Scrapped album could be My Chemical Romance swansong

Frank Iero has exclusively revealed to RockAAA that My Chemical Romance’s infamous ‘scrapped’ album could yet be released – as the band’s swansong.

The New Jersey rockers had not only wrapped up the follow-up to their mega-hit album The Black Parade – they had even picked the singles and done a series of photo shoots.

But suddenly they abandoned a reported 28-songs, headed back into the studio and recorded an entire new set of songs which became current record Danger Days: The True Lives of The Fabulous Killjoys.

MCR guitarist Iero admits it was hard to let some of their initial songs go but he explains they could eventually be released.

He told RockAAA:

“Just last week I started playing on one of the computers backstage and some of the tracks which we had on the last attempt at the record were on it and we were humming them back and forth and thinking they were really good. At some point it would be nice for some of them to see the light of day but there is no plan for that at the moment.

“Right now they are just for us but I actually did have this idea when we were making the record. I said ‘I have this great idea that we should record two records and release one and put the other away in the vault so when the band breaks up so it would be the last MCR record ever’.

“We thought that would be fun and we kind of did it but I don’t know if it is going to be our last record.”

Band mate and fellow axe man Ray Toro agrees it was hard to turn his back on songs he liked but insists it was something they had to do when they realised the new material they had come up with was better.

Toro said:

“There are definitively songs that I miss on that record and that was probably the hardest part when we started writing Danger Days as we started to realise that some of the songs we had written didn’t necessarily fit anymore. 

“I definitely remember that was a little bit of a struggle as we had to say goodbye to those songs – especially when you like them too.

Despite having almost 30-songs in the can the band still headed back into the studio to write what was initially intended to be a couple of new tracks and Iero reveals it was finishing current single ‘Sing’ that acted as the pivotal moment for the band in their realisation they had to start over.

He continued:

“We finished the first time and we had run out of time which meant we were in the mixing studio with songs which weren’t quite done. At the same time we still had songs we wanted to write but we put that on hold and went to the studio and we wrote ‘Na Na’, ‘Vampire Money’, ‘Planetary’ and ‘Sing’. 

“And once we finished ‘Sing’ I think that was the defining moment and we knew we liked them better than the 20 or 30 songs we had finished so we had to ask ourselves what we were doing.

“If we had come to that realisation before finishing those four songs I think it would have been very scary but we were so happy with the path that we were on at that point that it just made sense.”

Source: RockAAA