Early Sunsets Over Monroeville

This song is about a man and his wife who run away while trying to hide from vampires. Unfortunately, his wife gets bitten by a vampire, and though she says she loves him very much, he is forced to kill her before she becomes a vampire.

Monroeville is the town in Pennsylvania where the mall scenes from the movie Dawn Of The Dead were shot. Lead singer Gerard Way said the song was inspired by the movie. "The man and his love are hiding from the living dead, who are coming to kill them," said Way. "Since the town is surrounded by mountains, they cannot get out. The living dead attacks the woman, and she turns into one of them. Though he loves her, he is faced with the difficult reality - he must take a gun to her in order to survive and 'End this direst.' Because she loved him and he loved her, the decision to kill her made 'things harder at best.'"

This started out as a tender ballad, but producer Geoff Rickly sensed there was something darker brewing under the surface and encouraged Gerard to tap into it. "Just go with what's inside your head. Don't even listen to the music," Rickly recalled telling him before his explosive performance. The producer told MCR biographer Tom Bryant (Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance) the rest of the band was left shaken in the aftermath of the rage-fueled session. "Afterwards, everybody just left and went outside to smoke cigarettes because they couldn't deal with looking at him after he had sung that," he explained. "He had just ripped himself open in front of everybody. He'd taken it so far that it was uncomfortable for anyone who was friends with him. They hadn’t seen him as Gerard the singer, they still saw him as their buddy Gerard. It's a little scary to see someone do what he did."