Ray Toro and Gerard Way are a Creative Duo for the Ages, and their “Hazy Shade of Winter” Cover Proves It
I’ve been thinking for years that Gerard Way and Ray Toro are one of the most important (and underrated) musical collaborations of the past half-century. Their recent cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” for Netflix’s Umbrella Academy just confirms it.
When we reflect on their respective careers we generally don’t think of Toro and Way as a discrete unit in the way we do Simon & Garfunkel — or Hall & Oates, Garfunkel & Oates, or whoever else you want to join with an ampersand. We don’t even usually think of them as a discrete unit within My Chemical Romance. As MCR fans of yore certainly remember, when you think of a pair of MCR members, Gerard and Ray are not the first combination that comes to mind.
Since MCR’s break-up in 2013, we think of their career arcs individually: Gerard Way, from tortured rock star to eccentric comics dad with an Instagram full of woodland creatures; Ray Toro, from tortured rock star to a guy who released an underreported but excellent solo album and also once ranked the coolest lamps he owns on Twitter. This cover, though, proves to us that the same collaboration that was at the core of MCR’s genre-bending sound is just as potent today as it was in the ‘00s.
The intro of the track sounds like we’re heading for some deeply bizarre electronica. The vocals are drifting and ethereal and I don’t know whose idea it was to somehow make sleigh bells psychedelic (my suspicion is Gerard “I’ve always wanted to do a flute solo” Way), but that person just blew open my entire skull because that is not a musical effect I thought was possible.
Yet as the intro builds and then drops, it doesn’t catapult into the noncommital electronica I briefly feared the reverb on those same sleigh bells foretold. Instead, Ray Toro’s guitar busts into the song like a Kool-Aid Man full of classic guitar riffs instead of tropical punch. The eerie, reverberant background persists, but Toro’s guitar cuts its way out of the mist with unsettling urgency. Instead, in combination with Way’s wailing yet decisive tenor vocals, these disparate elements build a sound that feels too big for itself: expansive, yet menacing.
Simon & Garfunkel’s acoustic original, with its startling trumpets and the abrupt clip of its pace in contrast to most of the duo’s work, also creates a sense of urgency. In that version, it’s the desperate urgency of impending freezing weather, a need to prepare and to brace. In Toro and Way’s version, the urgency is darker, electrified and impossible to brace for. The dynamic whole that rises from the contrasting elements each of them unites is unstoppable. Someone is going to freeze to death this winter, and it’s going to hurt.
Throughout their careers, beginning as a powerhouse of genre-defying creativity within My Chemical Romance and continuing into their separate solo projects, Toro and Way have mobilized a uniquely enthusiastic skill for mobilizing the emotional power of disparate musical styles into a single, devastatingly effective whole. This track builds on that legacy, reinforcing that the two of them, working together, manage to function as one bizarrely mind-melded musical genius.
Consider listening back to the MCR classics you’ve forgotten about in the past decade, and then to the solo albums that led to this point. Count the musical styles, watch the influences, feel their daring disregard for genre lines, and then tell me that the Ray Toro-Gerard Way creative collaboration does not deserve remembrance in glorious infamy.
Cae Rosch is going to watch Umbrella Academy exclusively because of how much she loves this one cover. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.
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