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Reflecting on the making of Famous Last Words, Gerard says, "It's still a very powerful song to play live. It still really makes me feel a lot of very intense emotions. The story behind the song, interestingly, is when we were at the Paramour in pre-production basically still writing, things got kind of dark. I know that Mikey [Way] struggled with some mental issues. The place, we liked it, but it had this weird energy that it was kind of haunted. Things would occasionally kind of get kind of dark.
"One night I'm up really late because sometimes we would work well into the morning and just with Ray [Toro] and I think he was kind of playing something and basically this song started to kind of take shape, or at least emerge, and then we all started playing it together.
"I think one of the things I like so much about this song is I like the verses a lot because even in the studio, I remember thinking that I wanted those verses to feel very Judas Priest. I kind of wanted this old school driving metal sound, like almost early days of metal sound, just to have that kind of swagger that Judas Priest has. But it was written at a dark time. I think that's why there's so much emotion in that song…"