Inside Gerard Way’s Crusade to Change American Music

When he was fronting My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way was the driving force behind high-minded (and color-coordinated) concept albums like The Black Parade and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. But in the four years since the group’s last proper record, Way lost his band, his patience with the industry and his desire to do rock & roll on a grand scale.

Still, he never lost sight of a simple goal he set while making his solo debut, Hesitant Alien (due September 30th): “I have all these amazing Britpop records, and I have shoegaze records, but I don’t have anything on the radio anymore,” he says. “So the main objective was to change the landscape of music a bit. To kind of re-boot Britpop in America, see how that goes.”

It’s a tall order, but Way appears up to the task. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, he reveals how life as a major-label frontman prepared him for his latest endeavor, discusses his desire for reinvention and divulges what might have happened if My Chem had made one last record.

What is it about Britpop that has always appealed to you?
So many things. The style of it, the energy; it was a real exciting time. It was like the alternative to grunge, and it was so refreshing. It wasn’t harkening back to that Duran Duran excess, it was something different. It was a feeling that British music was being liberated, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved the attitude, I loved the way people looked, I loved the song titles, the album artwork. There’s this British company called Stylorouge, they did all the stuff for Blur, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and they also did the campaign for Trainspotting, which, to me, was the most brilliant design campaign of all time for a film. And then, you know, I remember stuff like seeing an issue of Select magazine that had Damon from Blur on the cover, wearing a schoolboy outfit, and I was like “This is it.”

“I’m proud of My Chem because I went with my gut, and what I thought the world needed at the time”

The influence of Britpop wasn’t really apparent in My Chemical Romance; why does it play such a prominent role on Hesitant Alien?
When I was in art school, I worshipped Britpop. And when I got out, I found myself very depressed and struggling. I kind of desired this new kind of sound, and it was the sound I made with my friends in My Chemical Romance. So it’s almost like this solo record is a re-education of what I was into before My Chem. And I’m proud of My Chem because I went with my gut, and what I thought the world needed at the time, and it didn’t sound like Britpop. So I trusted my inner artist, and I went with that and it worked out really well. And when the time for that was done, it was almost like being under a spell for 13 years, and then the spell broke, and I’m that person from art school again.

So, it was time. Can the same be said about ending My Chemical Romance?
It was the right time for My Chemical Romance to end. In my mind, it was becoming really dark, because I started to feel that’s what people wanted from the band, based off the experience of Danger Days. I think it was a little bit like, “Let’s fall into a comfortable zone,” where it’s just a uniform now, a brand. You know, “Let’s tweak the brand.” That’s where it was kind of going. And the amount of art I planned for the last My Chem record, it was like Danger Days was getting a little out of hand. It was getting to the point where I felt like I was starting to make giant art projects because I wasn’t enjoying making music as much. Danger Days was the first record where it started to feel like that.

When we eventually released Conventional Weapons, it was interesting because, when we made that, it represented our attempt at trying to be a proud American band, and pushing that with the music. It ended up not working for me, and what didn’t work about it was that our influences were largely British. So, it was almost like celebrating becoming a large band, a large machine that played sheds and stuff like that. It wasn’t so much celebrating it, it was embracing it. To me, Conventional Weapons is the audible sound of people embracing their American largeness. And, like I said, that didn’t work for me.