Source: Absolute Radio  (Part Two)
Date: November 9, 2010 (Based on the video’s upload date).
Transcribed By: EKillick, @DeathlyDisco

[READ PART ONE]
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Absolute Radio: And um, what’s it like, I’m not a dad so I don’t know, but what’s it like? Is there a real sense of responsibility?

Gerard Way: Yes, of course. It’s a huge responsibility but it’s a huge amount of fun. At first they’re very fragile and then all of a sudden they start to get stronger, and then now she’s just like, on autopilot. Now granted you have to watch her, but she can navigate the whole house, she has an opinion about things even though she can’t even really speak English yet but she can speak some made up language. She’s dismissive sometimes, she’s, she’s awesome. She wants crackers, she [gestures opening a cupboard door] pulls the things open and she gets the little crackers.

Mikey Way: Oh yeah, she knows how to get into the cabinet, I mean the closet, yeah.

G: It’s super rewarding. It’s just awesome, you know.

M: She’s always like, she’s always drawing something.

G: That’s the thing.

M: She’s always going for the piano [gestures trying to play a piano above his head].

G: She loves the guitar, the piano, the crayons, so so far she’s like mom and dad.

AR: Excellent. It must- the joy on your face is clear to see. Right, I’ve gotta have a go at you for the title of the first single.

G: Oh no! [Gerard and Mikey laugh]

[Everyone talking at once]

AR: Well just ‘cause as a radio presenter it’s really hard to kind of go “Now, here’s My Chemical Romance with “Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na…”

G: Well it’s really just “Na Na Na…” That’s what we say, we just say “Na Na Na.” The extra Na Na Na’s, there’s a guy named [Jeff Ayeroff], he used to be an art director at Warner Bros. for years. He worked with The Beatles, Madonna, everybody. So um, [Ellen Wakayama] is my art director at Warners as well, we’re all friends but he retired. So everytime I put a new record out I asked his opinion. I’d say “This is what the art’s gonna look like” and he said “What’s the song called?” and I said “Na Na Na” and he was like “I just want to see a paragraph of Na Na Na’s. It should just take up the whole back of the album” and that was actually the plan. I don’t know why it only got down to nine. It was supposed to be like a brick of text [gestures a block with his hands]. So yeah I get you on that. We just say “Na Na Na,” you have our blessing to just say “Na Na Na.”

M: I think the most they do is twelve. The most they’ll write is twelve Na’s.

AR: Right, you should have just gone for the whole back of the album. You know, 86.

M: We tried.

G: Yeah I know, we tried. We ran out of room ‘cause we had all this crap we had to put on there. All this anti-piracy stuff, which I don’t even know why they put on records. All this nonsense that, you know, there was a lot of stuff we had to put on there.

AR: So there we go, you spared “Na“‘s on the album for anti-piracy stuff. So, um is the next single gonna be “SING”?

G: “SING”, yes.

AR: Tell us about that.

G: Sing is uh, it was the fourth song written for Danger Days. It was the breakthrough. It was the moment I believe the band, even though it had started with “Na Na…” a little, then we did “Vampire Money” and then we did “Planetary…” and that’s when we were really freed up, we didn’t finish “Planetary” yet and then we got into “SING”.  And “SING” was the first time I’d say the band, operating on all cylinders, started writing music as fans solely of music. Not just a rock band and not anything else, just writing music ‘cause they wanted to. And uh, it’s about, it’s a lot about what the record’s about. It asks the question or says, you know, you have to be what tomorrow needs. To me ‘Sing’ means so many things. It means, it’s like somebody yelling out of their window, somebody painting a picture, you know. It’s a million things and that’s why it’s a universal thing. It’s the first and most universal song I think the band’s written.

M: Yeah I think that song kind of, you know, it’s gonna change what people think a My Chemical Romance song could be you know. It kind of tears all those walls down.

AR: I wanna go right back to “I’m Not Okay…” which your first kind of big breakthrough in the UK, and at that time that that record came out. And that record, or that song I think probably won you a lot of fans or got a lot of people kinda going “right, who are these guys?” you know, and it was kind of from there to The Black Parade where the whole emo scene I guess kind of grew and became a massive thing and was kind of the summit, the peak of whatever was Black Parade.

G: Yeah, probably, yeah.

AR: And now that scene’s kind of—whether it’s died down, whether people I don’t know, have grown up a little bit and aren’t wearing the full-on clobber they way they were maybe when they were a bit younger. And you know, kind of pop’s now in the ascendancy so that any mass-produced manufactured stuff gets straight to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Were you kind of thinking “right, where does this scene go now?” when you were writing Danger Days? How did it kind of, fit in with that?

G: Well, the way we were thinking about is that we’d never felt a part of that scene. Um, so we just kind of kept trucking along in our fashion, which is to say you know, we’re gonna be what tomorrow needs, we’re gonna self-actualize. We’re gonna become this individual that’s part of the future, part of tomorrow’s sound, and that sound is colorful, it’s psychedelic. It’s brash, it’s risky and it’s electronic and it was all those things.

