As Coheed And Cambria take The Amory Wars saga even further with their 11th studio album, Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe, mastermind Claudio Sanchez reflects on a life spent hiding behind intergalactic warfare, and why the ending of the story may finally be nigh…
When it comes to storytelling, do you need to know more about the author to have a greater appreciation of their creations? It’s a question Coheed And Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez is pondering today – and has been for some time. He certainly has reason to, given that their forthcoming 11th studio album, Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe, sees the band’s mastermind breaking down the barriers between himself and the vast narrative he’s been immortalising in music for almost 30 years.
But the most immediate question is of course: why now?
Sat in the upstairs room of a west-end pub festooned with flags and fruit machines, Claudio doesn’t necessarily look comfortable in his surroundings, forgoing the ales on offer in favour of the large coffee he’s clutching, but he’s incredibly open. His iconic hair tied back beneath a baseball cap pulled tight over a strong brow and kind eyes, you get the sense you can ask him anything. So we test the theory. Had Claudio begun to feel he was doing an injustice to himself, his listeners, and his subject matter by not being more obvious in what he was writing about?
“Absolutely,” he responds emphatically. “And that’s one of the themes of this record. Here I am, 46 years old, and I’m almost done. I can see an end to this – this epic. And part of me wonders what life would have been like if I’d have done things differently. How would my music have been received if there wasn’t the concept? Because sometimes I feel that it gets too much attention. Shit, it almost hides the music, the value of the music and the value of the real messages. And that’s by my design. But as I get older, I start to question these things.”
Despite this suggestion, Claudio says he’s not that different to the insecure teenager who began this journey. The kid who took the school bus from Nyack, a commuter town in Rockland County, New York into Manhattan to see a production of Tommy on Broadway. Tommy is, of course, the rock opera released by The Who in 1969, which tells the story of the titular character – a deaf, dumb and blind kid who becomes an expert pinball player and later a spiritual leader. While it had a grand story, its songs offered its creator, guitarist Pete Townshend, the chance to explore topics like the physical (Cousin Kevin) and sexual abuse (Fiddle About) he experienced as a child.
Although the significance of that theatre visit didn’t occur to Claudio until years later, the importance of seeing prog legends Pink Floyd on The Division Bell Tour at Giants Stadium in 1994 was immediately obvious. Both experiences solidified a passion for synergising music and visuals at scale, leading Coheed’s singer to develop the nucleus of a world he’s still taking to staggering levels almost three decades on.
It took a little while to get going, though, as his tenure in early bands was as a background player. And when it came time for Claudio to become the focal point, he admits to being afraid – of both the attention and of people knowing what his songs were about – so he dressed things up in theatrical garments and placed them in a fantastical landscape.
“That is my world, figuring out things and making them beautiful so that my emotions are exorcised, but it’s still costumed enough that the world won’t know.”
There are signs Claudio has grown in confidence over time, though. How else do you explain the single Someone Who Can? Released in January, the song is so massive and undeniable it’s as if he wanted to remind people that whatever they think of the way he frames his art, when it comes to songwriting, he can go toe-to-toe with anyone.
Claudio, it turns out, is too modest for that kind of self-aggrandisement.
For a certified banger, Someone Who Can had a modest inception, written in a small room in his Brooklyn home on an upright piano, with a few stereo mics giving the initial recording a raw, Americana feel. Plus, it wasn’t even intended to be on the new record, omitted from the running order he shared with returning co-producer Zakk Cervini, but included among the files simply to “round things out”. Thankfully, Zakk, a man of impeccable taste, knew gold when he heard it. “He instantly said, ‘This song’ and thought it was a vibe the record was missing, so I was into that,” shrugs Claudio, as if it were the easiest concession in the world.
Fifteen years ago, however, giving someone else the keys to his kingdom and the scope to terraform it with Claudio would have been totally alien. “I guess I’m a horrible collaborator,” he laughs. “Because I can hear this stuff fast and so I need to execute it fast, to capture it.”
Have you learned to trust the input of others over the years?
“It’s hard to say, because when I first started working with Zakk, I hardly knew him. He took two songs, Shoulders and A Disappearing Act [from Vaxis – Act II: A Window Of The Waking Mind], that were raw demos that the band and management really weren’t too sure about, and he saw the importance of them. All of my career I’ve been looking for someone to give me an objective opinion that I value. With so much control of everything, I had to let go a little bit.”
