On the persistent theme of death in the band’s music: “It comes from being raised Catholic. Your first experience with church is really scary – it’s all about damnation and death. And the first time I was really taught about death wasn’t really from my parents or TV, it was from a nun and it was really terrifying way to hear it. I became so obsessed with death at that point I didn’t want to lose anybody, and risk the potential of them burning in hell for eternity. I think that’s where it comes from and I think the acceptance of it eventually lead me to want to keep writing about it.”
On the platinum dye job he sported at the beginning of “The Black Parade”: “I definitely don’t miss that haircut. When I was wearing all black clothing and just kind of normal stuff it looked really cool – it actually looked very ‘70s – but then in the context of wearing the uniform and dolling up it made it way too squeaky clean for me, and I really started to dislike it and I didn’t feel like myself. I don’t miss it and I won’t go back to it, (but) it served its purpose for what I needed.”
On “Kill All Your Friends,” a Pixies-esque “Black Parade” B-side): “If I regret anything about ‘The Black Parade’ it’s not putting on ‘Kill All Your Friends.’ It was falling in the middle and the record, to us, wasn’t moving fast enough because there’s a lot of mid-tempo and no super breakneck speed songs. It was not that short of a song, it’s like 5 minutes, so it was kind of dragging the record; I think if we’d made a shorter album, it would have been a perfect song to have on it. There’s a part of me that wishes we would have saved it for the next record, too. It’s a really special song to me and it as actually one of the riskiest songs we did because we didn’t know if people were going to get it. I’ll tell you what that song is specifically about: It’s about growing up, living, working and dying in the same place, basically the fear that I’ve had my whole life. And going to what I refer to as ‘high school reunion funerals,’ so to speak, where you really only see people from your adolescent years at funerals, and I never heard a song about that specifically. You know, so it was just about kind of being from New Jersey.”
Gerard Way, this interview