In a recent interview with Sean Smith,

Mikey Way revealed that he considers Alive the backbone of the album production-wise:

It was a complete reimagining of the song, I’d never thought of it that way, it was very quiet and beautiful and then it got big when it needed to get big, [and I] think that song informed the rest of the album, because I was like “every song needs to make this jump, from the demo to the recorded version,” and I knew Ray would do that anyway, […] because that’s what he does.