Yay new song!

posted by Gerard on Jan 26, 2009 9:54am

Actually it’s not a new song, it’s a cover song, but it’s the first music we’ve recorded since Black Parade. As we are gearing up to start the next album I wanted to pop in and talk about the track we were asked to cover for the Watchmen film by Zack Snyder, which you can get here.

Firstly, I’d like to point out that we have never recorded a song for a film. We have allowed a couple of our songs to be used in trailers or end-credits, but since we are usually pretty busy with either recording or touring there has never been time to do something like this before, and even this was kind of tight, as we started it before even finishing our last tour. There have been other offers to do this kind of thing, and usually the timing always made it impossible, but more often than not the project never seemed to fit the band, and we have always passed. But when the chance came to do a cover of one of my favorite artists, Bob Dylan, for a film version of my favorite work of fiction of all time we had to jump at the chance.

Sometimes an interviewer will ask a musician “What’s the one record or musical experience, like a concert, that made you want to make music?”. Usually people will mention some sort of 7 inch record or a show they saw in a basement that really changed their lives, got them into punk rock, and shaped the way they looked at the world. For me it was Watchmen. At 15 years old, just as I was discovering The Misfits “Walk Among Us” I was reading the first chapter of the graphic novel. It is the one thing I can pinpoint that shaped my views and aesthetics, even down to the way I dressed at the time, not that I walked the hallways in a stained brown trench coat, but I definitely chose more antisocial articles of clothing, like an army jacket, picked up after watching Taxi Driver for the twentieth time, a film I was lead to by the comic. So I would definitely say it’s pretty important to me and the band.

The talks started about the same time as Projekt Revolution, and I remember getting on the phone with Zack, who was as excited as I was, somewhere in the middle of the desert as out bus rolled to the next venue. We talked about the comic and he asked what I felt the approach
to the song should be, which was to take a cue from Jim Carroll, who is not only the author of The Basketball Diaries but also a musician, and a pretty great one at that. On his album, Catholic Boy, he has a song called “People Who Died”, which I love, as does Frank, as he always includes it in our “Front Of House Mixes” you would hear during set-change during one of our concerts. Zack responded to this approach right away, as he actually used that song to end his remake of “Dawn Of The Dead”, which I had totally forgotten about, even though the whole band saw it on opening night and loved it. So the tone was decided upon and then came the length, which initially Zack wanted to be the full version of Dylan’s.

Now, I would consider myself a pretty big Dylan fan, especially after having worked with Scott Allie on my comic, as he really got me into him even more than I was before. And while I didn’t want to alter the song at all, I found that I had to, due to the new approach and the aggressive nature of the cover. There was simply no way I felt you could make it feel like a trashy punk song and play it for ten minutes…I think it’s impossible to keep that kind of energy up without either burning out or boring yourself, as anyone will note that most Ramones songs don’t exceed three minutes, and there’s a reason for that. Down-strummed til your wrist breaks! Fast and fucking hard!

So back at a hotel in Arizona I sat in a hotel and did a rough arrangement, which clocked in at around 2:40, and I paid careful attention to the lyrics, while losing some of my favorite verses I managed to keep the ones I felt were represented by Alan Moore in the comic. We then started playing the song at sound check, and had so much fun doing it that we decided to play it live, to get warmed up for the recording.

We did some initial tracking in Nashville and then just lived with it for a while. When crunch time came, and after seeing some of the film, I became increasingly unhappy with my vocal performance, and we felt we could get more out of the guitars. So we asked our friend Rich
Costey to help us finish the track and get some new sounds, which he did, in NYC at Electric Ladyland, with the addition of some sweet old Marshall Plexi’s, to get a kind of Sex Pistols tone, and we had a blast.

And thats pretty much the story of the song. We’re really proud of it, and really excited you finally get to hear it.

Hurm,
G

PS- Special thanks to Bob Dylan for letting us cover the song and for not getting really mad at us for hacking out some of the best lyrics ever written.

My Chemical Romance Get To Work On Non-Concept Album, Sort Of

From MTV News

By James Montgomery, with reporting by Brian Jacks Dec 29 2008 8:00 AM EST

Well, at least now we know what the new My Chemical Romance album won’t sound like.