But uh, yeah when we got swept up in that it was kind of interesting because if you picked us apart from any of other bands they were calling that at the time there was no musical correlation whatsoever from influence, to style of dress, to anything. It was actually kind of funny. I mean there was the copycat bands but that’s different, visually. None of them could ever sound like us because we were always changing our sound like the next week. Even when you go see it live there are songs that have been a little bit reworked.

But um, I guess that’s why that wasn’t an issue because we’ve always existed without it being an issue, and it’s been kind of nice. It’s nice to see it gone but I don’t really feel like it ever had just a huge impact. It had just been turned into a fashion. It was kind of a disappointment.

M: Yeah, probably like that term is probably like I can imagine in ‘94 an interviewer mentioning that to Eddie Vedder and him just being like “What does that- What does “grunge” mean? What are you talking about? That’s stupid.” It’s kind of the same thing, it’s like you know “emo” kind of meant something else when we were growing up as teenagers it kind of meant some entirely different thing and then I think maybe some press outlets lazily grabbed in and went “this is emo” and it’s like “well, wasn’t emo this other stuff?” and well now it’s just talking about clothes? Then what the hell even is it? It just became this weird thing.

G: Yeah a guy made a joke today like what if a journalist went up to Eddie Vedder and said “hey you guys sound like Candlebox.” He’d probably like, he’d punch the guy in the nose or something! You know what I mean? [Laughs]

AR: Are you saying you’re going to punch me?

G: Noooooo!

AR: I’ve got a screen! It’s the most dangerous band in the world!

G: Hahaha, you look far too tough. You’ve got some muscles man, I won’t go near you. [Mikey laughs] 

AR: Live shows. You’ve got, um you’ve just finished actually some live dates in the UK where you did like, you know, you did venues you could sell out in three seconds. Are you gonna be doing bigger ones, is there gonna be a new tour coming?

G: I believe there is a bigger tour coming. We start rehearsals again mid-January and then we’re back out so I don’t know where we go first, I don’t know if it’s gonna be like Japan or Australia or what it is. I know we’ll be back here a lot which is great. This is our home, I mean-

M: Yeah we can’t stay away you know.

G: You know, this is where we broke. This is the place where, good or bad, sensational tabloid newspapers write about you, and you affect and blow up the culture. That’s awesome. Like it’s awesome that we have an effect like that here so it’s enticing to be around that, in the chaos of it.

M: Yeah, you guys know how to have a good time, you know?

AR: Sometimes. Only on Saturdays. Never on, never on weekdays. [Gerard and Mikey laugh]

AR: Summer festivals?

G: Possibly. Possibly. We actually don’t know. I think, I mean the idea is to do them…

AR: Yeah, but you’ve not been booked, that’s what I’m trying to get.

G: Oh no, we haven’t been booked.

AR: I was hoping you’d give us some exclusive that you’d accidentally slip out… “Oh yeah, we’re doing Reading… Leeds…”

G: I’m sorry. Oh because I’m the guy you’d get to do that actually I’m so gullible actually that I’d be like “Oh yeah, we just booked that…”. But no, we haven’t booked any so-

AR: What kind of stuff are you listening to at the moment? What were you listening to in the um, in the days when you weren’t, you know, in the off days?

G: In the off days, at first I was listening to a lot, I was rediscovering just my favorite records like you know Damned Damned Damned, all The Stooges records, MC5 and then during the making of the record, nothing. Now I’m listening to, I love Sleigh Bells, I think that they’re a fantastic band.

M: I’ve been digging The Black Keys [Gerard agrees] and Glasvegas.

G: Yes, very excited for the new Glasvegas record.

M: Yeah I’m so excited.

G: Waiting, we’re waiting. We hear good things.

M: Soon. Yeah, we hear soon.

AR: Are they doing big stuff over in America?

M: Not really, I don’t think, not really.

AR: But you’ve heard them through being here?

G: Well we’re like, total like- We listen to British music.

M: Yeah, that’s what we were into growing up. We read the NME, Mojo…  you know that’s where we got a lot of our- We gravitated towards that stuff.

G: Mhm.

AR: See all the cool kids in America always listen to British music.

G: That’s right, we were listening to the Britpop. We would literally getting on the [?something train?] to see Pulp and Blur-…

AR: Pulp are reforming!

M: I can’t wait.

G: They are! [mumbles about “favorite people”]

M: Are they playing festivals this summer?

AR: They’ve announced one festival day which is in London in Hyde Park in June-

M: [Makes a gesture with breath that seems to signify his contemplating going]

AR: And you know, if you’re gonna reform for one gig you might as well reform for a few more but at the moment it’s just the one.

M: Yeah hopefully we make it out to some of the shows ‘cause when I saw them they did This is Hardcore in Manhattan and I was just like- I was blown away.

G: I love that record.

AR: Well look guys, great seeing you-

G: You too!

AR: And let us know the moment you have the new tour dates announced.

M: Oh we will, yeah.

AR: Sing is available to download now and of course the album is coming out on November the 22^nd. Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys, to give it its full title. [Everyone laughs a little bit]

M: Thank you for having us, this is awesome.

G: Yeah man, this is awesome, this is great.

M: This is great.