Coheed and Cambria Run Through Four Albums For NYC Residency

In a buzzing, Jack Daniels-stocked dressing room on the final night of Coheed and Cambria's sold-out "Neverender" series at Terminal 5 Saturday, frontman Claudio Sanchez was celebrating. And with good reason. He just got offstage with the Allman Brothers Band's Warren Haynes for a smashing, surprise encore of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" and Coheed's own "Welcome Home," not to mention having survived four nights of wailing while battling a scratchy throat. Perhaps most exhilarating, though, is that Sanchez finally got to tell the story of his comic book series The Amory Wars live and in its entirety for the first time.

"It is a piece of fiction," Sanchez explained to Rock Daily. "But it's all symbolic to things that have happened to me."

Though it's a complicated sci-fi prog sprawl, Neverender had no shortage of old fashioned rock & roll battle-cry moments. An extended talk-box solo by lead guitarist Travis Stever during "The Final Cut" on night three found Sanchez biting into his guitar strings. An intimate acoustic set of melodic favorites "Wake Up" and "Feathers" fed a few hundred hungry VIP fans before Saturday night's show. The Haynes-assisted encore on the closing night sparked an intense, backflip-filled mosh pit.

By the end, Sanchez was already looking to the future, admitting he had already written five songs for the band's next album in his home library — a faux studio that has natural sunlight ("a big theme on the record," Sanchez says cryptically) streaming in all day.

"We got three other places to go," Stever announced to the crowd at the end of the final night, referring to upcoming Neverender dates in Chicago, Los Angeles and London. "But fucking New York man — it's gonna be hard to top."

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Song Stories

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Nirvana | 1991

"Smells Like Teen Spirit," named after a brand of deodorant marketed to girls, was Kurt Cobain's attempt to "write the ultimate pop song," he said, using the soft-loud dynamic of his favorite band, the Pixies. Cobain "had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation," the song’s producer, Butch Vig, told Rolling Stone, "but also this vulnerable pop sensibility. In 'Teen Spirit,' a lot of that vulnerability is in the tone of his voice." Sadly, by the time of Nirvana's last U.S. tour, in late '93, Cobain was tortured by the obligation to play "Teen Spirit" every night. "There are many other songs that I have written that are as good, if not better," he claimed.

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