I’ve never seen a band like them.

First off, you’ll never see a band who tries hard to stay connected with their fans like 30STM does. Especially bands of their popularity. They usually focus on their own lives, on practice, on the music, and that’s it.

Mars makes the Echelon a PART of their daily lives, a part of the music, and a part of their creative process. The will talk to their fans online, hold many online chats, take questions, wait hours to meet with them after shows, mingle with them before shows, and graciously take photographs with eager Echelon who wait hours to see them at either shows or just out in public around venues and locations like The Hive.

And that’s another thing of Mars that is very curious.

Their fans, the Echelon.

They’ve told the Echelon that they are all one big family. And we believe it wholeheartedly. Not that there aren’t fights and bickering. There are, just like an actual blood family. Many within the Echelon believe themselves to be closer with each other than actual relatives and friends they have in reality. And in many cases, this may be the truth.

And not only is it a family that Mars has bred, they’ve also created this unstoppable machine. A force, an army of people who readily jump at the command. When one of the Letos or Tomo tells us to jump, we don’t ask why. We just say “How high and can we go further?”.

The band is where they are today because of their fans.

That may sound like a ‘duh’ statement, but even if they’d had normal fans like every other band, fans that weren’t as dedicated and hardcore as the Echelon, they would NOT have the popularity, radio play, awards, or name they have in music today.

Many in the industry speculate that the majority of the fans of Mars are just fans of Jared that crossed over from his acting career. I wholeheartedly disagree.

There may be a small percentage that are, but if you look at the age demographics of the Echelon, most of them are too young to go from Jared the actor to Jared the singer, especially considering the majority of Jared’s movies were made before the record A Beautiful Lie came out. Most fans fit in the 14 to 28 group, with some younger and a semi-large clan over the 30 year-old age group as well. Its those over the age of 21 who would most likely know Jared as the actor first, but the chances of many people seeing some of his late 90s movies and early 00s movies like Requiem For A Dream before finding Mars are slim. The majority of younger Mars fans who are major Jared-the-actor fans would know more about his career with films like Chapter 27, Mr Nobody, and Alexander.

And many people who do not understand the concept that we the Echelon are not only there for Jared seem to forget that Shannon Leto and Tomo Milicevic are also in the band. Jared is not a one-piece band.

Many of us admire all three talented men, not just the frontman of our favorite band. And I know many of us would not be interested in a just Jared Leto outfit. We totally embrace the emotional and passionate instrumentals that are given to us by Shannon and Tomo. If they were not part of the band, the band would not be 30 Seconds to Mars and we would not be Echelon. There would not be Echelon if it was just Jared. That is a FACT.

If there was ever and band that started from the ground up, it was Mars. Jared adamantly refused to use his celebrity to get them off the ground, going to extreme lengths to make sure that the band did not rise up the rock ladder due to his name in films.

It was the hardcore, passionate, and animalistic drumming of Shannon, the strong bassline of former bassist Matt Wachter, and the heart of guitar work from beginning guitarist Solon Bixler. Now Tomo carries the riffs, but this means they’ve gained a new sense of personality and have transcended what was once a family project started by the Letos.

30 Seconds to Mars is now a machine of music and personality. They’ve proven themselves over and over, won the game multiple times, and proven the haters wrong time and time again. And despite the critics that continually pop out of the woodwork, Mars and their Echelon beat them down again, proving them they don’t know what the populace wants and that its not about sales or popularity.

Its about those who Believe.