That famous mop/afro of his - because of his Puerto Rican and Italian heritage, his hair grows out, not down - is pulled back into a ponytail. "I really do like the way it looks," Sanchez says, not shying away from the subject. "As a kid, I couldn't have my hair like this because of jobs, but I grew it in high school."

Sure, it's conversation-starting hair, and it overwhelms the singer's frame. The hair enters a room about a half hour before he does. And he's not in town for a cut Ôn' color at a high-end NYC salon. Rather, he's here to promote his band's new album, Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. The album title is long, and if you don't know Coheed and Cambria, it appears to be a bit pretentious. But nothing is cut and dried about this band. And the record is never too smart that it alienates its audience. In fact, it only serves to reel listeners in.

On Good Apollo, Sanchez's androgynous voice takes the stage, that same stage which also showcases the 27-year-old singer's guitar wizardry.

"I've always had more of a thing for female vocalists," Sanchez reveals, citing car rides with his mom spent listening to pop tarts like Madonna and Taylor Dayne. "Singing wasn't the thing I focused on. I was always the guitar player, not the singer. Accidentally, I became the singer and went back to being the young kid sitting in the car, and thinking, ÔThis is how Madonna sings.' I don't know if it was conscious."

Sanchez is clearly smarter than your average bear, and surprisingly, he's not an only child. He's one of four siblings, and he's close with his parents. When Coheed played a sold-out show at NYC's Roseland Ballroom in November 2004, Sanchez lead his adoring crowd in sending birthday wishes to his mom, who was seated at the VIP balcony.

"My mother is actually the band's biggest fan, and knows things our management doesn't know," giggles Sanchez in his soft-spoken, well-enunciated voice.

On Good Apollo, Coheed is progressively weirder and weirder. The album is part Iron Maiden (the band has been known to cover "The Trooper" live), part Rush, and a dash of Placebo. Gentle, acoustic, almost Simon & Garfunkel-style ballads are thrown into the mix. Unpredictability, thy name is Coheed. And Cambria.

"I experiment with all forms of contemporary rock. I don't want to have a record full of nine-minute songs, but we do write those." Sanchez says the band not only writes songs with prog textures, but that its music is truly progressive in that it progresses by leaps and bounds between records.

Despite the group's highbrow concepts (more on that later) and quirky sound, the kids have flocked to Coheed in droves. It's surprising to me, and to Sanchez, that the kids "get" what Coheed is trying to do, because the music isn't for young rock fans with ADD.

"I'm surprised," Sanchez admits, regarding his fans' devotion and the younger demographic that worships dutifully at the band's altar. "But it has to do with the band's upbringing on the indie level, when we came up playing with hardcore bands and emo bands."

From his carefully thought-out music and its conceptual framework - again, more on that later - you might think Sanchez was an outcast in high school, someone who was smarter than the rest of his classmates and probably shouldered some flack from the jocks because of his beautiful, artistic mind. While the ever-humble and unassuming Sanchez doesn't quite paint himself as a maligned outcast per se, he says, "I spent most of my time in high school in bands. Since I was 13 years old, that is what I did. I had my select friends that were in the band with me. I'd go to school, do school, get out, and go to the rehearsal space and then go home when it was time for dinner. That was where my focus was."

So, about the "high concept" that we've twice mentioned. Each record Coheed's released - 2002's The Second Stage Turbine Blade and 2004's In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth:3, which saw the band move from upstate New York indie Equal Vision to the vastly larger corporate mindset of major label Columbia Records - is part of a bigger concept, a series.

"All the records are concept records, and a part of an ongoing saga," Sanchez says, never revealing the intricate details about the concept of the story. He's not trying to avoid the topic; he just wants listeners to do the work for themselves. "This is the fourth part. This particular album is where the band steps outside of the story and sees things from the writer's perspective, and it's the end of the saga, while it's really the beginning."

Each Coheed and Cambria record advances the story, and Sanchez is working on accompanying graphic novels as companion pieces. He's interested in comics, but he's not a fanboy collector.

"I'm a big fan of reading the stories, but I'm also influenced by classic rock writers," Sanchez says. Not a surprise, since Sanchez emphatically sites a Black Sabbath show he saw at Giants Stadium as a child, and his love of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. "One of my favorite lyricists is Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. Seeing The Wall opened it up for me. And with their live show being so elaborate ... I always wanted to do something like that. A movie may not be the thing that I do, but I was a fan of the stories and doing something different, and the closest thing I can come to storyboard is comics, so I picked that medium. It's a lot of fun, but sequential writing is hard. I've learned a lot." He continues, "Whether the stories suck, we'll see. I'm still learning."

A Coheed and Cambria record - especially Good Apollo, which starts off soft and then slowly and steadily builds to a rage - is a learning process not only for its authors but for its audience. It's a lot to digest, but the kids love it.

As for the members of Coheed and Cambria, drummer Josh Eppard has a hip-hop side project called Weerd Science that released a record earlier this year through Equal Vision, showing that Coheed hasn't severed its ties with its former label family and is still grounded in the indie scene. Each member of the band has a Coheed and Cambria tattoo. The group's crewmembers sport the same dragonfly tatt, which is the band's first logo. Everyone in the Coheed camp is inked, kinda like a gang!

When I say this to Mr. Sanchez, he laughs and says, "But we don't fight! It's such a family thing, from the guys in the band to the crew. We just have a family work ethic. We love one another, and have a good time. It's just awesome."

Sanchez admits he never thought his band would get to this level - selling 500,000 copies of a record and garnering a frothing-at-the-mouth fan base that screams every note of his lyrics with him and shrieks at the band as though it were the Beatles - and he's very aware of his good fortune. He isn't taking anything for granted.

So, why, after all this - after the concept, the comics, the crazy hair - why in the hell will a not-yet-18 rock fan who likes cannon-dwellers such as Sabbath and Zeppelin as well as envelope-pushers like Rush be drawn to the Coheed and Cambria cult?

Easy.

"If you want to hear some rocking guitars and some banging-ass drums ..." Sanchez says, attempting yet clearly failing to encapsulate his band's sound. "I can't sell the record. I just go out and play on the stage."

Well, it's the record company's job to sell the record. Luckily, Coheed's got quite a hot ware to peddle in the form of Good Apollo.

BACK TO ISSUE FEATURES