Trivia / The Mars Volta

• Black Sheep Hit: "The Widow," while not stylistically out of place with the rest of the band's work, is notably the shortest song on Frances the Mute, but even then the single version edits out about two and a half minutes of abstract sounds afterwards. It's also their biggest hit by a fairly substantial margin.
• Creative Differences: What lead to the hiatus from 2012 until 2014. While Omar and Cedric were the epitome of True Companions, the making of Noctourniquet was arguably the roughest for the two, leading to first ever creative differences with them. After the completion of the album, Cedric would state that he had left the band and just didn't want to be around Omar anymore, although Omar himself felt that the two needed a break from one another. This would be the case considering the two patched things up two years later and made Antemasque together.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Frances the Mute is Juan Alderete's.
• Development Hell: The reunion. While it did happen in mid-2022 (much to the shock of their subreddit), the reunion had been teased for years by Omar, going back as far as 2016. It's unknown what kept delaying it however, with some speculation with the issues Cedric and his wife Chrissie were dealing with at the time (as seen in the Nightmare Fuel page).
• Executive Meddling: The reason why "Cassandra Gemini" is split into eight tracks on the CD (the band would've only been paid an EP's worth of wages for a five-track CD, even a seventy-seven-minute-long one) and why the title track of Frances the Mute was left off the album. In a more minor case, the band considered "Son et Lumière" part of "Inertiatic ESP", but it ended up an Album Intro Track with its own title at the label's insistence.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The band encouraged bootlegging of their live shows, so there are dozens if not hundreds of shows circulating online.
• Life Imitates Art: A case that will probably give many people nightmares. See the spoiler-marked text in the Nightmare Fuel section about Frances the Mute for details.
• Throw It In!: According to Cedric, this was a major part of the lyric writing process for Frances the Mute - at some points he would just sing random gibberish and then form it into coherent structures later. In some cases they apparently kept some of the random strings of words, because they considered his first reaction to the music to be the most honest.
• What Could Have Been: This◊ was very nearly the artwork for Amputechture.
  • Frances the Mute was intended to be be originally five songs (six if you count the title track), however Universal forced the song "Cassandra Gemini" to be split into eight pieces (and not by the song movements mind you) due to the album coming off as an EP than a full release. Weirdly enough, online MP3 retailers have the original intended five tracks (with "Cassandra Gemini" as a 32½-minute epic).
  • Frances was intended to have the title track, actually; however, due to the CD's limitations of 78 minutes (which the album passed), it was not included and was instead put alongside the "The Widow" single. At one point the band wanted a double album with only "Cassandra Gemini" on the second disc, but the record company vetoed this.
  • The record company wanted "Goliath" to be the lead single from The Bedlam in Goliath, which is quite understandable as it's one of the catchiest songs on the album. However, it's seven minutes long, which is far too long for a single that isn't "Hey Jude", and the band, understandably, didn't want it edited down, because the ending is just as epic as the main part of the song. It's kind of surprising no one thought of compromising by editing it into two separate songs - there's a clear musical shift in the middle that could've served as a split, in a sort of Bob Dylan "Like a Rolling Stone" sort of fashion. Ultimately, "Wax Simulacra" (a good song, but not that good) was used as the lead single. "Goliath" was released a vinyl single later on, with the album version, two versions of a remix by rapper El-P, the album version of "Tourniquet Man", and a remix of "Tourniquet Man".
  • One not related directly to the band is that Cedric once performed in a band with Beto O'Rourke, who later became congressman from El Paso and attracted nationwide attention with his ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Senate (though he came closer to winning than any Democrat had in decades and is generally agreed to have had coattails that lifted several Democratic congressional candidates to victory). O'Rourke is now considered a serious contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, should he choose to seek it. It would certainly have been fascinating had a U.S. Senator and the front man of the Mars Volta and At the Drive-In once played in the same band.
  • The band's very well recorded performances at Maida Vale in 2003 provide an interesting window into what De-Loused might've sounded like with better mixing and mastering (and if its producer Rick Rubin had allowed the band to jam more in the studio). These are arguably better, thanks to the severe Loudness War issues with the official release of De-Loused. (The first set, which comprises the first 31 minutes and change, still has some clipping problems, but nothing like De-Loused has. The second set is, mercifully, completely free of such stunts.) It also helps that you can hear Ikey much more clearly in these performances.
• Word of God: The song "Frances the Mute" is a "decoder ring" for the album of the same name. Fan analysis of the song responsible for the spoiler-marked section under Concept Album on the main page.
• Working Title: Sarcophagus was the original title planned for the second album.
• Writer Revolt: "Abortion: The Other White Meat" (see Epic Rocking on the main page) was apparently a case of this. The festival organisers had evidently told the band that they had to play "The Widow" and their other hits. In protest of this, the band improvised a 50-minute set and didn't play any other material. Cedric also sat on the side of the stage with a typewriter, evidently composing a letter reaming out the festival organisers for attempting to impose creative restrictions on the band.

---