[Concert Review] My Chemical Romance Turned Chase Field Into Another World, While Jimmy Eat World Came Home
The Black Parade 2026 brought a full-scale dystopian rock opera to Phoenix, but before My Chemical Romance took over Chase Field, hometown heroes Jimmy Eat World celebrated 25 years of Bleed American in their own backyard.
Photos by Bryce Hall
There is something strange about walking into Chase Field and realizing that, for one night, it no longer feels like a baseball stadium.
I have covered events there during Diamondbacks games before, so I am used to seeing the field under stadium lights, hearing the usual sounds of a baseball crowd and knowing roughly what to expect.
On September 6, that familiarity disappeared.
Jimmy Eat World walked onstage at exactly 7 p.m., and Chase Field immediately erupted.
It felt less like an opening act arriving and more like Phoenix welcoming somebody home.
That made sense. Jimmy Eat World came out of Mesa, and seeing them perform one of the biggest hometown shows of their career inside Chase Field added another layer to a night already built heavily around nostalgia. Singer Jim Adkins even acknowledged the scale of the moment, telling the crowd it was one of the biggest shows the band had ever played in town.
For me, there was another kind of nostalgia happening.
I remember Jimmy Eat World being on the radio when I was younger. I remember hearing their music through my cousins and CDs growing up. Now, years later, I was sitting inside Chase Field covering them.
It was one of those little full-circle moments you do not really think about until you are sitting there experiencing it.
Jimmy Eat World Celebrates 25 Years of Bleed American
Their set centered on the 25th anniversary of Bleed American, the 2001 album that helped turn Jimmy Eat World into one of Arizona's biggest rock exports.
They played the album in sequence, beginning with "Bleed American" and "A Praise Chorus" before reaching a song that almost everyone in the stadium seemed to know within seconds.
"The Middle."
Hearing it live was one of those moments where the years between first hearing a song and finally seeing it performed disappear pretty quickly.
But the crowd somehow became even louder during "Sweetness."
The giant "whoa" singalong echoed through Chase Field, and it was one of the first times that night where the size of the venue really hit me. Thousands of voices were bouncing around a building normally designed for baseball.
Then came "Hear You Me," which pulled everything in the opposite direction. The guitars softened, the mood changed and the set suddenly became much more emotional.
That balance continued throughout Bleed American, eventually reaching the slower "My Sundown," which ended up being one of my personal favorites despite not being a song I knew going into the concert.
That's another thing that stood out about Jimmy Eat World's performance.
I didn't need to know every song.
Adkins' vocals still sounded remarkably strong, and between the guitars and Zach Lind's drums, you could physically feel the music hitting throughout the stadium. It had been a while since I had been to a straight-up rock show on this scale, and feeling drums shake through your body is a pretty good reminder of why live rock is different from listening through headphones.
Looking around the audience made the night even more interesting.
There were clearly plenty of millennials who grew up with these bands, but there were younger fans, older fans, people in My Chemical Romance-inspired outfits and entire groups who had clearly been waiting a very long time for this night.
The person sitting near me told me it was their first time seeing both Jimmy Eat World and My Chemical Romance. Just seeing how excited they were made me more excited for what was coming next.
Jimmy Eat World wrapped at approximately 8 p.m. after adding "Big Casino," "Work" and "Pain" to the end of their complete Bleed American performance.
Then Chase Field started changing.
Welcome to Draag
As the crew tore apart Jimmy Eat World's relatively straightforward setup, an industrial structure began appearing in its place.
Screens came alive.
Strange instructional videos began playing.
Rules appeared.
The entire mood inside the stadium changed.
At that point, I knew My Chemical Romance had built some sort of world around The Black Parade, but knowing that beforehand and actually watching Chase Field transform into it were completely different things.
The fictional nation of Draag sits at the center of this version of The Black Parade, an authoritarian world built through sets, characters, propaganda, machinery and theatrical interludes. The production itself was designed to turn stadiums into a retro-futuristic environment rather than simply giving the band a giant stage to perform on.
When My Chemical Romance finally appeared around 8:50 p.m., the concert essentially became theater.
