Frank Iero Emotionally Opens Up About Near-Death Experience

Frank Iero & the Future Violents recently released their debut album Barriers — an album particularly personal to bandleader Frank Iero. The former My Chemical Romance guitarist had released solo albums in the past, but this was his first after surviving a near-fatal bus accident while on tour in Australia in 2016.

“I knew what I wanted to talk about on Barriers, I just didn’t know how to say it at first,” he admitted during a recent interview with Kerrang!. “I felt like the things that I needed to get out on this record were so enormous that every time I wrote something down, I was like, ‘That’s just not good enough, it doesn’t cut through to the heart of it.’ Sometimes you try to be too clever and it ends up blurring the magnitude of what’s being said. So it took a while. And I’m glad that it did. There are songs on this record that I’ve wanted to write for years and years and years.”

Though music has helped him deal with the aftermath of a near-death experience, it's still an event that will haunt him forever. “I think about it every day,” Iero said. “I still have nightmares about it. That moment, I will never forget – it’s stillt here. It’s not like an experience that shall-not-be-named, nor do I have to shy away from it, but there are certain elements of that day that I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay with. I just have to accept it and move on, but it’s like nothing’s been settled. That’s a horrific feeling.”

However, through the darkness he's seeing a light. “You have to remain hopeful, to wipe the slate clean and start anew,” he explained about moving on from the accident. “Because not every day is going to be great. Some days are gonna f**king suck, but you have to get back up, brush it off and fucking try again. You have to. Quitting is not an option. There are so many things in this world that are designed to bring us down, that’ll make us bleed and hurt. We don’t need to be an extra thing on top of it all.”

Read the full, emotional interview here.

Photo: Mitchell Wojcik


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