10 Rock Songs That Left Us All Hanging

For all of the detractors that the album format had in the age of digital downloads, the concept record was really holding its own. In the wake of Green Day’s American Idiot changing the game, My Chemical Romance dared to dream even bigger, making an entire album centered around one man coming to grips with his own death. That means that he has to die in the end, right? Well…not quite.

Though one could argue that The Patient in this scenario is dead from the moment this album starts with the flatline sound of Dead!, the rest of the album seems to play out like him coming to terms with the concept of death, from making peace with his disease on Cancer to turning his nose up at all of his friends and family on Mama and I Don’t Love You. He reaches the point of no return more than a few times on this record, but Famous Last Words gives him one last wish to turn things around. He’s still jaded as ever on this track, saying that there’s nothing he can do to change anything and that the hospital lights have always blinded him from the real world anyway, but the chorus tells a bit of a different story.

Going through each line, the Patient isn’t afraid to keep living on and also not afraid to walk this world alone. For the most part, he seems to not know whether he’s going to live or die in this scenario, willing to embrace the cold death that he deserves and spend eternity in Hell or be condemned to the life that he already hates. This isn’t about giving up though…this is about perseverance even when you have the odds stacked against you. Neither of these scenarios are going to work out well for our protagonist here, but either way he’s going to make his peace with whatever happens. No matter where he ends up, here’s hoping that he’s at least happy.