It’s a chilly afternoon in New York City. Down where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side, the streets pulse with a rush-hour cacophony of honking cars and pedestrian chaos. But three floors above it all, in the sunlit conference room of his publicist’s office, Claudio Sanchez’s mind is miles away — flashing back to that fateful moment, some three decades ago, when his musical destiny was placed in his hands, as if the Lady of the Lake herself had presented him with Excalibur.
“I don’t know how old I was, but I remember the day,” says the Coheed and Cambria frontman, a touch of awe still evident in his hushed voice. “It was at Robbie’s Music in Nanuet, New York. I just remember sitting there and looking through the glass at a Fostex X-28H four-track cassette recorder, and being like, ‘Whoa!’
“My dad bought it for me,” he continues. “I’d already been playing guitar for a few years by that point, but in a weird way I feel like that was even more important than my first guitar. Because that four-track was where I learned to write music and write songs. It was where I started to find my voice and figure out ways of expressing myself.”
Now, as January winds down and Coheed and Cambria prepare to release their 10th studio album, Vaxis — Act III: The Father of Make Believe, Sanchez has been thinking a lot about the path that his father’s gift set him on. This latest installment in the band’s sprawling sci-fi saga, the Amory Wars, is filled with personal reflections on the choices, experiences and relationships that have led the front-man to the present day. And for the first time in his band’s long history, Sanchez is stepping out from behind the narrative and embracing a new level of openness about just how deeply his own struggles and victories have shaped and informed the epic tales woven throughout Coheed’s discography.
Emerging from the 2000s emo and post-hardcore movement, Coheed and Cambria have evolved into a progressive-metal powerhouse known for their ambitious world-building and intricate storytelling (which has been further expanded upon by Sanchez’s popular The Amory Wars series of comic books and novels). Their 2005 breakout album, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness, launched them into mainstream recognition — thanks in part to the now-iconic track “Welcome Home,” which has recently found new life on TikTok.
Over the years, they’ve racked up six Top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 charts, shared stages with everyone from Slipknot and Linkin Park to Iron Maiden and Heaven & Hell and built an ever-growing cult following drawn to their far-out, high-concept universe. This year they’ll continue that mission as they support Vaxis — Act III, first with a co-headlining tour alongside Mastodon and then joining forces with Taking Back Sunday.
But 23 years on from Coheed’s debut album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade, Sanchez no longer feels the need to hide behind the mythos he’s built.
“I am such a different person now than I was then,” he says. “Here I am, 46 years old, with this long-running sci-fi concept rock band, but part of me is like, You know, I’d like to be recognized for the reality that these songs speak to, as opposed to just the guy that has the cartoon.
“I’ve always had a hard time being the frontman, which is really why this concept exists in the first place,” Sanchez continues. “I created this idea of the Amory Wars when I was so young and uncomfortable with myself. It was something I could use as a shield. The truth is, all of these records are very much time capsules of my life, and I know what they’re about and what parts of my life they truly personify. You know, it isn’t all spaceships and lasers.” He laughs.
“But, creating a science-fiction world was something I always wanted to do anyway, and I figured I could hide my insecurities behind it.”
As with all previous Coheed albums (aside from 2015’s explicitly autobiographical The Color Before the Sun), Vaxis — Act III: The Father of Make Believe delves deeply into Sanchez’s ever-expanding Amory Wars universe. It’s the third chapter of a planned pentalogy that follows the story of Vaxis, a boy who is trapped in a state of physical limbo yet possesses incredible mental powers.
The album also introduces some new characters to the story — most notably Blind Side Sonny, a menacing villain who appears in the videos for “Blind Side Sonny,” “Searching for Tomorrow” and “Someone Who Can,” the album’s first three singles.
“I’m very excited about that character,” he says of Blind Side Sonny. “There’s something kind of reckless and punk rock about him. He’s not a good guy, but as the stories of Acts IV and V unfold, I think we’re going to see some other sides to him.”
For Sanchez, storytelling has always been both an escape and a mirror, a way to channel his emotions and process the puzzle of his own existence while building something larger than life. And while the Amory Wars continues to offer a vast, galactic canvas for his imagination — and endless lore for superfans — you don’t need to be familiar with the band’s previous work, or be able to name a single one of the 78 planets that make up Heaven’s Fence (the primary setting of the Amory Wars) to be swept up in The Father of Make Believe.
