After The War

Jared Leto is as composed and immaculate in the flesh as he is in your dreams. In the country on a whirlwind promotional trip to make an appearance at the listening session for new album Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams, his charisma is undeniable and such perfect posture! Hair slicked back into a ponytail that's looped into a bun of sorts and modelling a navy military jacket that is undeniably couture, Leto is lathering on hand sanitiser and requesting “a normal chair” rather than the couch (“It's from the 1970s, probably”) when this scribe enters the allocated interview room in Cremorne's Sing Sing Studios. “All right. Ready,” he announces.

Leto was booked for South By Southwest this year, not to front Thirty Seconds To Mars, but as his alias, Bartholomew Cubbins, the director of Artifact: a documentary about the making of the band's last album, This Is War, which was inspired by their legal battle with EMI. “It was a lot of trauma,” Leto observes of the period during which the label intended to sue the band to the tune of $30 million for failing to deliver three albums in the allotted time specified in their contract. “And we're glad to be through that.” Artifact won the People's Choice Award for a documentary at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and Leto attended screenings at South By Southwest. “It was nice to play it at a music festival,” he admits. “It was good to share with those people… and we'll probably put [the documentary] out later this year.”

The touring cycle that followed This Is War saw Thirty Seconds To Mars officially recognised by the Guinness Book Of World Records for the most shows played during a single album cycle – 309 gigs in almost 60 countries over six continents. Leto understandably “slept a lot” when he eventually returned home, but then up and left again almost straight away. “I was only there for about a week and then I went to India to start the post-touring writing process,” he explains. “And that was incredible, that trip. We went on an adventure. It was amazing and it inspired – there's a song called Pyres Of Varanasi on the record [Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams] that we'd never have had had I not gone to India and seen the things we'd seen. So I worked on the record for about two years and travelled quite a bit, um, did a lot of site-specific recording and really kind of let the album give birth to itself in a way.”

As our conversation progresses, Leto yawns luxuriously and is visibly tired. He rocks gently from side to side in his chair, constant motion essential to staying awake.

On whether the location of a recording can be heard on a finished track, Leto insists, “For sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, technically but also emotionally. I think that they have different spirit and, you know, I recorded a guy in a hotel room in India, uh, singing: an Indian man. And that ended up making the album, but not until the very end. I didn't use it until, like, the last few weeks. Before the album was finished, I thought, 'I've gotta find a place to put this in,' 'cause I remember it being so magical. I was sitting in my hotel room one day and I wrote this song just on the spot and then I thought, 'You know what? We've gotta get an Indian singer on this song,' and a few hours later we found some guy and brought him in the room.”

Any romantic notions of Leto wandering the streets of India in search of a busker are straightened out pronto. “No, he wasn't busking, he was just a friend of a friend of a friend… but, yeah, they have all kinds of street musicians who play wonderful flutes and horns and these harp things. And tabla players, beautiful drummers – we recorded some drummers and the singer.”

This leads to a discussion about African instruments fashioned from wood, animal skins and various natural materials that happen to be lying about, and Leto's sense of humour escapes for a brief moment: “Yeah, yeah, like, dental floss and a piece of wood. It really is incredible, but you don't need much and it's always inspiring to see people do a lot with a little and be inventive… You certainly don't need all this anymore [gestures toward the studio]. You can make what's in here [points to his forehead] a reality.”

It's actually impossible to listen to Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams without all kinds of images flooding through your grey matter. Not sure whether Leto was too impressed by his song End Of All Days awakening visuals of robot wars in the Colosseum in this listener's imagination (“Mmmmm. Interesting.”), but he allows: “It seems that we evoke quite a bit of imagery – the album overall – which is kind of interesting because I am a really visual person. Music for me is about colour, not just sound. [It's] about shape. Not just what I'm hearing in my own head, but what I'm seeing as well. So it's fun that it brings that up for other people as well.”

The album also has a narrative arc. How do you orchestrate such a thing when you're not yet sure of the tracklisting? “I think there are really a few answers to that question,” Leto ponders, “but number one: the way that I work is I do generally have an idea of where songs will go before they are done. So that's part of it. The other thing is… you ever read a great book and it jumps all over the place? From time to time to time, sometimes [it] even goes beyond a person's lifetime but there's connectivity there and it makes sense. So I think that chapters – if each song is a chapter, they can be a bit modular and you still get a sense of an overarching theme, or ideas.”

So this is similar in a way to shooting a film out of sequence, but knowing where the parts fit within the script. “Sure. Exactly. You know, certainly the process of shooting something can mean that you do things incredibly disjointed – out of order, out of sequence – but you also learn from that. And I do think, though, that with this album you have these very strong themes: Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams, not just the album title or words, but themes themselves that are so important: integral to who we are – all of us.”