My Chemical Romance

Mikey Way traces the whole band back to one night: the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness tour stop at Madison Square Garden in 1996. "I remember nudging him and being like, 'This is what I want to do. This is what we're gonna do -- and we're gonna play in this room,'" Way told the magazine Rock Sound, recalling how he turned to his older brother Gerard mid-show. Gerard agreed on the spot, and repeated the same story from that same stage when My Chemical Romance finally headlined Madison Square Garden themselves, twelve years later.

listen: upstream & heresource: Loudwire — "Mikey Way ↗share

1995

Bullet with Butterfly WingsSmashing Pumpkins

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2025

Bullet with Butterfly Wings (live cover)My Chemical Romance

listen forTwenty-nine years after that Garden show, My Chemical Romance put the debt on record, working a cover of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" into their 2025 tour -- the same gold-certified Mellon Collie single Mikey Way once watched from the crowd. Listen for how closely Gerard Way tracks Billy Corgan's original vocal arc: a flat, muttering verse that snaps into a full-throated, wounded scream on the chorus, the same loud-quiet lurch My Chemical Romance built much of their own catalog on.

Explaining how "Welcome to the Black Parade" grew from a modest punk song into a nine-minute rock opera, Gerard Way named the reference outright: "'Bohemian Rhapsody' was always an influence on this song. Just these big sweeping section changes and things like that... we're gonna make this big epic thing like 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' in that way." The homage went past talk: in 2005 the band recorded a charity cover of Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," and in 2011 Queen's own guitarist Brian May joined them onstage at Reading Festival, closing the set with them on "Welcome to the Black Parade" itself.

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1975

Bohemian RhapsodyQueen

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2006

Welcome to the Black ParadeMy Chemical Romance

listen forNeither song trusts a single verse-chorus shape to carry it. "Bohemian Rhapsody" moves from a hushed a cappella opening through an operatic mid-section into hard rock before dissolving into quiet again; "Welcome to the Black Parade" runs the same route in miniature -- a lone piano ballad that detonates into a martial drum march, then a massed gang-vocal chorus, before the parade recedes into near-silence at the end. Both build their drama by refusing to resolve early.

Asked in 2003 to describe My Chemical Romance's sound, Gerard Way's first reference was Iron Maiden; asked for his influences in the same interview, he named them first again. The debt runs deeper than taste -- a year later he traced it to one performer. "It started really young with Bruce Dickinson," Way said. "He's a great frontman, a great singer and I've always been influenced by the way he sang." No cover, no shared stage, just a teenager deciding, watching Dickinson command a room, what kind of singer he wanted to become.

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1983

The TrooperIron Maiden

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2004

HelenaMy Chemical Romance

listen forNo single Iron Maiden song is on record as Way's specific reference, so play his vocal instincts against Bruce Dickinson's operatic delivery on "The Trooper" -- a wide, chest-out wail riding a galloping tempo, narrating a doomed cavalry charge. On "Helena," Way reaches for the same theatrical register: a voice pushed toward its top to narrate his own funeral procession, trading Dickinson's battlefield for a graveside eulogy, but keeping the instinct to sing a death scene like an aria rather than confess it quietly.