Greatest Parade

Album: Idols (2025)
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Songfacts®:

  • Yungblud grew his fanbase pretty quickly, rising fast with his 2018 debut album, 21st Century Liability, and its follow-up, Weird! in 2020. But fans can be fickle, and he got some negative feedback for his self-titled third album in 2022. When he set out to make his fourth album, Idols, he was thinking about idolatry and the ebbs and flows of fame.

    "I really wrote this as a love letter to my fanbase," said of the song in Rolling Stone. "And people who have left been like, you were once a part of the greatest parade, and you can go, you can come, but I will think of you. I will dream of you, I will do this for you every day until I am not here anymore. It was a really gutting song. It's about how we lift something up onto a pedestal and rip it down and then lift it up and rip down again because it's entertainment."
  • Those high notes at the end were a stretch for Yungblud. He says getting singing lessons helped him to hit them.
  • Yungblud wanted the Idols album to sound big. And important. He did so, in part, by bringing in the string section from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which plays on this track. "Music at the minute is so much about dopamine and less about depth," he told Gibson. "Everyone is putting a time limit on their ideas by making it so specific. We really wanted to make something larger than life and ambitious, and big."
  • Yungblud writes most of his own songs, typically with his main producer, Matt Schwartz. He wrote Greatest Parade with Schwartz, his guitarist Adam Warrington, and bass player Bob Bradley.

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