A few months back, when we spoke to MCR bassist Mikey Way about the “Batman” story he was writing for DC Comics, he mentioned that he and his bandmates had begun work in earnest on the follow-up to 2006′s Welcome to the Black Parade, but, while they’re all writing songs, he had no idea what the album would end up sounding like.

“So if, say, we wrote some songs that sound like Rick Springfield, a week later they’ve all turned into Children of Bodom songs,” he explained. “I know it’s going to be great — I just don’t know what it’s going to sound like. We’re going to be just as surprised as everyone else, believe me.”

And we did. So when we recently caught up with Mikey’s brother, MCR frontman Gerard Way, we asked if the new album was still in such a state of flux. His answer? Yes, but he’s at least got an idea of how he doesn’t want it to turn out.

“You know, we’ve made concepts for three albums now, so I think this one — at least from my standpoint — I want to go into it not thinking about a definite story. I said that during Parade, but I still think I had something to work out,” he said. “I think I had to get it out of my system, as far as writing concept records. I had to at least do one more before I stopped doing them. Obviously, they’ll always be cohesive though. The songs need to fit together, that’s what makes a great album.”

Way added that rather than focusing on a concept, he and the band are keeping it much simpler this time around — they’re just focusing on writing really killer, really loud rock songs.

“The one thing is we’ve never really captured that ‘live’ feeling. We’ve gone for sometimes more polish. We’ve obviously emulated bands like Queen in trying to get that classic, late-’70s glam sound, and we’ve gone for that at times, especially on the last record,” Way explained. “But then, when we’re playing this stuff live, it’s ultimately going to get more aggressive, so I think it’d be interesting to hear what the band sounds like recorded at least somewhat in those parameters of a live set.

“And that’s not to say it’ll all be distorted, who knows. I think you record it live viscerally, and the minute you put in the distortion, yeah, it’s going to sound ‘punk,’ ” he continued. “You take it off and I don’t know what it sounds like then. The song we did for ‘Watchmen’ [a cover of Bob Dylan's 'Desolation Row'] in a lot of ways is a really good test-run or experiment, at least sonically.”

Of course, in keeping with the company line, Way said that there is no definite timetable for when or where My Chem will actually begin recording the new album … in fact, what with Way’s “Umbrella Academy” comic series having recently been green-lit for production and guitarist Frank Iero’s side project Leathermouth taking off, there seems to be even less time to be dedicated to the business of being MCR.

“Well, [guitarist] Ray [Toro] is coming out Sunday and … we may even sketch out a whole album together, which is something we used to like to try to do. We’ve had less and less time to sit down and try to do a skeleton of an album,” Way said. “It’s good to start doing that stuff, but once you start doing that you kind of paint yourself into a corner. Like, we finished mixing Black Parade, and then the next day we were on a plane off to Europe doing press. It was literally that quick. So I don’t think we want to go through that again. We don’t want some kind of time limit on us.”

New My Chemical Romance cover song on vinyl – pre-order now!

posted by Jeff Watson on Jan 12, 2009 6:27pm

Big news, friends and folks.

You can now pre-order the VERY limited edition 12″ picture disc version of My Chemical Romance’s cover of Bob Dylan’s classic “Desolation Row” from the upcoming Watchmen soundtrack right here.

The vinyl picture disc comes with artwork from the film, and is available for a special price of only $11.99. The B-side is the instrumental track “Prison Fight” by Tyler Bates from the film.

Orders will arrive on or around January 27th. Get it here. Enjoy to your heart’s content.

Single Of The Week

From InTheNews.co.uk

My Chemical Romance: Watchmen/Desolation Row

Reprise Records; out January 12th

Sporting a video directed by Watchmen helmer Zach Snyder, Watchmen/Desolation Row is a cracking, raw-edged double A-side from Emo gods MCR.

The five-piece’s rendition of Dylan’s Desolation Row leans more toward a re-working than an out-and-out cover, slotting neatly into the forthcoming comic book movie’s soundtrack of 60s and 70s material.

MCR frontman Gerard Way, no stranger to comic books himself as he currently writes a strange superhero title called the Umbrella Academy, says Watchmen/Desolation Row is a road test for the band’s new stripped-down punk sound.

They promise to unveil more of this new style later in the year.

This is backed up by the fact they’re currently in the studio recording a new non-concept LP, designed to counteract their ambitious and smash hit Black Parade album from 2006.