The story goes that Gerard Way was seated on a ferry gliding across the Hudson River when the first plane struck the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. He didn’t witness the first hit in real-time—the then-intern at Cartoon Network was busy sketching—but the intensity of the ensuing experience prompted him to form My Chemical Romance as a form of “therapy.”
Kerrang! reported on Way’s panel during this year’s Comic Con in Los Angeles, where he spoke about MCR’s origin story. “So 9/11 happens, and I pick up the guitar again, and I write ‘Skylines And Turnstiles,’ and then I called Otter [Matt Pellissier, drummer] and then I called Ray [Toro], and we got Mikey [Way, bassist] in—and we just started building this momentum,“ he said.
Way explained that music “became my therapy from the PTSD that everyone had experienced from 9/11, and processing that.”
“Skylines and Turnstiles” appeared on MCR’s 2002 debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, where Way wrote vividly about destruction:
Steel corpses stretch out
Towards an ending sun, scorched and black
It reaches in and tears your flesh apart
As ice cold hands rip into your heart
While MCR played a key role in the mainstreaming of emo in the mid-aughts, the frontman dodged a question about whether he considers the track to be emo:
While therapeutic at the time, Way had a more complicated relationship with the song in the live setting:
In a separate interview with Newsweek from February, The Umbrella Academy creator revealed why apocalyptic scenarios creep into his work:
One of the biggest reasons I started My Chemical Romance was because I was one of the people to witness 9/11 in New York City. That felt like the end of the world. It felt like the apocalypse. I was surrounded by hundreds of people on a dock on the Hudson River, and we watched the buildings go down, and there was this wave of human anguish that I’ve never felt before. Since then, I’ve continued to think about what we would do at the end of the world if we knew we only had a little time left.
Someone actually pointed out to me that the music video for ‘[Welcome to the] Black Parade’ also looked a bit like the aftermath of 9/11, and it came out just a day or two after the anniversary.
He also gave a more illustrative rundown of the experience, as reported by Vice:
I didn’t see the planes hit. I did see the buildings go down, from I’d say fairly close. It was like being in a science fiction film or some kind of disaster film—it was exactly that kind of feeling. You didn’t believe it. You felt like you were in Independence Day. It made no sense. Your brain couldn’t process it. And for me it was a little different. I’m very empathetic and I’m kind of a conduit emotionally, so I pick up a lot of stuff in that way. There was about three or four-hundred people around me—and I was right at the edge. All these people behind me, they all had friends and family in those buildings. I didn’t. So when that first building went, it was like an A-bomb went off. It was like just this emotion and it made you nauseous.
While the group eventually disbanded in 2013, MCR marched back onto the stage for a reunion show at LA’s Shrine Expo. The future of the band remains unclear, but the members will head out on a short trek across Australia, New Zealand, and Japan next year.
Catch up on all the lyrics to My Chemical Romance’s biggest hits on Genius now.
