Disenchanted: The Crow and the Puddle of Mudd

“It can’t rain all the time.”– Eric Draven (played by Brandon Lee) in The Crow, written by David J. Schow and John Shirley

“Everything’s so blurry, and everyone’s so fake.”-”Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd

A quick disclaimer: “Drowning Lessons”, which is the fourth track from My Chemical Romance’s debut album I Brought You My Bullets is much better than anything the half-assed, post-grunge poseurs Puddle of Mudd ever composed. But, mentioning them worked in both a cheekiness factor, and MCR embracing the sounds of “modern rock” in this song so I decided to leave the band’s name in the title of this essay.

Most of what both the band and the fans have to say about “Drowning Lessons” is decidedly mixed. Some fans, who see Bullets as a kind of concept album prequel to Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge see it as establishing the concept of a man having to gun down a thousand souls to save his girlfriend from the devil/purgatory/some vaguely Catholic afterlife thing. (See the “Helena video.) They even present the lyric of “A thousand bodies, piled up, it would never be enough” as evidence. On the other hand, Gerard Way talks about the “curse” of this song, and how it was super personal. Plus equipment would malfunction when they would try to play it live. In a 2013 tweet, Gerard even compared “Drowning Lessons” to songs by emo legends Saves the Day, which is probably because of the powerful guitar playing from Ray Toro (Who even gets a mini solo) and screamed vocals from himself.

However, lyrically and narratively, this song works even without being a chapter of a concept album about souls, gunslingers, and some kind of afterlife gimmick. It’s about living the happiest day of your life (Wedding day in this case) in an endless loop and waking up in hell on earth because your loved one isn’t there. Even though My Chemical Romance uses the imagery of traditional weddings (rice, roses, champagne etc.), “Drowning Lessons could be about reliving any kind of trauma, which goes back to why this song was difficult for the band to consistently play live. Also, I’m no expert, but maybe even the constant screaming and yelping would take a toll on Gerard Way’s vocals as he mainly sang “cleanly” (In the posthardcore sense) going forward. So, there is a potential that “Drowning Lessons” was both physically and emotionally painful to MCR.

Sonically, “Drowning Lessons” is very much emo meets “modern rock”. Some music execs (or critics) probably heard this track and compared Gerard’s vocals and the dissonant, yet melodic at times guitar playing to the band’s contemporaries like The Used or their New Jersey compatriots Thursday and Saves the Day and placed them in the emo category. This is definitely a valid observation because Thursday’s Geoff Rickly produced this track. However, MCR still had a sense of lyrical melodrama with the subject matter evoking films like Groundhog Day (obviously), and The Crow where the protagonist, Eric Draven, was murdered the day before his wedding day with his bride, is resurrected by a crow spirit, and must take revenge on their murderers one year later to find some semblance of peace.

The Crow is definitely something that Gerard Way would be into…

In a 2015 interview, Gerard Way mentioned the importance of The Crow soundtrack to his music taste, and he went on record  on the Cartoonist Kayfabe podcast about being a fan of The Crow and Tim Vigil’s outlaw comic Faust so he definitely engaged with the original source material. However, in that same interview with Bad Feeling Magazine, he mentions that The Crow soundtrack featuring artists like The Jesus and Mary Chain was more of an influence on his 2014 solo record than anything he did with My Chemical Romance. For now, these musical and pop cultural touchstones had an impact on his lyrics about weddings, grief, and loss and not the band’s sound as much. This lack of influence can be seen in “Drowning Lessons’” twin outros.

The two endings of “Drowning Lessons” felt like MCR was trying to appeal to their emo/posthardcore fandom (and Eyeball Records labelmates) as well as the larger pantheon of (Let’s face it, shitty except for Hybrid Theory) commercially successful modern, or active, rock at the time, such as Godsmack, Nickelback, Creed, Puddle of Mudd (of course), Staind, Chevelle, and Linkin Park sans their hip hop elements. This is strange to me because “Drowning Lessons” is an album cut, not a single that featured a more traditional hard rock breakdown a la this song’s second ending, which gave me very uncomfortable middle school and early high school flashbacks. (I played basketball and ran cross country, and these songs were very popular in the locker room, as warm up music, and in the car stereo on the way to games.)

Even if the total package of sound and lyrics isn’t there yet (Especially with the song’s XM Radio SquiZZ-esque ending), “Drowning Lessons” deals with the pain of having happiness unexpectedly ripped from you as well as the ongoing process of dealing with and hopefully exorcising this trauma. Plus there’s a side dish of head bobbing percussion from Matt Pelissier and strong riffs from Ray Toro that complements Gerard Way’s shrieks. Toro even gets to play a half-solo a la Eric Draven in The Crow, who shreds on the roof while Detroit burns. A Hangman’s Joke/My Chemical Romance Devil’s Night double bill would have been an iconic gig for sure.