They say parenthood changes you in more ways than you can expect. For Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez, those changes included doing something he’d never done before as a professional musician and hasn’t done again since.
Following the birth of his son, Sanchez decided the next Coheed record would be their first non-concept album and would exist outside of the band’s long-running sci-fi storyline, the Amory Wars. That album, The Color Before the Sun, was released Oct. 16, 2015 — 10 years ago Thursday.
“That was an important record because of the experiences of that time in my life, you know, my son was being born,” Sanchez tells ABC Audio. “I mean, ‘the colors before the sun’ just means the feelings before birth.”
Throughout Coheed’s discography, Sanchez would insert details about his personal life into the lyrics, so in that sense the birth of his son “could’ve easily been in the concept to some degree,” Sanchez says. Still, he wanted to tell this story straight without shrouding it amid an ongoing sci-fi epic.
“I also in a weird way wanted my son to think later in life, like, ‘Oh wow, this moment in their discography is this way because my dad wanted to share with me how important that experience was to his life,"” Sanchez says.
The Color Before the Sun remains the only Coheed album not a part of the Amory Wars concept — the band has since released three more records that continue the storyline. While it may seem like an outlier on the surface, Sanchez feels it still fits within the larger themes of Coheed’s music.
“It doesn’t feel foreign in terms of the overall architecture of what we do,” Sanchez says. “It’s totally at home.”
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