Every time I felt the pain coming on I'd go downstairs and hammer out an idea. After a few months I started to take a look at what I was making, I had for the first time in my life written a large grip of songs completely alone and without any expectations or plans of what they would be for.
Frank IeroI thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.
Frank IeroI don't understand how people can make such a fuss about people that are happy and in love, when there's people dying of hunger and war and they don't even notice that. I really don't understand that. That makes me so angry!
Frank IeroWhen my creative side isn't being fulfilled, I see it affect me in a negative way and I'm not able to become that father/husband/man that I want to be. So it's almost like this dark half that you have to satiate in order to become full, in order to become a good person.
Frank IeroI feel like the personal me and the artistic me are separate, but connected. It's almost like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. As much as you try to keep them apart, they end up together. I'm very much aware that when I'm miserable on the creative side - if I can't make things work a certain way - it really detracts from being the father I want to be. So in order to ultimately be a good father and the man I want to be I know I need to keep my creative side in check, or at least a little bit happy. It's weird how it's intertwined that way.
Frank Iero