So, yeah, I feel like My Chemical Romance has SOME aspects of the kind of thing I'm looking for, but not everything.

I feel like the whole overwhelming hope thing comes through; "Welcome to the Black Parade" has that good feel to it. I feel like it's all just fake, though; the lyrics don't betray any real meaning, they almost seem random in most of their songs.

That may be fun for some people, but I just don't feel like playing anymore, I want something real.

One song I'm talking about is one of the Big Two off their last album, "The Ghost of You". Starts out pretty promising, but like most of their stuff, degenerates into randomness:

"I never
Said I'd lie in wait forever,
If I died, we'd be together,
I can't always just forget her,
But she could try..

At the end of the world,
Or the last thing I see, you are
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?..

And all the things that you
Never ever told me,
And all the smiles that are never ever

Ever,
Get the feeling that you're never
All alone, and I remember now,
At the top of my lungs, in my arms,
She dies,
She dies..

(repeat chorus)

..and all the smiles that are ever gonna hold me,
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?

And all the wounds that are never gonna scar me,
From all the ghosts that are never gonna catch me.."

It's all right, I feel like there's the ghost of some meaning there (pun), but not actual substance. I mean, I want to listen to a song and start crying at the truth of it. And I don't care that that's a tall order, there ought to be something out there that does that; I've read plenty of books that do that to me, why should music be so different?

What kind of depresses me is that it's always been this way, there hasn't been much meaning to songs for many years. I wonder if one reason is that an album has to have at least ten songs or so, and take up 30 minutes. I mean, if I was a songwriter, I could easily see myself coming up with three good ideas, and using eight half-baked ones as album filler. Screw that.

The time has passed when the demand for length in a musical recording is all-imporant. In older days, they'd sell long-playing records on the fact that they played longer, there was more music there on a single album. Now, with all the options available to buy single songs, I would almost be really scared to buy a whole album unless I was absolutely sure that there were more than, say, eight songs on the CD I wanted. With iTunes, a song is 99 cents, and an album is 9.99; therefore, if you only want five songs from a CD, it makes far more sense to buy those individual songs so you have what you want; instead of spending $10, you've spent $5 and you now have every bit of content you wanted from that CD.

I still really like MCR, of course. I bought the entire album from iTunes after having heard two songs off it, and I like a lot of the songs that they didn't make videos for. And I'm enthralled with the new song they've released from the upcoming CD, "The Black Parade". But it sucks, because once again I feel like I enjoy a band, but they're not like the band of my life.

I mean, why shouldn't music mean something?