Not all experiences with producers have been so successful, though, because some of those appointments have been foisted on Claudio and haven’t necessarily offered the kind of dynamic he was looking for.
“Sometimes you’re told by the label, ’Oh, you should work with this producer.’ The stuff that a producer would hear would be what it sounded like the day I wrote it. I’d have these instances where we’d just make a better sounding version of the demo, which wasn’t really what I was looking for. I was looking for somebody with a songwriter’s mind.”
“All of my career I’ve been looking for someone to give me an objective opinion that I value”
Zakk isn’t the only producer Claudio has had great creative cohesion with. On 2010’s Year Of The Black Rainbow, he collaborated with Atticus Ross – whose work with Trent Reznor has yielded 10 Nine Inch Nails records since 2005 and several Academy Award-winning film scores – and Joe Barresi, who teamed up with Tool on their 2019 opus, Fear Inoculum. “I value that experience so much,” he says. “Among other things, I learned so much about the exciting possibilities that sound can offer.”
He also values the one opportunity he’s taken, so far, to step away from The Amory Wars saga on record. On 2015’s The Color Before The Sun, Claudio articulated the many emotions he experienced in the build up to the birth of his son, Atlas – the happiness and excitement, naturally, but also the concern about the state of the world and the kind of parent he’d be.
“I wanted my son to one day go, ‘Oh, that record is without concept, and is what my mom and dad were feeling before I came into this world,’” explains Claudio with obvious joy. “[My son] exists in the other records in the conceptual frame, of course, but those feelings before he was born weren’t something I’ve ever experienced before, so it was important for me to do that.”
Spoiler alert for a movie released in 1995, but remember the ending of The Usual Suspects, when the police detective is interviewing a seemingly hapless criminal, played by Kevin Spacey, about the identity of a mysterious mastermind called Keyser Söze? During the film’s climax, in one of cinema’s great twists, it turns out, too late for the poor detective, that Kevin’s character is Keyser Söze, and the yarns he’s spun to secure his release have been taken from scraps of information dotted around the office the interview takes place in.
Claudio uses his reality as the basis for his fiction, albeit for less nefarious purposes, though he appreciates the reference point. “I’ve got goosebumps,” he smiles. The Amory Wars – the conflict at the centre of almost all of Coheed And Cambria’s albums, as well as a series of sci-fi comic books and novels – is named after the street Claudio grew up on.
And as well as being the title of Coheed’s debut record, 2002’s The Second Stage Turbine Blade, is a reference to the airplane parts Claudio’s father helped build in the blue collar factory he worked in. Meanwhile, the dragonfly featured on the artwork symbolises a syringe – a reference to his father having been a functioning addict – which injects main character Coheed with a virus that transforms him into a monster. The implication is clear. Knowing this, you can’t help but think Claudio’s early life must have been challenging.
“My fear was that people would hear these songs and think my life was tragic,” he responds. “It wasn’t without dysfunction, of course, but I didn’t want to villainise my parents. They did the best they could, so it’s not right for me to go and bitch and moan about my fucking life. My dad got me my first guitar and my first four-track, so put me on my way, you know? Writing like that was a way for me to tell stories without bastardising the people I love.”
“I always wanted a creative partnerships with a significant other”
This time around, however, there are people that Claudio has written about more clearly and without ambiguity. The first is his wife, Chondra Echert, his “favourite collaborator” with whom he co-writes the comic books and graphic novels that deepen the lore around The Amory Wars. She is celebrated on the gorgeous acoustic track, Corner My Confidence.
“This is so silly, but as a kid I would get [guitar] strings from this company called Dean Markley. I didn’t care about the strings necessarily, but I like the image they used in one of their ads, of a guy and a girl sitting on the porch of this old dilapidated house, and he has a guitar and they look like they’re singing together. I had that ad up on my wall because I loved the idea of creative partnerships with a significant other, and that’s what I always wanted. Thankfully, that’s what I have with my wife. I fear the day when we have to leave each other.”
That profound worry about being separated by death, a teary Claudio explains, was informed by the story of his grandparents. His grandmother died in the 1980s, when Claudio was too young to attend her funeral. Her loss left his grandfather – the inspiration for the character of Sirius Amory in the The Amory Wars – without his wife for 35 years, until his own passing at the beginning of the pandemic.
