“Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance

"Welcome to the Black Parade" led the charge for My Chemical Romance's third album, The Black Parade, in 2006, and it swings for the rafters from its very first bar. It starts on a lonely piano figure, then marches, swells and finally bursts into a full-throttle punk charge, emo and pop-punk dressed up in a marching band's uniform. The story belongs to the album's central character, the Patient, who drifts back to a childhood memory as he dies; Gerard Way has said the larger idea is the "triumph of the human spirit".

The song took years to crack. It goes back to the band's earliest sessions, when it was called "The Five of Us Are Dying", and they kept circling it without landing a version they liked. What finally unlocked it was a piano line Rob Cavallo had written, bolted onto the front. Cavallo produced it with the band, Chris Lord-Alge mixed, and Way, Frank Iero, Ray Toro, Mikey Way and Bob Bryar share the writing.

Samuel Bayer's video puts the band in their Black Parade guise, leading the Patient toward the afterlife. It gave them their only UK number one and their biggest Hot 100 hit, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among the songs that shaped rock and roll.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.