“As soon as I explained the concept and the aesthetic, Ellen Wakayama knew right away whom to use. She had recently received an amazing portfolio by a guy named Chris Anthony. He apparently never did commercial work, but these fantastic pieces that hung in galleries. He was looking to try something new and the second I saw this portrait he had done of Zooey Deschanel, I knew he was the right guy. His images are haunting; that had that turn-of-the-century feeling I wanted, yet they were striking and powerful. They looked like someone climbed in a time machine with a camera and got to shoot the year 1910 in color.” – Gerard Way, Black Parade Special Edition
We walked around like zombies, not creating, not showering, not living. Some never left their rooms. I left my pyjama pants on for a week once, constantly fighting back the urge to just walk into the swimming pool and stand at the bottom until I couldn’t breathe. I would yell ‘I’m just gonna walk into that fucking swimming pool on day!’ We were all losing it. We had decided that we didn’t want to videotape any of the writing process and at this point we were glad we didn’t tape anything.
Gerard Way, The Black Parade Special Edition
‘Mama’ was a very special song to us, so we had some of our parents come out and track some vocals on the ending, we could have them on the track forever. This made the record even more special to us but it still wasn’t finished. During the last month, during final vocals, I had started to re-track some of the vocal parts in ‘Mama’ I was unhappy with. We came to this section where it gets very quiet before the big finale to the song and I stopped for a second and said to Rob and Doug:
‘I think it should be a woman here…what do you think?’
This had come up before and I had done some female voices on the record I was pretty happy with…but right here it felt like I couldn’t act it. It needed real sorrow, real tenderness.
They said ‘Who do you think?’
Now I should mention that I had been warming up in the vocal booth by doing an impression of Judy Garland as I would picture her to be on Broadway, very bawdy and expressive and I would yell with vibrato in my voice: ‘Hellooooooooo!’
I would do this to warm up and occasionally break the tension when we had a long night. Doug was a big fan of it. I was a big fan of ‘Cabaret’ so naturally I said:
‘Liza Minnelli.’
‘Liza with a Z?’ They asked.
Now to further illustrate how ‘crazy’ became infectious, I should point out that Rob Cavallo did not choose to comment on this with words but instead he picked up the phone near the board and made a phone call. I heard him talk to someone briefly and then hang up. He then said ‘I love Liza Minnelli.’
Fast forward to two weeks later, we are in the same tracking room at Capitol Records where we had just done a string and horn session with the amazing David Campbell. And we have Liza Minnelli live in New York City in another studio. It was amazing that Rob pulled this off and he said that she was very happy to do it. The guys were very excited. As soon as we started talking to her I got pins and needles. I’m a huge Liza Minnelli fan, because growing up she was our grandma’s favorite performer. I was exposed to theatre and musicals from a very early age…I was exposed to showmanship. To me, Liza Minnelli was the only voice that could have portrayed Mother War. Someone very strong, someone that had loved and lost, someone that had been through so much in her life and survived. There was no one that could beat her and she was so amazingly sweet, funny, charming…and she had a flawless voice. She kept doing takes on her own just to make sure she got it right, even though her worst takes are better than others’ best takes. We can’t wait to meet her in person.
– Gerard Way, Black Parade Special Edition
