glass beach, a punky post-emo outfit from Los Angeles, are closing out Pride Month with a celebratory cover of My Chemical Romance‘s classic “Welcome to the Black Parade,” signifying MCR’s importance to the LGBTQIA+ community as well as to glass beach’s inspiration as a group.
glass beach, made up of several queer/trans/non-binary members, released their debut album, practically titled the first glass beach album, in 2019. A vinyl release on Run for Cover Records followed in 2020. The band is also active on membership platform Patreon — to wit, it’s their subscribers there who urged them to tackle the My Chemical Romance tune that opens 2006’s watershed The Black Parade.
Listen to the cover version down toward the bottom of this post.
My Chemical Romance have helped impart “the confidence to be who you want to be and have the space to encourage others to do the same,” glass beach respond when asked why they think the act and it’s lead singer, Gerard Way, still strike such a chord with LGBTQIA+ listeners.
As for their version of “Black Parade,” glass beach say they “knew pretty immediately we were going to approach it as faithfully as possible. Not only is covering the song on its own a daunting and difficult task, but re-imagining it could have either been the easy way out or even significantly harder. In fact, a big part of our process was taking what was already there and going, ‘OK, now if glass beach were to have written this section, what might we have done?’ We basically used a note-for-note cover as a jumping-off point.”
The band adds that they’ve “all been fans of MCR for a while, most of us discovering them when we were much younger. Layne, our guitarist, in particular, formed a pretty strong emotional connection through The Black Parade as an album.”
Check out more of glass beach at patreon.com/glassbeachband.
