Break Up

My Chemical Romance — a band known for its dense, intensely strained instrumental textures, darkly poetic if often mysterious lyrics and elaborately theatrical performance style — announced its breakup on MARCH 23, 2013  evening after a 12-year career that produced four highly regarded studio albums (most notably “The Black Parade”) as well as two live discs and a handful of EPs.

The reason for the sudden, unexpected split is – well, even after a 2,200-word essay, posted on TwitLonger by Gerard Way, the group’s singer, and apparently the instigator of the split, no one is quite sure. But the decision appears to be the result of a change in Mr. Way’s feelings about performing rather than any differences, creative or otherwise, among the band’s members.

Mr. Way made a point of saying what the reasons were not.

“I can assure you,” he wrote, “there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor.”

Instead, he attributes the breakup to an understanding the group had when it was formed in 2001 – a “fail-safe” or “doomsday device,” as he called it, which would detonate “should certain events occur or cease occurring.”

Those events appear to be a realization, which came to Mr. Way during a performance in Asbury Park, N.J., on May 19, 2012, that it was simply time to stop. After experiencing what he described as “a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive,” he went onstage and found himself, for what he said was the first time, detached from the performance – more taken with how blue and vast the ocean looked than with the large audience.

“I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong,” he wrote. “I am acting. I never act onstage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless – trying to shake it off – but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade.

“All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell — it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly – what it had to say.

“What it said was between me and the voice.”