“I’m really excited about it” Coheed & Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez on starting his own guitar company and embracing the inevitability of loss
It’s rare that Claudio Sanchez ever finds himself alone. Usually, he’s surrounded by other people on a tour bus, or if he’s at home, he’s with his wife and writing partner Chondra Echert and their ten-year-old son Atlas. When he found himself staying in an Airbnb in Paris all by himself – his wife on a writing retreat in Italy, his son back in the US – the conditions felt jarring and foreign. That was when his mind ran off without him.
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“Thinking, to me, causes suffering. Being alone with your thoughts can be dangerous,” Sanchez considers. He’s sat across from us, bundled in a coat on a chilly early February early, sipping coffee in the upstairs room of a Leicester Square pub. “In the pandemic, I actually thought I thrived because at least I had my family, whereas this was a moment where I was completely alone.” He began imagining what it would be like if that solitude were more permanent, in the alternate universe where he hadn’t met his wife, where they hadn’t brought their son into the world.
Coheed and Cambria’s new album The Father Of Make Believe – the next volume of the band’s ongoing story of The Amory Wars – is a narrative of intertwining hypotheticals. What if Sanchez didn’t have his band? What if it all ended tomorrow? (The song on which he explores that question, Goodbye Sunshine, feels eerily like a eulogy written on a postcard for the future). Who would he be in the infinite alternative realms in which he’d taken a right turn in life instead of a left? It didn’t, however, start with that solitary stay in Paris. Everything that it brought to the fore exemplified the somewhat existential midlife crisis Sanchez was going through.
At that time, Sanchez was still processing the deaths of both his grandfather and his uncle. The grief was strange, overwhelming and foreign. “In a lot of Coheed records, there’s this throughline of mortality,” he ponders. “Death kind of scares me and it makes me very sad. As a young person, I didn’t experience much loss because it was sort of sheltered from me, but now I’m getting older it’s becoming much more prevalent.”
Image: Jimmy Fontaine
Encroaching Inevitability
Death makes the living jolt – it’s a reminder of the ever-encroaching inevitable that’s easy to forget in a fast-paced world. Brushing as close to it as we do in times of loss provokes us to find a sense of perspective in life, but it’s natural to look over one’s shoulder and wonder, if death were to find us now, would we be satisfied with how our time panned out? This was chiefly what Sanchez was exploring.
Alone in the Airbnb, he realised he’d stepped a fraction closer to the lives his grandfather and uncle were living. Both were longtime widowers, his grandfather outliving his grandmother by a few decades. Eventually, he and his wife would be separated too – when they vowed to love each other till death do them part, the gravity of that parting perhaps didn’t hit home as hard as it could later.
Luckily, there’s at least one universe out there now where his grandparents are reunited, and that is in Sanchez’s fictional one. It takes place in The Father Of Make Believe on the tender yet epic mid-album highlight Meri of Mercy, in which the character of Sirius Amory – a stand-in for his grandfather – from earlier volumes of The Amory Wars returns and reunites with his wife Meri. “The idea came to me in the Airbnb. It was a beautiful day and the view from the window was amazing. It just reminded me of them and the possibility of them potentially reuniting in the afterlife. I told my mother that I brought him back and she was so touched by that.”
The other song Sanchez wrote in that Airbnb follows directly after Meri & Mercy on the tracklist – and sonically, they’re poles apart. That song is the biting, snapping Blind Side Sonny, which finds Sanchez baying for blood, expelling his overflowing reserves of anger that he says he was trapped with at that period.
Intertwined within its introduction of a new character, Sonny, to The Amory Wars is a sense of the New Yorkers fighting back against the notion of being underrated. As he was looking back and questioning his path, Sanchez began questioning the perception of his band and the creative decisions he’s taken along the way.
It’s different for Sanchez now, but at the time, the genesis of The Amory Wars came from his feeling that he couldn’t quite own his narrative. “I created The Amory Wars out of insecurity,” he considers. “I couldn’t see myself as the frontman of a band, I could not see myself as a frontman. What better way to make myself more comfortable than to hide behind a curtain? But as I get older, and in the wake of loss, I find myself more comfortable with who I am and am willing to pull back the curtain and wonder how I would be perceived and would things be any different if there hadn’t been a concept tied to the band. Time helped me become more courageous, if that makes sense.”
Hot Heat
The concept for The Father Of Make Believe began gestating not long after the cycle concluded for 2022’s Vaxis II: A Window Of The Waking Mind. Because there was so much pressing on the walls of Sanchez’s mind, he felt that there was no need to stop writing music – there was more he had to express while his emotions still burned hot. Helpfully, he had some scraps left over from writing A Window Of The Waking Mind as well, amorphous ideas that hadn’t yet been fleshed out. Some material from this time fed into what became Goodbye Sunshine, or the later track Play The Poet.
“I really do feel like The Father Of Make Believe was just an extension of the writing process of A Window Of The Waking Mind. The thing I learned now that the record is finished is that our way of writing is more in line with the fashion of what we’d done maybe when the band was younger, when there was no scheduling. I just kept writing. When we toured on The Second Stage Turbine Blade, we had in our setlist In Keeping Secrets and that album wasn’t even recorded yet. It’s important for me to continue to express myself and write, so long as there’s heart in it.”
As a guitarist, meanwhile, Sanchez thinks about function rather than any favouritism towards a particular brand. “[I use a combination of everything – it’s kind of a case of whatever’s around,” he explains. “If I’m looking for something aggressive, it’s usually a Gibson, whether it’s a Les Paul, an Explorer, or an SG, but if I’m going for something a little thinner and cleaner, I probably prefer a Stratocaster with a single coil in between the bridge and the neck in the middle pickup. Those are really the main things that I have in the room when I’m writing, something that can give me the dirt that I need, but something that seems pretty smooth for the lighter stuff.”
Intriguingly, Sanchez is starting his own guitar company, Evil Instruments. Working with the California-based manufacturer Dunable, the burgeoning business showed off its first model, the Jackhammer, at NAMM earlier this year. Sanchez had spent two years playing prototypes, all of which stemmed from a design he sketched out on paper while on a flight one day.
“It’s a fairly classic, unique body type, and I’m really excited about it,” says Sanchez. “It’s a two humbucker situation, the neck profile sort of mimics what I am comfortable playing weight wise as well. There are two versions. There’s like a stock version import that one can get, and then there’s also a US custom version that will come assembled with Bare Knuckle pickups that are the ones that I typically play.”
The present looks exciting enough, but what about the future? Although there are points, such as on Goodbye Sunshine, where the record feels very final, there are still two more volumes of the Vaxis series to come. Sanchez isn’t worried about it. In a way, he just has to live his life and the story will write itself.
“Life will dictate what the story is going to be. But for the most part, like, I know how I dance, and I’m really excited about it, because I think it’s a fairly unique way to put closure on the whole thing. But I won’t know how I get there until I write those records, until whatever life experience happens that informs what the songs are about.”
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