Interview with Top Musique

Jared Leto (from 30 Seconds To Mars) calls in to the X96 studio to chat with Richie T about 30 Seconds to Mars’ new album, “LOVE LUST FAITH + …

‘I feel like we’ve made the best album of our lives, hands down,’ says the actor-singer

BY Tom Lanham


You’ve got to hand it to Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto. When he wanted to announce his outfit’s return with an apocalyptic new fourth salvo, Love Lust Faith + Dreams, he really went the astronomical distance—and quite literally, by sending the set’s flagship single “Up in the Air” into the stratosphere aboard a Falcon rocket headed straight for the International Space Station, where it had its recent premiere.

And the singer was even present for lift-off. “We had this crazy idea to send our music to space, to launch the single, to launch the video and then the album, and to launch this new chapter in our life,” Leto explains. “So we went to NASA and put our CD in a rocket, and it shot 261-miles up to the station. And we debuted our song in space!”

And it does mark a new genesis for Thirty Seconds to Mars: “Love Lust” opens with the jazzy, swinging horns of “Birth,” then keps upping the sonic ante with the marching “Conquistador,” a furious, string-buttressed “The Race,” the morbid piano dirge “End of All Days,” a huge coliseum rocker called “Bright Lights,” and the serpentine, rattlesnake-percussion perambulator “Northern Lights,” with Leto intoning “They don’t believe that I have a soul left to be saved.” He finishes the thought on the closing acoustic ballad “Depuis L Debut,” wherein he coldly notes that “I dance with a billion devils” and “Died from a life of sin,” then chorus promises “There will be blood.”

What’s been going on in his life since 2009’s tortured This is War? Quite a lot, as he related last week, after opening his Church of Mars Tour at—where else?—St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea, New York City.

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