How My Chemical Romance Created Emo Anthem “Welcome To The Black Parade”

Harper Horizon Announces

Anthems We Love: 29 Iconic Artists on the Hit Songs That Shaped Our Lives

By Music Writer Steve Baltin

Out October 25, 2022

Featuring Interviews On Songs By Aerosmith, The Beach Boys, Carly Simon, CHIC, Linda Ronstadt, Linkin Park, Shania Twain, TLC + So Many More

Harper Horizon announces Anthems We Love: 29 Iconic Artists On The Hit Songs That Shaped Our Lives (due for publication on October 25, 2022), a new collection from veteran music writer Steve Baltin that investigates the stories, serendipities, and moments of inspiration that went into some of the songs that have most authoritatively soundtracked the past century. Featuring interviews with a wide-ranging assortment of musical legends — from Carly Simon and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson to TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas and Edge from U2 — about the stories behind some of their most classic songs, Anthems We Love is an essential look at how a song’s legacy is built that seeks to better understand the universal power of popular music in all its forms.

The Daily Beast shares an excerpt from Anthems We Love: An interview with My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way about “Welcome To The Black Parade,” an emo epic that pushed the band into superstardom and will be a highlight of many nights of their upcoming reunion tour. Read the excerpt on My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome To The Black Parade” over at The Daily Beast.

Guided by Baltin’s informational, direct style, Anthems We Love gets to the heart of pop hits from throughout the 20th and 21st century, across a wide range of scenes and years. Whether it’s U2 examining how “One” became a rallying cry at varying points of history (including post-9/11 and through the AIDS epidemic), The Doors’ Robby Krieger examining the metaphorical potential of the lyric “Light My Fire,” Janis Ian explaining how “At Seventeen”’s exuberance was abetted by an amateur rhythm guitar player joining her in the studio, and Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson tracing his band’s meteoric rise alongside their hit “In The End,” Baltin expertly unspools the various musical, political, social, and personal threads that make up the fabric of a song’s existence as both a piece of art and a cultural artifact.

“I have done thousands of interviews over the years and one of the most common refrains, no matter how big the artist, is songs are like children. Anthems is what happens when those songs have grown up,” Baltin says. “All 29 of these songs have gone into the world and been a huge part of people’s lives, whether they’ve been played at weddings, funerals, births. And my favorite part of writing this book was hearing from the artists how they’ve been moved — and even shocked — by the way these songs have become part of the fabrics of listeners’ worlds in ways the artist could never have imagined. Anthems proves that when a song leaves the nest, it becomes the world’s.”

Anthems also includes a foreword from Cameron Crowe, a prologue by Spencer Proffer, and an original chapter written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Keep an eye out for news about book events for Anthems We Love, and pre-order Anthems We Love here.

Anthems We Love

Foreword by Cameron Crowe

Prologue by Spencer Proffer

The Temptations, “My Girl”

The Beach Boys, “God Only Knows”

The Doors, “Light My Fire”

Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

Neil Diamond, “Sweet Caroline”

The 5th Dimension, “Aquarius / Let The Sun Shine In”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Our House”

The Jackson 5, “ABC”

Carly Simon, “Anticipation”