Coheed & Cambria Go Behind The Scenes Of Their New Album

There’s no rest for the wicked, as far as Coheed & Cambria are concerned. Just months after leaving Australian ears ringing with the huge Monolith mini-fest, which saw them perform 2005’s Good Apollo… Vol. I in full, the New York-based emo-prog-metal rockers have shared their 11th studio album, The Father Of Make Believe. The record sees the band complete the Vaxis trilogy that began with The Unheavenly Creatures in 2018 and continued with A Window Of The Waking Mind in 2022.

Musically and creatively, frontman Claudio Sanchez has attributed the inspiration of the album to a “constant internal battle of searching for creative release and growth”. “This one took more effort in the beginning,” he said, “but in the end, I think the digging was worth it for the subsequent surge.”

To celebrate the album’s release, guitarist Travis Stever has given Music Feeds an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the album’s creation with six fun facts about its creation.

1. Freddy Krueger Makes A Cameo… Sort Of

A first fact about the making of this record, and Claudio only just posted about this, but the Freddy Krueger glove makes an appearance. Claudio wore the Freddy glove and recorded it for one part on The Father of Make Believe.

2. Guitars Were Recorded By Claudio Himself

Not a lot of people would know this, but for most of my guitar parts on this album I would travel in and record in Brooklyn at Claudio’s studio. A lot of the guitars were recorded and then sent to [producer] Zakk Cervini, some re-amped and some live amped at Claudio’s.

3. A Lost Track From ‘Act II’ Made It To ‘Act III’

The song ‘One Last Miracle’ was actually a leftover from the last record. I remember working on it with Claudio, and at the time he showed me a chorus to a song that he had already written. We had been working on the guitars to what would eventually become the verse for ‘One Last Miracle’, and I remember him saying: “I wonder if this chorus would work here?” And it did! The chorus for that song was so perfect that ‘One Last Miracle’ is now in my top two or three favourite songs from The Father of Make Believe. In fact, it might actually be my favourite.

4. Josh Eppard Is A Unique Percussionist

While Claudio recorded himself wearing a Freddy Krueger glove on one part of the album, Josh played percussion for ‘Corner My Confidence’ on a guitar case. I watched him do that out in L.A. with Zakk.

5. Promoting The New Album Took Them Back

When we did the video for ‘Someone Who Can’, we used the club Olive’s in Nyack – which was actually the place we played at for the release of our first record, The Second Stage Turbine Blade. We filmed inside, where we played the actual record release back in the day. We used a storefront next door that the owner used to own, which used to be a restaurant that was part of Olive’s, and we used the basement too. All of those locations are what make up the video, aside from the band driving around on the road.

Coheed and Cambria - "Someone Who Can" [Official Video]

6. Travis’ Best Guitar Moment Came At The End

There’s a song called ‘The Continuum IV: So It Goes’. It’s the last track on the record – and one of my favourite moments making this album was working with Claudio on it. We worked on some of it when I came in, and we did re-organise things. For the most part, though, he loved the approach I had to it – and it turned out exactly how I hoped it would. I was already such a fan of the song, and I didn’t want to fuck with it too much, but I had this really firm idea about the guitars that I wanted to add and what they could be. Claudio was really into it. He even called me afterwards and was like: “I really liked what you added today”. Those kinds of things mean the world to me.