Rob Cavallo Looks Back on The Black Parade at Twenty

The Black Parade turns twenty, and Rob Cavallo has been talking about how it was made. Cavallo produced the record after years spent behind Green Day’s albums, including 2004’s American Idiot, and he describes the two projects as arriving from different impulses.

American Idiot, he says, was partly a response to how iTunes was selling music at the time, slicing records into individual 99-cent tracks. He and Green Day wanted an album that had to be heard as a whole. My Chemical Romance got to the same place through Gerard Way, who built a narrative across thirteen songs around a character called the Patient, a man dying of cancer. “Gerard is such a prolific writer,” Cavallo says. “He has backstories for all his records.”

A good deal of the writing took place at the Paramour Mansion in Silver Lake, where Way suffered night terrors. Cavallo does not treat the setting as incidental. The house, he remembers, was “absolutely haunted and freezing,” a living room with no heat where the team set up a PA and hung microphones to capture the room live in stereo.

Guitarist Ray Toro has pointed to “Jesus of Suburbia” as the model for “Welcome to the Black Parade,” noting that the song moves through five or six distinct sections that hold together as one piece. The piano figure that opens it was written by Cavallo himself, and it became the part most people know first.