I Am Not Afraid To Keep On Living, I Am Not Afraid To Walk This World Alone - Slime

I AM NOT AFRAID TO KEEP ON LIVING, I AM NOT AFRAID TO WALK THIS WORLD ALONE //

✋wood glue jelly x clay blend x lava gravel
👃smoked honey, dry grasses in a burning field, hand-spun wool, torched sugar, pink peppercorn, the strike of a match

*NOTES:

• Each clay heart contains a red plastic gem "ember" embedded inside. You can remove it by squishing and tearing the clay apart.

One of the most iconic My Chemical Romance lines from “Famous Last Words” speaks to finding the will to endure and keep living even in isolation, grief, abandonment. 

During production of The Black Parade album, the band was overwhelmed and creatively strained. This all came to a head while they recorded the album and & stayed in the haunted Paramour Estate, where they experienced emotionally intense & creepy incidents that intensified many members’ mental health struggles. Bassist Mikey Way left partway through recording due to these struggles, leading his brother, lead singer Gerard, to write this song as the band continued to push through their exhaustion.

Gerard recounts, "It seemed as if fear started to creep its way into the camp. It felt like we were burning and drowning at the same time with no end in sight. We would try in vain to write [...] we started working on this new piece. We all tried things we had never tried and played very fiercely. Almost like our lives depended on it. This song became Famous Last Words.” 

Lead guitarist Ray Toro says the song “sums up the whole CD, it relays the message: live everyday like it's their last, live life to the fullest & really enjoy it. The song has the most inspiring lyrics, the chorus makes me want to wake up in the morning & have a great day; it's very powerful." 

Gerard says, "It's one of the most emotionally powerful songs on the record, it's an extremely difficult subject to talk about [...] it's one of those songs that you just have to hit play & hope they understand. It's about saying, I can do this alone, sometimes I just have to be strong and I can make it, I wanna live."

My visual representation of this song features a fiery neon-orange base, charred with ash, an anatomical clay heart nestled in the fire, blackened and burned but having weathered the flames. A glowing red ember is embedded inside each clay heart representing the will to carry on and move forward.