30 Seconds to Mars: “Skyrocketing To Stardom”

Within the world of popular music, there’s no telling what’s going to be the next big thing. This holds true for musical acts from all different genres with unlikely stars emerging all the time, but there is perhaps one exception to this rule and that’s the celebrity band. Every once in a while, a celebrity, most commonly a Hollywood actor, decides that their ego needs to be stroked even more and he or she develops a band. We’ve seen it with the Bruce Willis band; the Keanu Reeves band Dogstar and try not to cringe, but the Steven Seagal band.

Despite the fact that these actors are often ridiculed for their efforts, they persist in pursuing their music even though the public reaction is often lukewarm at best. One massive exception to these trends is the group 30 Seconds to Mars. 30 Seconds to Mars is an up and coming and talented new rock band led by actor Jared Leto, a Hollywood actor who has had roles in all sorts of television and movies, including a leading role on the teen show My So Called Life and a critically acclaimed appearance in the film Requiem For A Dream. And unlike his cohorts Willis, Reeves or Seagal, Leto’s band is actually good.

The beginnings of 30 Seconds to Mars go back to the late 1990s. Leto, who was already a well known actor, got together with his older brother Shannon to form a sort of garage band. Originally, the project was just meant to be a small family project that would be a fun thing to do among friends, but soon a full fledged band was starting to take shape. The Leto brothers started jamming and writing music together, before recruiting members to form a band. The first member to be recruited was bassist/keyboardist Matt Wachter, but the guitar player role proved to be a bit more challenging to fill. The band’s first two guitarists, Kevin Drake and Solon Bixler left the group not long after joining mostly due to touring issues. Finally, after going through more auditions, the band settled on Tomo Milicevic who remains 30 Seconds to Mars’ guitarist to this day.

Although Leto had formed the band around 1998, it took until the year 2002 for 30 Seconds to Mars to release its self-titled debut album. Despite the fact that Bob Ezrin, the famous Canadian born record producer was enlisted to produce the disc, it received mixed reviews from fans and critics and sold a mere one hundred thousand copies. The band did tour extensively behind their debut disc, playing over 300 shows over the course of a year which helped win over more and more fans.

Despite the lukewarm reaction to the band’s first record, Leto was not discouraged and set out to write 30 Seconds to Mars’ second album. To write and record the group’s second disc was by no means an easy task for any of the band members. Over a span of three years, the band wrote songs for the new album in five different countries in four different continents, including such places as Cape Town, South Africa. The reason for the nomadic way of writing the album was largely due to Leto’s thriving film career that did not permit him to exclusively focus on writing and recording back in the United States. The band settled on the title A Beautiful Lie for the album while in South Africa before returning to the U.S. to record the disc with yet another famous producer, this time Josh Abraham, famous for his work with Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park.

Much like the band’s debut, A Beautiful Lie got off to a slow start in terms of sales and interest upon its release in August of 2005. Although the album’s first single “Attack” did crack the top 30 on the U.S. modern rock chart, A Beautiful Lie was not exactly selling at a prolific pace. The major breakthrough that the band was looking for happened to come along with the release of the album’s second single titled “The Kill.” “The Kill” climbed its way up the charts all the way to the top 10 and suddenly the word about 30 Seconds to Mars started to spread.

Believe it or not, “The Kill” was almost scrapped from the final track listing from A Beautiful Lie because Leto had trouble transferring the song from an acoustic arrangement to playing it with the rest of the band. Fortunately with the help of Josh Abraham, Leto was able to nail the song with the rest of the band and largely thanks to “The Kill,” A Beautiful Lie has been certified gold and sold close to six-hundred thousand copies in the U.S. alone. All this success has catapulted 30 Seconds to Mars to the forefront of new rock music, a spot that should become familiar to this band for quite a number of years to come.  [ END ]