Sanchez’s soaring vocals, the dazzling instrumental interplay between him, lead guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Zach Cooper and drummer Josh Eppard, and the album’s kaleidoscopic sounds make for a riveting experience. Co-produced by the band with Zakk Cervini, who previously worked with Coheed on 2022’s Vaxis — Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind, the album’s 14 tracks are by turns furiously cathartic, heartrendingly sad and breathtakingly cinematic.
“I’m so proud of this record,” says Sanchez. “The last record was so important to me, because it reflected so much of my being a dad to my son, and the hurdles my wife and I had to go through during the pandemic. I loved it from front to back, and at the time it was my favorite Coheed album. It just felt like such a hard record to follow. I had such a hard time seeing anything after Window of the Waking Mind.”
Unable to clearly envision a creative path forward, Sanchez found himself meditating on the recent past — particularly the deaths of his beloved maternal grandfather and uncle. “I know I’m not in my ‘twilight years,’ but I haven’t really experienced a lot of death in my life until very recently,” he explains. “But the passing of my grandfather, which happened right at the beginning of the pandemic, and his son — my uncle — passing so young and leaving a widow… Seeing that happen so close together really did something to me.”
While on a writing retreat to Paris with his wife and longtime collaborator Chondra Echert, Sanchez penned two songs that wound up opening the door to The Father of Make Believe: the snarling, high-octane “Blind Side Sonny” and the wistful ballad “Meri of Mercy.”
“My grandmother’s name was Mary. She passed away when my grandfather was still in the middle of his life, and he lived a whole other lifetime without her,” Sanchez explains. “There are characters in the Amory Wars story that are loosely based on them — Sirius and Meri Amory. We did a record for the Sirius character years ago, The Afterman. And after my grandfather passed away, I decided that I was going to bring him back into the story in Window of the Waking Mind. And since Sirius and Meri had been separated in the story, one of the things with the Sirius character was, ‘Does he find his wife?’ And that’s really where ‘Meri of Mercy’ came from.”
Sanchez vividly recalls the moment it all clicked. “So, I’m sitting there in this Airbnb in Paris on this beautiful day, looking outside at the Sacré-Cœur in the distance, and the song comes to me,” he says. “I’m in tears thinking about them reuniting in the After, and finding each other again after all this time. And that one and ‘Blind Side Sonny’ got me thinking about where the songs I was writing for the new album were going to land, conceptually, and how they were going to fuel the motives of the characters in this chapter.”
Sanchez’s maternal grandfather, the late Peter Mattiaccio — better known to his family as Beeps — was a major presence during the first forty years or so of Sanchez’s life. Not only did he unwittingly inspire the character of Sirius, but he also influenced the entire setting of the Amory Wars universe. “I lived most of my life on Amory Drive, the street in Valley Cottage, New York, where my grandfather originally bought a house,” Sanchez explains. “And that’s where the Amory Wars was taken from. My grandfather’s house was sort of the origin of that solar system.
“For a long time, my grandfather and I were the odd couple — we were roommates, sharing the bottom level of this two-family house. He was like a second dad to me, and he was always so supportive. It was really tough to lose him, and I miss him so much. He used to joke around with me. Because there were so many facets of what I do, he’d always say, ‘That kid’s always got a gimmick!’ He had a very ‘old school’ mentality, and was always giving me advice, like, ‘If you’re gonna be an entertainer, you can’t get married. What are you doing wearing that ring? Girls aren’t going to come to your shows!’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know if that’s what’s keeping them away.’” Sanchez laughs.
“But he never knew that the Sirius character was based upon him. So when we started to illustrate the book of Vaxis — Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind, I had Chase Stone, the artist who did the cover and the interiors, base the images of Sirius off my grandfather. Because in this timeline, Sirius is an elderly man. So he did, and it’s really touching every time I see those illustrations, which are very photorealistic and cinematic. I showed them to my mom. I told her, ‘I brought Beeps back for the Amory Wars,’ and she was like, ‘He always wanted to be a movie star.’”
Of course, if Sanchez based the Amory Wars universe around his personal one, it’s no major stretch to assume from its title that life on Amory Drive wasn’t exactly peaceful. “Well, don’t get me wrong — I’m a Star Wars fan,” Sanchez says, chuckling at his obvious penchant for outsized tales of space adventure. “But there are things in the story like, for example, the dragonfly — the dragonfly represents a syringe. My dad was a recovering addict, so that’s why that becomes a thing in the story.
“My perception of that world is so skewed, because my dad was a functioning addict, and my mom was the shield that kind of kept that hidden from me and my siblings. But we didn’t have a bad upbringing. Like I said, my dad was the guy that took me to buy my first four-track, and he was getting up and going to work at the factory every day. I had a great dad and a great mother, when I look back at it.
