mcr-transcripts:

mcrupdates:

New interview with Mikey Way and Gerard Way.

Text version:

Source: MTV Australia (via MCRupdates, uploaded for international audiences by Youtube user carmesim)
Date: January 31, 2012
Transcribed by: Cassie

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(Commentary, interspersed with “The Kids From Yesterday” video)

Mikey Way: The great thing about Big Day Out is: there’s so many different genres of music on one bill, and you know, bands that normally wouldn’t play together get to play together, so there’s amazing acts that we love that we’re able to share the stage with.

Gerard Way: This year we’re psyched to see Kanye—

Mikey Way: —Kanye’s great…

Gerard Way: —it’s going to be fun. The Living End is on it, and we’ve known those guys for a long time, so it was nice to see them again.

Mikey Way: It would be a pipe dream, though, to collaborate with Noel Gallagher.

Gerard Way: Yeah, yeah—

Mikey Way: He’s been a hero since as far back as I can remember.

Gerard Way: Yeah, ‘really excited to watch his set. We haven’t gotten a chance to yet…. We’ve been touring. We spent a year touring, and then uhm— we’re building out a studio right now to start the next record.

Mikey Way: Get new music out sooner than later is our plan right now…. I think we’ve learned to tour smarter. Instead of, normally we’d be at the halfway point of the tour where we’d have another year of touring, and now we’re going to put the breaks on it, so that we can go home, decompress, spend time with our families, and then start writing new music. We wrung ourselves dry during Black Parade, and we brought ourselves to the boiling point, and we-, yunno, this time we promised ourselves we wouldn’t do that, and we didn’t.

Gerard Way: Certain countries have really embraced this band, and then we’ve gone there and embraced them. Japan was one of those places, so it was just very important for us— You know, you go all over the world and then sometimes you have a really strong, kind of magical connection with a group of people, and that was one of those places, much like in the UK.

So, causes, of course, we like to always be involved with those. We were involved with Linkin Park’s tsunami efforts when that had happened years ago, and then this one, obviously, we were involved in. So, yeah, it’s important…

I think that, if anything, is the responsibility of a musician: not to explain themselves or to apologize, but to be involved in stuff that actually helps the world. …

This band is the 4 guys you see in the band, and the drummer thing is just: it is what it is for our band. I don’t think it’s a curse, I don’t think it’s anything— It’s just always been what it is, and it’s kind of like us and James, and right now we love playing with Jarrod. He’s awesome, and he saved our butts, and he flew out, he learned all the songs… He kept us on the Blink tour, so… We thought we were going to have to cancel, and we didn’t because he showed up and helped us out. And he’s so fun to play with.

Mikey Way: We, every night, play it like we mean it, and that’s all you can do. I would tell bands to just write music that you love, and don’t worry about trying to sell albums. Don’t worry about trying to fit into a genre. Don’t worry about trying to impress people. You know… Just write what comes from your heart, and people are attracted to that.

Gerard Way: Absolutely. 100%. Like, don’t worry about how many friends you get on Myspace. Just play shows, you know. Those are the real, emerging kind of bands that I start to find now. I don’t even think they have Myspace pages. It’s pretty cool.

Mikey Way: 2012. We’re gonna head home.

Gerard Way: No touring. Just making music. I think that’s the rest of the year is going to be us working on our next album, or whatever it ends up being.

(If you see any corrections that need to be made, please submit them.)