After "Over Fields (The National Anthem of Draag)," the familiar opening of "The End." gave way to "Dead!" and the story was underway.
And my notes at this point literally say:
"WOW this is a whole world and I love it."
That is probably the easiest way I can describe it.
There was a massive mechanical eye descending over the band. Characters moved around the stage. Propaganda-style imagery surrounded everything. Performers became part of the songs. Fire erupted behind the musicians. Even the small pauses between tracks weren't really pauses because pieces of the Draag story continued unfolding between performances.
The concert rarely felt like it had actually stopped.
Instead, one scene just became another.
The Black Parade Comes Back to Life
For the first half of the performance, My Chemical Romance worked through The Black Parade, celebrating the album's 20th anniversary by giving it something much bigger than a traditional album-playthrough.
"The Sharpest Lives" led into the unmistakable opening piano notes of "Welcome to the Black Parade."
That was obviously one of the songs I knew going in, but hearing it surrounded by tens of thousands of other people hits differently.
This wasn't somebody putting on an old emo playlist.
This was an album that came out in 2006 filling a baseball stadium two decades later.
"I Don't Love You," "House of Wolves," "Cancer," "Mama" and "Sleep" followed before another massive audience reaction arrived with "Teenagers."
Then came the song I immediately wrote down that I needed to look up afterward.
It was "Disenchanted."
That's probably one of my favorite things about going into a show without knowing every song. There is still an opportunity for something unfamiliar to grab you enough that you want to find it again afterward.
The Black Parade portion eventually reached "Famous Last Words," bringing the theatrical first act toward an explosive conclusion before a reprise of "The End." and "Blood."
By then, the show had already delivered more production than some entire concerts.
And it still wasn't finished.
Then the Concert Changed Again
Around 10 p.m., there was another break.
This time, something started happening much closer to where I was sitting.
The crew began preparing a smaller B-stage inside the crowd.
Suddenly, after spending the first half of the night watching this massive fictional world unfold from a distance, My Chemical Romance was about to perform considerably closer to our section.
The costumes and giant theatrical production mostly disappeared.
What replaced it felt like another version of the same band.
"I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" kicked off the second portion, immediately taking the show away from Draag and back through the rest of My Chemical Romance's catalog.
"Boy Division" followed before Phoenix received the tour debut of "The Only Hope for Me Is You." The band continued through "My Way Home Is Through You," "Helena," "Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us," "Thank You for the Venom," "Na Na Na" and "The Foundations of Decay."
Then Phoenix got something even rarer.
My Chemical Romance closed the night with the first-ever live performance of "The Light Behind Your Eyes," a song originally released as part of the band's Conventional Weapons series.
For longtime fans, that alone made Phoenix a special stop on the tour.
The Point Where I Stopped Taking Notes
Somewhere during all of this, I realized I hadn't written anything down in a while.
Normally, that would be a problem when you're supposed to be reviewing a concert.
This time, I think it says more about the show than another page of notes could have.
I got distracted.
Not by my phone. Not by people around me. By the concert itself.
I went into Chase Field knowing songs like "Welcome to the Black Parade," "Teenagers," "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" and "Helena." I wasn't somebody who could recognize every deep cut within three seconds.
And maybe that made the experience even more interesting.
I didn't spend the night waiting for a checklist of favorite songs.
I got to watch My Chemical Romance slowly convince me to enter whatever strange world they had built inside Chase Field.
The first half was part concert, part theater and part dystopian fever dream. The second half stripped much of that away and reminded everyone that underneath the enormous production is still a rock band with more than two decades of songs capable of filling a stadium.
And before any of that happened, Jimmy Eat World got to celebrate the album that changed their career in front of one of the biggest hometown crowds they have ever played for.
Gerard Way later acknowledged that connection, telling the Phoenix audience that Jimmy Eat World had been one of My Chemical Romance's collective favorite bands and recalling listening to their CDs before MCR even existed.
That feels like the perfect summary of the night.
Two bands whose music became deeply connected to a generation, still filling stadiums decades later, with another generation now standing beside the people who grew up with them.
I walked into Chase Field expecting to review a concert.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot to keep reviewing it.
I was too busy watching.
And I think that's probably the best compliment I could give it.