Although many families weren’t allowed to see their sick loved ones due to COVID restrictions, Claudio’s brother and his wife were first responders who worked at the hospital, so were able to care for him.
“My brother told me that my grandfather was sort of miming this dance in his hospital bed, despite seemingly not being conscious,” reveals Claudio. “I took that as a sign he was beginning to reunite with his wife, somewhere in his mind, so that resonated with me.”
He wrote the song Meri Of Merci in their memory, its twinkling piano and soft vocal providing the ideal accompaniment to a slow dance with a loved one. It was written while Claudio was staying at an Airbnb in Paris, imagining his grandparents together again, while looking out at the splendour of the Sacré-Cœur. He had enjoyed this same view in 1998, back when Coheed were yet to be signed, using it as the inspiration for the home of the Prise, one of the three main races in The Amory Wars.
“It’s initially what inspired the idea of the through narrative within the records. I was singing songs that were embellishments on my life, but when I got to Paris I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is like being on Mars.’ There was a shop across the street called The Bag Online and that was what I initially named the concept…”
The second track on Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe is called Goodbye, Sunshine. Despite sounding joyous, powered by a rousing vocal and buoyant guitars, it’s imbued with sadness. “It’s basically standing at the funeral procession of Coheed And Cambria,” reveals Claudio. “When you listen to the chorus, it talks about the good times and the bad.”
Later, the album concludes with The Continuum III: So It Goes, a phrase borrowed from the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which Claudio re-read only last week, in which those words are used in reference to anything that’s dead. With all these suggestions of finality, and the frontman having opened this conversation by saying he’s “almost done” and “can see an end to this”, is that truly the case? To answer the question, he almost immediately makes references to a character from The Amory Wars, Vaxis, who, like Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five, has the ability to slip between past and future. “It’s almost like I’m living the end, but I’m also living the beginning. Does that make sense?”
Watching the video for Someone Who Can, you understand where Claudio is coming from. While Coheed’s narrative nears its end (or at the very least the end is coming into view), its creator has cause to reflect on the way it’s impacted his life through some flashes back in time. In the aforementioned promo clip, which has a through-line with the videos for other new tracks Blind Side Sonny and Searching For Tomorrow, members of the band are shown their potential realities had Coheed not existed.
Setting aside the layers of symbolism and the many Easter eggs, we see a young Claudio in the video, played by an actor named Toby, wearing a jacket with an Iron Maiden ‘Up The Irons’ patch on the back. Not only is this period accurate, it’s Claudio’s actual jacket from when he was a kid. As is the guitar. “I keep everything,” laughs Claudio. “I’m a little bit of a hoarder. We don’t live in a hoarder house or anything, but my wife hates it.”
Back when this writer spoke to Claudio in 2022, he had been asked to work on a musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray. So, could this be a potential project for the post-Coheed or post-narrative Coheed landscape, when and if it ever comes? Quite the opposite, in fact. “Nothing ever happened,” explains Claudio. “Now I think of it as a potential record for Coheed, potentially with other singers playing the role of the character. It would be a double record.”
To hear Claudio discuss what he’ll often jokingly refer to as his “fucking wacky concept dreams”, as well as the real people, places and situations that have inspired them, you can’t help but return to the name of the new record. Presumably that title is Claudio putting himself, The Father Of Make Believe, a man who crafts people and planets and conflicts for a living, front and centre in the most fundamental way?
“It’s a self-brand,” he explains as he prepares to brave the cold streets of London. “I think about all of the years being the guy who’s in the concept rock band. It’s a brand on myself, a painful one and a proud one. But the title is also for the character of Vaxis, who’s at a place in the story where the world is his and he can create it as he chooses. Part of me sees myself more in that character than ever. The end of the band, or the end of the concept of The Amory Wars is around the corner. Do we continue to stay inside the concept? Because I know how to do that, but part of me wonders what a new creative life looks like. That’s something that Vaxis has the choice to do, and will probably do when the next two records are done. I see a conclusion that, to me, feels perfect.”
What happens next with Claudio and with Coheed isn’t crystal clear, then, largely because the line between the creator and his creation is more indiscernible than ever. For the man at the heart of this world, it’s “a blessing and a curse”, though it allows for limitless possibilities in the future. Whatever Claudio chooses to do, he can be sure that legions of fans, bewitched by his work to date, including a stellar new album, will be on board for the ride…
Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe is released March 14 via Virgin Music Group.
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