CONFRONT Magazine: A Year in the Making

CONFRONT Magazine is one year old. Who would have thought all those months ago that a year later we would have managed to come as far as we have. Though not many people are aware of this, CONFRONT Magazine was primarily created as a means to an end. This is true of almost everything you’ll say, but the fact is that for CONFRONT’s Arts and Visuals director, Christine, and myself, this venture was a not only a way to blend the world of music – our passion – and our fields of study, Photography and Literature respectively, but also a way for us to showcase a project on the band 30 Seconds to Mars and their fan base, The Echelon, that we had spent the summer of 2006 working on.

Magazines, web based or otherwise, are normally created over the course of quite a few months. From conception to finished product, it can take established professionals a long time to get things just right and get everything ready for publication. We didn’t have that luxury. All in all, we had about seven weeks to put this venture together. Add to that the creation of a website to publish the work and needless to say we didn’t know what we were getting into. What did we know of web design, record labels and promoters? In a way, I think our ignorance and naiveté with regard to what would be involved in getting CONFRONT ready to go live was as much a positive as it was a negative.

We started with little more than an idea of what we wanted the magazine to be about and what we wanted it to reflect. But our lack of knowledge in the technical aspects of design and publication required that we ask many questions and be more open to suggestions than we might have been had we had a precise and definite idea of what it is that could be done. Thankfully, we quickly surrounded ourselves with people who were experts in their fields and could help us bring our vision to fruition. Of course, we learned on the job so to speak; we still do in fact. Not being afraid of making mistakes and a willingness to learn and grow from them is a must in our world. But we did it. Seven weeks of long days and sleepless nights later, CONFRONT Magazine’s first issue hit the proverbial shelves and the rest is history.

The first line of our very first Feature Presentation said it all. “Amidst the chaos and frenzy of decision making, phone calls, more decisions, picking colors, taglines, sleepless nights and hair pulling disagreements, one thing was unequivocally certain; we wanted 30 Seconds to Mars to be CONFRONT Magazine’s first cover.” As I said, CONFRONT was created in part for this purpose. But when the first issue went live on August 31st, 2006 we knew that this was something we wanted to be doing for a very long time.

Our article on 30 Seconds to Mars entitled Come into the Pantheon showcased three interviews we did with the band members – front man Jared Leto, brother and drummer Shannon Leto, then bassist Matt Wachter and guitarist Tomo Milicevic – in June and early July 2006. At the time, the band’s sophomore release ‘A Beautiful Lie’ had been available in most markets since August of 2005 and their latest single “The Kill” had launched them into a quickly accelerating whirlwind of mainstream worldwide success. Though we didn’t get a chance to interview them again, we caught up with Leto at the Montreal stop of the 2006 Taste of Chaos tour and had a bit of an off the record chat.