Heartbreak fertile soil when it comes to songwriting, and millions of songs have been dedicated to the wars and woes of love. But for Claudio Sanchez, creator of the galaxy-spanning Amory Wars series that’s been told across comic books, graphic novels and just about every album his band Coheed And Cambria have released over the past 20-plus years, surely a bunch of songs about failed relationships would seem, well… pedestrian?
“Every Coheed record stems from a personal place,” the singer counters. “I was afraid to be a frontman – and still am, to a degree. The Amory Wars concept is just a way for me to exorcise my truth and be more honest.”
Claudio was still in high school when he formed his first bands. By 1998, he had come up with the broad strokes of the idea that would become The Amory Wars, while on a trip to Paris. It would be a Dune meets Star Wars space opera with tyrannical forces, rebellious heroes and interplanetary conflict. On returning home, he pitched his bandmates the idea of exploring the story through songs and albums. Fortunately, they agreed.
Renaming themselves from Shabütie to Coheed And Cambria after two key figures in the story, their first two records, 2002’s The Second Stage Turbine Blade and 2003’s In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3, established The Amory Wars’ main setting and characters.
Ambitious as the concept was, it was matched by their mix of punk, emo, post-hardcore and prog, and both albums ended up breaking the Top 100 on the US Billboard 200 album charts.
“We’d play to a packed house as a support band, but the second we’d finish the place would clear out,” Claudio recalls in awe. “That was huge to me; I started writing music at 13 years old with a four-track and a guitar. So by the time it all started to happen, I was in my 20s. It felt like we were going in the direction of our dream.”
But as the band went from strength to strength, the same couldn’t be said for Claudio’s personal life.
“I met the woman I wanted to marry and she broke my heart,” Claudio says frankly, chuckling as he reminisces. “[Our third album] Good Apollo is where I started to pull back the curtain and allow the listeners – and readers – to understand that these stories are all very real to me. I just needed to put them into a fiction to be comfortable telling them.”
Thankfully, he wasn’t short on creative outlets. In addition to the Coheed And Cambria albums, Claudio had written comic books that further fleshed out the story of The Amory Wars (then called The Bag.On.Line Adventures).
Inevitably, his experience with heartbreak bled into the story he was putting together for the band’s third album. Claudio introduced a new character in The Writer, a figure crafting the story of The Amory Wars. As The Writer experiences real-world anguish, he translates it into disasters that befall the main characters. Very subtle.
“My perspective of heartbreak spilled into the narrative in a very childish way, because it was something I’d never really experienced before,” Claudio admits. “It was reflected in The Writer’s struggles. He was constructing this world that he was willing to destroy because of these emotions he couldn’t navigate.”
Of all the songs on Good Apollo… Vol One, The Suffering best captured the tumultuous nature of Claudio’s own love life at that point. The lyrics tell the story of The Writer proposing to his girlfriend, Erica Court, who rejects it, sending The Writer into an emotional tailspin that manifests in delusions around a demonic bicycle. Thankfully, Claudio didn’t have his own reckoning with possessed bikes and psychotic breaks, but there was still a kernel of truth in there.
“It’s not like I’d proposed marriage at that point, but it was something I was aiming for down the road,” he admits sheepishly. “The Suffering was playing on this heartbreak, wishing my way could have been the way. But at the time, things hadn’t worked out.”
By February 2005, Coheed And Cambria were ready to record their third album. Freshly signed to Columbia Records, they headed out to Applehead Recording Studio in Woodstock. There was an undeniable excitement for what lay ahead.
“It was our first major label release, with major label money,” Claudio recalls gleefully. “Instruments were being sent to the studio and a lot of attention was being drawn to the band. I was working on a graphic novel that would accompany the album, making it the first time we were working on a dual release, something we do a lot now.”
Good Apollo… Vol. One – or to give its full title, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes Of Madness – was a serious step up for the band. More polished than its predecessors, it also pushed the band’s compositional skills with strings, piano and more intricate instrumentation showing off their progressive leanings.
That stylistic shift had its downsides, however, not least when it came to deciding singles. “It was a trying time for us, working with the label on singles,” Claudio admits. “There was a real divide between label and band. We wanted Welcome Home to be the lead single and the label was pushing The Suffering.”
The songs couldn’t have been more different. Welcome Home was a reflection of the edgier, prog metal leanings the band had embraced fully for this latest record: a six-minute epic with strings and marching riffs that would do Led Zep proud. By contrast, The Suffering was a punchy, sub-four-minute banger with power pop infectiousness and a hook you could use to reel in Jaws’ Bruce the Shark.
“It’s very typical of me to write a song that falls into this very clear pop world,” Claudio says with a shrug. “I just remember sitting there, writing The Suffering to push away from the more progressive side of the band and write a more ‘get to the point’- type song.”
In truth, both songs represented the dichotomy at the heart of Coheed And Cambria, but only one could win out when it came to picking the lead single. Coheed got their way.
Welcome Home was released on September 20, 2005 to herald the arrival of Good Apollo…. It was their first album to hit the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 in the US, also cracking the Top 100 album charts in Germany and the UK.
The Suffering was the album’s second single, released just in time for Valentine’s Day on February 13, 2006. And how did they visually represent this poptastic tale of heartbreak for the accompanying music video? In true Coheed style, with an epic high-fantasy video involving a centaur, a mermaid and a giant squid. Go figure.
“When I initially posed the treatment for The Suffering video, the idea was to have it done as a stop-motion animation in the style of Ray Harryhausen,” Claudio says. “I’d wanted to do something like Clash Of The Titans, but it didn’t quite work out that way for one reason or another. But it does a pretty good job of showing off that Coheed are a weird fucking band! I think it’s perfect for how kooky and out of place we were.”
While Coheed had struggled to fit snugly into a box pre-Good Apollo, the album marked a point in their career where they were crossing boundaries and making new fans, as likely to pop up on bills with Thursday or My Chemical Romance as they were Glassjaw or Avenged Sevenfold.
“I take it as a badge of honour,” Claudio says. “We’ve done shows with Primus, Incubus, Taking Back Sunday, Tool… We had a lot of fun on tour with Avenged [in 2006]. There was a lot of apprehension from both bands when it was announced, because we both did such different things. But it’s one of the tours I’ve had the most fun on. Now and again I’ll see pictures of me hanging out with Vinnie Paul or M. Shadows. Great times!”
As for the heartbreak that had inspired The Suffering – and much of the subject matter of Good Apollo… Vol. One as a whole – it turned out to be just a speedbump on Claudio’s road to marital bliss. Asked if the meaning of the song has changed over the past 20 years, considering he’s been married to writer and musician Chondra Echert since 2009, he pauses in thought.
“It’s difficult, because I married the girl it was about! Ha ha!” he chuckles. “So there’s a bit of a disconnect on it now, because there’s this perspective that’s almost foreign to me. I’ve lived a happy life with that person and she helped me write the conceptual portion of the comic book. But every Coheed record is a time machine to a moment in my life, and I wouldn’t change it.
Coheed And Cambria's new album The Father Of Make Believe is out now. Coheed headline 2000 Trees festival in July.
