Credit: LeAnn MuellerCoheed and Cambria's forthcoming album, The Color Before the Sun, will be their first album to not continue the story of the Amory Wars, a sci-fi epic about the band's namesake characters. The break from the concept album mold was fueled by two big life events in frontman Claudio Sanchez's life: he left his country house to move to Brooklyn, New York, and his wife got pregnant.
When Sanchez first moved to Brooklyn, however, he was struck with a case of writer's block.
"I started to have this trouble: I didn't see myself creating anything; I was just having problems with it," Sanchez tells Rolling Stone. "Then my wife got pregnant, and that sort of pulled me out of that. I started to see the beauty in her and the anticipation of fatherhood, what kind of father I was going to become to this new person, and the inevitability of having to leave that person when touring came."
Sanchez's relationship with his wife manifested itself in "Here to Mars," the latest track to be released from The Color Before the Sun.
"Here this person was that is so important to me, and we're about to do this together," Sanchez says of his wife's pregnancy. "And ['Here to Mars'] was just my way of expressing my gratitude to her."
While Sanchez wanted to move on from the Amory Wars for The Color Before the Sun, he still had to pitch the idea to his band mates, who, luckily, were "very into it."
"For years the concept has been...I don't want to say a source of negativity, but not everybody understood it at the ground floor, so it took years to sort of swallow the idea of the concept," Sanchez explains. "Everybody sort of embraces it now; certainly it's ingrained in the DNA of Coheed and Cambria."
In fact, Sanchez first thought that The Color Before the Sun would work better as a solo album.
"But then I realized, well, Coheed, for years, I always tried not to put any limitation on it," he says. "I always wanted us to be as limitless as possible when it came to the music, when it came to the bands that we toured with. So I thought, why should the concept be any different?"
The Color Before the Sun will be released on October 16.
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