Coheed and Cambria bringing new chapter in prog rock saga to Rupp Arena

Sometimes, one’s grandest visions begin at home. Later, if you’re lucky, the realization of those dreams might bring you back there.

Such was the case for Claudio Sanchez, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, primary songwriter and overall chieftain of Coheed and Cambria. For over two decades, Sanchez has utilized accents of prog, metal, guitar-saturated pop and more to outline an ongoing sci-fi saga called “The Amory Wars.” It has been the foundation for novels, comic books and all but one of the band’s 11 studio albums, including the newly released and heftily titled “Vaxis — Act III: The Father of Make Believe.”

The storyline of “The Amory Wars” is intergalactic, set in a region of 78 planets and seven stars. Its roots sprouted not in the cosmos, but in the Southeastern New York state village of Nyack. It’s the town where Sanchez grew up, where his fascination for rock music took hold and where the multitude of fanciful characters and inspirations came to life that would soon give him, quite literally, a universe of his own.

The name of the street his family lived on? Amory.

Fast forward to April. “The Father of Make Believe” has been in release for roughly a month with plans near completion to show its music off through a co-headlining tour alongside veteran Atlanta prog-metal band Mastodon, a trek that brings Coheed and Cambria to Rupp Arena on May 22. But on this mid-April day, Sanchez and the band aren’t living the music of “The Amory Wars” on an arena stage. They’re being celebrated near the street of Amory back in Nyack by formally receiving the keys to the city.

“I didn’t really think about it so much until it actually happened, about how proud I actually was,” Sanchez said. “It just turned out that the ceremony was in the center of town. Some 30-odd years ago, that was where I would get on the bus and travel all the way upstate to Woodstock to the band at the time that would become Coheed and Cambria. It was just a full-circle moment that was pretty cool.”

Devoting so much of a recording and performance career to an ongoing story, coupled with a shifting stylistic vocabulary that has had many critics scratching their heads in assigning a genre to describe Coheed and Cambria and its music, has made Sanchez and the band’s ascension to the ranks of arena headliners an unexpected success story.

“Coheed is a real hard project to put in a box,” Sanchez said. “But sometimes I feel like that makes us easier to digest. There are times I wonder, had we this plan to be one thing, what would our outcome have been? Then there is the other side, too. I never wanted my creativity to be limited by a choice like that. I’ve always wanted to be allowed to use all forms of creativity as a palette of expression.

“And that certainly goes for music. I listen to everything. I was inspired by so many styles of music, just listening to them by proxy through my parents or friends or whoever. Nothing ever felt bad to me. It all just felt like a way to your world out there. For me, as much as I wonder what life would have been like if we were just going down one narrow path, there’s always the other side of me that’s like, ‘You could never be happy that way.’”

Fascinated by the musical and storytelling possibilities presented by the first rock concert he witnessed (Black Sabbath at New York’s Beacon Theatre), Sanchez’s sense of imagination exploded after witnessing a stadium performance by Pink Floyd in 1994 when the longstanding prog band toured behind its album “The Division Bell” (Floyd’s final tour.)

“Seeing the lights and visuals, the company and the big grandiose band with the backing singers ... I mean, it was just very transformative. I was someplace that I that I had never experienced before. And that was ‘The Division Bell.’ That wasn’t even ’70s-era Floyd. I didn’t even know Pink Floyd at the time, but I became a huge fan. I went down the rabbit hole.”

But Sanchez was quick to point out another major artistic inspiration that was not musical at all, but literary — as in the socially inclined, sci-fi leaning writing of Kurt Vonnegut.

“There was this really cool bookstore in town called Pickwick Books. There were tons of books, so many books kind of out of order. I remember pulling one off the shelf and seeing that it had two titles — ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ or ‘The Children’s Crusade.’ I was so intrigued by that. I was like, ‘Wow, they couldn’t decide on one title.’ Clearly that makes a lot of sense when you see ‘Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness” (the marathon title to a 2005 Coheed and Cambria album.) Some of these themes I have injected into ‘The Amory Wars,’ where the writer comes into the story and tries to stop the character from utilizing free will to make his destiny his own.”

As for his own destiny with Coheed and Cambria, Sanchez is content. While the band has not experienced a mammoth commercial breakthrough (yet), its reputation has grown in increments. Coheed and Cambria played Rupp once previously, as a show-opener for Slipknot in 2009 with a Kentucky Theatre show of its own following in 2012. While Coheed hasn’t hit Metallica-level numbers thus far, each successive album has seen the band’s fanbase expand.

“This is far beyond the dream that I had,” Sanchez said. “There is something that feels right about the trajectory we’ve had. There have been moments where you have a major record label and the fuel behind it, but there is always a hurdle. Whether the choice is made by us or something else, there has always been a thing that sort of blockaded that road, if that makes any sense.

“What is happening now just feels more right, more natural and more in line with how we first came up, when we were in a van doing things in that grassroots way. I think maybe that was just always the way it was meant to be.”

Coheed and Cambria/Mastodon/Periphery

When: 7 p.m. May 22

Where: Rupp Arena, 430 W. Vine

Tickets: $50.55-$96.30 through ticketmaster.com