30 Seconds to Mars frontman talks the new album and getting the fans involved.
Videogame chatter isn’t all Jared Leto is good for; we also talked with him about the new 30 Seconds to Mars album and his seemingly intense love for the bands’ fans and his desired to interact with them in some appreciable ways. And you’ll find all that below.

“It’s overwhelming,” he said when we asked about how fans have responded to the album. “The reaction has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. We worked on this record, I was writing for a couple of years, maybe even three years and in the studio for about two years and hadn’t had a record out in four years. When you wait that long and you spend that much time doing something, it obviously…carries a lot of weight when you finally release it. It was a relief. It’s exciting to have it out there.”

But it isn’t just about making them happy, Leto says. 30 Seconds to Mars is in it for the fans. “When you’re up there, at least for us, it’s really about what can we give the audience and about what we share with the audience,” he said. “We never really take away from it any worthless adulation or anything like that. It’s really about what we can give; when we talk about the show, we talk about areas that worked and areas that didn’t work and how can we make that better and how can we give a better show for the people that have come.

“When you’re in that place, it’s always a good feeling when you’re giving away. I hate to sound so altruistic about it, but I think it’s common knowledge that giving and being of service is an important thing to do, and you can apply that to your art.”

But the band had a very specific way to give back, as well. “I was looking for a way to include our fans from around the world. We’ve always had a really active participation, and I wanted them to be a part of this record, and I was looking for a way to do that utilizing the technology,” he said. “In the digital age there’s an opportunity there to utilize some of the technology out there to further the experience and the creative experiment. We held an event called “The Summit” in Los Angeles. We invited a thousand people to come and be a part of the album. They sang and chanted, they stomped and clapped, and it went so well we did it in eight different countries around the world.

“I got a Twitter message from someone in Iran who was frustrated they couldn’t make one of the Summits that we held globally, so that gave me the idea to launch a digital version of the Summit. So people could sit at home by themselves with friends and participate… If you’ve heard ‘Kings and Queens’ or seen the video and it sounds like there’s a big gang of people on that song, it’s actually tens of thousands of people from all over the world.”

We capped the conversation with a very simple question: what does he think of how the new album turned out?
“I think we’ve become more of who we really are,” he said. “I think this record is a transformation. We demanded a lot of ourselves; we pushed ourselves are hard as we can, and this is the best we can do. This is it. We all know that because we didn’t let ourselves do anything less; we demanded that of each other and ourselves.

“We pulled out all the stops.”