Livedaily.com recently conducted an interview with Frank Iero of My Chemical Romance.
Misfortune struck Iero: He's missing this winter's overseas tour due to unspecified "illness." (He wouldn't comment on specifics; his publicist said he had a "sudden attack of illness.") As a result, he is in Los Angeles doing interviews to advance the US jaunt, which begins Feb. 22. Iero is scheduled to rejoin My Chemical Romance for the US dates in support of the group's Top 10, gold-certified album, last year's "The Black Parade."
"I'm waiting for them to get here. I cannot wait," he said. "I'm here and I've been checking up on them on YouTube and stuff like that. I know the shows are going amazing and they're killing it every night. I've been talking to them every night. I wish I could be there. I can't wait for them to get back to the States so I can play."
Did you consciously decide to make an album much different from your previous works?
Frank Iero: It was an amazing experience; it really was. It was definitely a conscious decision to write something or do something we had never done before. We wanted to just to try to break down boundaries that maybe we had set up around ourselves. We wanted to do something that maybe would be timeless, that we would be proud of in 20 years.
What is the songwriting process like? Do you write in the studio, on the road, at home?
Actually, [it's] a mix of everything. When we were writing for this record, while we were on the road, we had a makeshift studio in the back of our bus. We had a little ProTools set-up. Anytime something would come to you, maybe you'd lay down a riff here or there. Or you'd bring it to somebody else and we'd lay down a couple of tracks. A lot of the stuff we wrote on the road--we kind of scrapped. Maybe one or two songs we kept or just kept in the back of our heads to write later. Most of them were just to get the writing process going. We sat down. We wrote in New York. Then we finished in New York. We moved into a [house] where everybody had a room. We had a big live-room and we could play whenever we wanted--24 hours a day. We had a little ProTools set up there where we could demo whatever songs we felt were at the level that we wanted to record.
Tell me about the story line.
The main character is The Patient. He is dying tragically of a disease kind of early on in his life. When death comes for him, it comes for him in his earliest memory, which is of his father taking him to the parade. So, death comes for him in the form of this black parade and takes him on this journey of basically his life flashing before his eyes. He goes on and sees different things he's seen throughout the years--different decisions he had made, different people he's met along the way--and you get to hear those stories. Finally at the end of the record, he starts to plead with death and realizes he didn't live his life the way he wanted to live it and he wants another chance.
I've heard your songs on pop, alternative and rock stations. Did you think, while you were writing "The Black Parade," that the album would have that kind of crossover appeal?
I can honestly say that never came to our minds when writing it. We just wrote what we wanted to write. We wrote what we wanted to hear and what the songs wanted to be. We were very fortunate that a broad spectrum of people like the songs and appreciate it for what it is. Did we know? No. It's really cool, though, that it happened that way. Now, a wider gamut of people can hear the record on the radio. It's especially cool for us because, in New Jersey and New York, there are no rock stations. Now, you can turn on a bunch of different stations and hear it.
What can we expect from your shows?
We're definitely going to do a My Chem show, but on a way larger scale. I don't think we've taken on as much as we're going to take on with this new tour. We're talking about different set designs and settings of the stories. It'll definitely take you on the journey of the record, but in a more visual sense than we've ever had before.
With a concept album, how are you going to perform the concert? Are you going to do "The Black Parade" in whole? Or are you going to break it into pieces and do a regular concert, per se?
I was talking to Gerard about it last night, and we're actually still talking about it. I think there's a very, very, very good possibility that we're going to do "The Black Parade" in the whole. But are we going to do it in the order of the story that has been released or are we going to change the story around a little bit? I'm not sure.
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