“Sure, we were not without our dysfunction, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. And my folks are still together, which is pretty incredible. When you walk into their house, right there on the wall is the display that they had at the Tower Records in Nanuet for Second Stage Turbine Blade.” (That album took its name from the particular part that Sanchez’s father heat-treated during his job at an aircraft factory.)
For Sanchez, the Paris trip that helped unlock Vaxis — Act III: The Father of Make Believe was more than just a creative breakthrough — it was a full-circle moment that brought him back to the city where the entire Coheed and Cambria concept first took root in 1998.
“My girlfriend at the time was doing a college year abroad, and so I spent a month out there with her,” he recalls. “And, I mean, I hadn’t been anywhere in my life. New Jersey was like the most foreign place to me. I remember getting out of the subway and seeing, like, the aesthetic of the Metropolitan sign, and being like, ‘Oh shit, I am in another world!’”
Inspired by the energy and creativity he felt in Paris, Sanchez began writing a science-fiction story based on himself and his girlfriend. “It was originally named The Bag.On.Line Adventures. The Bag On Line was the name of the luggage store that she lived across the street from,” he explains. “But then as I started to really write and bring the concept along, and when the band adopted the name Coheed and Cambria, I saw that it wasn’t a story about that love interest. I realized that it was really about my family and the world of Amory Drive.”
And with that shift, the Amory Wars was born.
“Coheed and Cambria took on the likenesses of my parents, and I played a role as their son,” Sanchez continues, “and then, you know, every record after that sort of mirrored the moment in my life that I was living at the time.”
The Coheed album that most overtly reflected Sanchez’s life was 2015’s The Color Before the Sun, which stepped away from his sci-fi saga to chronicle his and Echert’s lives as they were anticipating the birth of their son Atlas.
“It was important for me to pay tribute to those experiences without the shield of the Amory Wars, because I was never going to experience those feelings for the first time again,” he says. “My wife and I, we have a big hand in the deluxe editions of the records. And when we put together the stories, the relics and all of that for The Color Before the Sun — it was really just this little biography, this window into our lives. At the time, I thought, This is the story I’m gonna tell them, not the other one.”
For some artists, stepping away from an elaborate world-building epic might feel like a relief. But for Sanchez, it only made him realize how much he missed it. “I love creating in all forms and all arenas,” he says. “Songwriting, putting together these concepts and then trying to figure out how these ideas are going to live in the records and the comics. I like the challenge that poses. So, I did miss all that when we did The Color Before the Sun. It was important for me to do that for that time in my life, but I did enjoy coming back to it and finding creative ways to continue the story. And now, with Vaxis, this is the body of work that’s really meant to conclude it.”
The title of The Father of Make Believe could easily apply to Sanchez himself. Many of the album’s songs — including “Goodbye, Sunshine,” “Searching for Tomorrow” and the title track — find him casting a thoughtful eye over the vast world he’s created, pondering what it means to bring it to an end as they approach the saga’s final chapters.
“On this album, I’m sort of questioning my place in the world, and myself as the focal point of this band,” he says. “It’s like, ‘What if I had done things different? What if I tried this? What if I tried that?’ And that’s sort of where the character of Vaxis is — he’s going to learn that he’s got the power to really start something new. And as much as I initially saw my son in Vaxis, I am starting to see myself in him. I think that’s because of all the things I still want to do — though I’m not even entirely sure what they are.”
That uncertainty hit hard when the record was finally finished.
“There are two installments left of this little pentalogy I’ve put together, and it has the perfect ending,” he says. “It closes the Amory Wars and where this version of the story fits within that chronology in such a unique way — one that I’m not so sure has ever been done before in a thing like this. I find that beautiful, and I’m hoping I get there.
“But that means two more records — and then that would be it for this version of the band. So, I’m getting to that point where I’m like, ‘Does the band continue without the concept when that’s all closed? Do I see a future where the band goes through a metamorphosis and becomes something else? Do I change into something else?’ I just don’t know. But these are all questions that I’ve been posing to myself.”
Still, even if the story of the Amory Wars ends, don’t bet on Coheed and Cambria disappearing anytime soon.
“I’ve always felt like we’re an outsider, underdog-ish kind of act — and it still feels like it’s growing whenever we do these shows and we see new participants and fans,” he says with a grin. “Right from the beginning, our common interest was music and the love of it and the exploration of it. We were so open-minded about everything — no scene could define what we did, because we didn’t want that. We wanted to stretch outside and do whatever made us feel good. And that’s really the thing that drew us together and made us what we are.
“It’s a special thing, this band of weirdos!”