More than two decades in, Coheed and Cambria continues to evolve

The twin guitar harmonies of Iron Maiden. The recurring lyrical themes of Rush. The shape-shifting bombast of Faith No More.

Those are just a few of the influences that have helped shape Coheed and Cambria’s musical identity.

But as small-town teenagers growing up in Nyack, New York, none of those bands could compare to the outright awesomeness of Led Zeppelin, which at that age transcended pretty much everything there was to be transcended.

Coheed and Cambria has released 11 studio albums in more than two decades. Its latest is “Vaxis Part III: The Father of Make Believe,” which dropped in March. (Courtesy of Jimmy Fontaine)

“Everybody has that one band, and mine is Led Zeppelin,” said Coheed and Cambria drummer Josh Eppard, who fell under Led Zeppelin’s spell at age 11.

“There was this 25-year-old guy who worked for a Big Brothers type of program, and he’d take us poor kids out to lunch,” Eppard said.. “And one day he told us, ‘Don’t ever listen to Led Zeppelin.’ Then he told us how he listened to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backward and it invoked a demon in his house. … So then, of course, we got my dad’s copy of the album and played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backward. And at the point where it’s supposed to say, ‘Satan is God,’ I was like ‘Really? What I hear is ‘I love cheeseburgers.’ And I realized that you can make it say anything you want it to be in your mind.

“But it was still kind of mysterious. Zeppelin had that sort of mystique that we try to carry on in Coheed and Cambria.”

Back in the early days, Coheed and Cambria, which plays the Coca-Cola Roxy on Friday, was once described as what would happen “if Iron Maiden went emo.” But the band has covered a lot of musical ground over the course of 11 studio albums and more than two decades.

Coheed and Cambria’s “Vaxis Part III: The Father of Make Believe” album, which was released in March, is a case in point. Songs range from the two-and-a-half-minute, pedal-to-the-metal “Blind Side Sonny” to the more pop-punk “Someone Who Can.”

And then there’s “The Continuum,” a sprawling, 20-minute epic in four movements that begins as a really catchy pop song before veering off in enough different musical directions to make prog-influenced bands like Dream Theater jealous.

“It’s one of my favorite tunes on the album,” Eppard said. “The way it starts out as this tender song and then it moves through these parts that are epic, evil, grand and beautiful. When you have such a big catalog, it’s easy to fall into, like, ‘Oh, I’ve already done that before.’ So we’re constantly trying to reinvent ourselves. And it happens on every record, probably every song.”

All of which can make it that much more challenging to keep track of the songs in their early stages.

“On every record, the working titles for a lot of the songs are the names of the bands that inspired them. Like ‘A Favor House Atlantic,’ which was one of our biggest songs. The working name for that was ‘Police,’ because it felt very Police.”

There’s more, of course. A lot more.

“I don’t think anyone would say that ‘The Light in the Glass’ actually sounds like ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but that’s what we called it,” said Eppard, whose bandmates are frontman-vocalist-guitarist Claudio Sanchez along with guitarist Travis Stever and bassist Zach Cooper. “That whole album (the 2003 sophomore release ‘Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3′), every song on it had a band that inspired it. And I think that happens to all artists.

“We’re all fans of music, and music spoke to us. That’s why we dedicated our lives to it.”

When it comes to arranging the songs for live shows, Eppard says the band takes a different approach than it did back in its early days.

“As we’ve gotten older — and dare I say, better — we’ve tried to be more faithful to the records,” he said. “And thank God we have gotten better. I just saw a video the other day of us playing in 2001 and I was like, ‘Oh, dear God, we were horrible!’ I think we were playing the song literally twice as fast as it is on the record. But we were kids, and we were excited just being in Baltimore and getting to play there. And I think something spoke to somebody, because it landed for people.”

So while Coheed and Cambria’s aim is truer these days, the band still leaves room for what can make a live show unique, intentionally or not.

Eppard fondly recalls going to a Radiohead show where one of the band’s songs fell apart and they had to start it all over again.

“For Radiohead to have a song fall apart and then they just start laughing — nobody was mad — it just taught me so much seeing that, and I’m so thankful,” Eppard said. “It was a really profound moment for me to realize that, hey, mistakes maybe should be embraced. We’re all human, and there’s a humanity to playing live. I don’t think us trying to get it close to the record is ever going to sacrifice that humanity.”

Meanwhile, to help keep the mystique alive, the band continues to release deluxe versions of its albums, which include lengthy graphic novels that complement the song lyrics. Sanchez, who began writing them in the band’s early stages, numbers Grant Morrison’s “Batman: Arkham Asylum” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” among his influences.

For Coheed and Cambria fans, those evolving storylines in the lyrics and graphic novels add a world-building dimension that gives them that much more to anticipate.

“It’s almost daily that I run into a fan who has such a passion for the music, which is really inspiring, and it makes me think of myself back when I was 11 years old,” said Eppard, recalling how he would listen to the music while staring at gatefold sleeves and reading the liner notes. “If Led Zeppelin had these other tiers to immerse myself in, I’d be in there hook, line and sinker. Feetfirst or headfirst, I’d be jumping in. And I hope that, on our best days, maybe we can be that for somebody.”

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Coheed and Cambria