It all boils down to macho versus emotional at the end of the day. It comes down to gutteral, violent tendencies versus talking about your problems."

But mostly, Way wasn't happy when he thought ahead to what his daughter, Bandit Lee, born in May this year, might think when she picked up My Chemical Romance's previous album, The Black Parade, and gave it a spin as a teen. Would she see her dad and his bandmates as moaning victims?

"I didn't feel that we were," Way clarifies.

"I always felt there was a great deal of black humour with anything we were doing. But I did feel it was misperceived and misinterpreted, and in really strange ways. That's the thing though, when you put a song out there, it's no longer yours, it's somebody else's, and it's theirs to interpret however they want.

"But I knew the power the band had was whatever we put out next, so we could dictate what we were saying, we could dictate how it's perceived to a point."

My Chem 4.0, he swears, will be "very explicitly saying that we're all not victims".

Way, his bassist brother Mikey, guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero and drummer Bob Bryar began pre-production on the new album in February.

"We started from absolutely zero, we didn't bring any road songs into the room," Way says.

Time is a luxury the band have never afforded themselves before, and Way says the all-the-time-we-need edict will carry over to artwork and everything else that must be done for the album.

Songs so far (though the titles may change) include Still Alive, Trans Am, Death Before Disco, The Only Hope For Me Is You, Black Dragon Fighting Society, Kiss The Ring, Boy Division and the marvellously named Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back.

Way says every track is a "first-listen song"; something that will grab you from the get-go.

"That was why it took so long, because if something wasn't making you feel that feeling, then it went away and it had to be replaced with something that did make you feel special," he says.

Australia will be first to hear the new songs when My Chemical Romance tour in February for the Soundwave festival, though the album won't be released until March.

Another thing you won't find on the new album is the conceptual pomp and the striking costumery that helped send The Black Parade to platinum status in Australia, Britain and the US.

"Let's swap the word theatrical for cinematic this time," he says. "If Black Parade was a big rock show that was full of theatricality, then this is more of a movie moment. I don't think this band will ever lose any kind of aesthetic or art to it - that always has to be there. It just means that we're not doing what we've always done; it doesn't mean there won't be anything exciting attached to this record."

Though musically shorter and sharper, Way is cautious of using the term "stripped back".

"If anything is stripped back, it's bells and whistles and marching bands and things like that. Songs are now under four minutes or maybe even shorter. That, to me, is stripping it back, trimming the fat, trimming any kind of indulgence out of the music."

Gerard Way Talks New Comic "Fabulous Killjoys," Next My Chemical Romance Album

"I like the titles from The Umbrella Academy issues better than my song titles now," Gerard Way announced at his Saturday afternoon panel at Comic-Con International. "They've leveled up. There's nothing better than titling an issue of Umbrella Academy." The frontman of My Chemical Romance, Way is also a longtime comics fan — he mentioned that he'd freaked out about seeing Jeff (Bone) Smith the night before, and rhapsodized over Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's The Walking Dead ("After The Walking Dead, I don't know that you can touch zombies. It'll be a good five or 10 years before somebody else can do a zombie comic").

Of course, Way has also become an award-winning comics writer himself in the last few years. At the overflowing panel that's now an annual Comic-Con tradition, he announced two new comic books he's working on: the third Umbrella Academy miniseries, subtitled Hotel Oblivion and drawn by the Brazilian artist Gabriel Bá, and a new series called The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, drawn by Becky Cloonan (Demo). Way talked to Rolling Stone about the new comics, as well as the MCR record that's in progress right now.

What's the story with The Fabulous Killjoys?
It's written by myself and my co-creator Shaun Simon. He was the keyboard player in Frank [Iero]'s first band, he's our good friend, he was our merch guy. I think a lot of ideas we came up with back then in the band are what ended up in Killjoys.

Like what?
Like the notion of driving by a children's playground off to the side of the desert and realizing that it's a cemetery because it's where childhood dies — stuff that we'd say to each other, driving around. But it's from the perspective of a gang, because that's basically what a young band is. You stop being a gang at a certain point, but you always chase that feeling. You want to get that feeling back.

How has it been working with Becky Cloonan?
She's awesome. When I first talked to her about it, she sent me a sketch of Rachel, one of the characters, and I knew right away she had to be the artist for the book. The great thing about her is that she comes from that world. She went to SVA, and she got her start doing show fliers for CBGBs — she saw the bands and went to the shows. She's very punk rock in that way, and her art has that energy that a punk show has.

You've talked about your master plan for The Umbrella Academy; where does Hotel Oblivion fit into the big picture?
It's pulling further away from what people think a superhero comic, or even a comic, can be. It's going to trigger a major event that needs to happen in the comic. I'm very excited for it.

What's happening with the next My Chemical Romance album?
I'd say we're right in the middle of it. Brendan [O'Brien] is the kind of producer who really likes a lot of things going on at once, so we're tracking and he's going right across the hall and mixing. It's a process that always keeps everyone involved the whole time. The songs are all wildly different, but the one I'm really excited about is called "Death Before Disco." It's a completely different sound for the band — it's like an anti-party song that you can party to. I can't wait for people to hear it. It brings back, lyrically, some of that wonderful fiction from the first album. I think we wrote our "Born to Run," and I'm so amped about that. To me, it's the greatest song we've ever written — it's my favorite MCR song.

Holidays!

ok...like i've got nothing to do, so I just stay all day long in my computer....

writing a fanfic and making a video of I'm Yours Tonight by The Academy Is...



then if i can uploade it to Youtube i'll ost it here...