YourGigs caught up with Jared Leto as his band were about to declare This Is War across Australia.

“Are you hung like a wildebeest, too?” were the first words uttered to me by actor and musician Jared Leto after an admittedly flimsy icebreaker that we share the same birthday. The bouncing baby Leto was born in Louisiana but moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue a music career, with acting initially as an aside, and started the band 30 Seconds to Mars with his brother in 1998. The band is embarking on their Into the Wild world tour to support their third album, This is War.

Read the rest of the interview HERE

EMI Music:

(New York, NY, July 19th, 2010)- Multi-platinum rock band Thirty Seconds To Mars single “This Is War” reaches #1 on the alternative radio airplay charts this week, after an 8-week run at #2. This is the band’s second consecutive #1 single from their 3rd studio album This Is War (EMI’s Virgin Records) which was released in December, 2009. The album’s first single “Kings & Queens” spent three weeks at #1 in January. Thirty Seconds To Mars now has three #1 songs and four top 5 hits at the format. The platinum selling A Beautiful Lie’s “From Yesterday” reached #1 in 2007 and “The Kill” peaked at #3 in 2006 before becoming the first song in alternative radio history to be retired from the Billboard chart after a 52-week run. “The Kill” was named the #1 Alternative song of the last decade by AOL Radio listeners. Their new single “Closer To The Edge” is already climbing the airplay charts across Europe and will impact U.S. radio in August.

Last week Thirty Seconds To Mars announced new dates for the stateside return of their “Into The Wild” world tour which kicks off on August 30th in Syracuse, NY at the New York State Fair and runs through Oct. 16th at the Deluna Festival in Pensacola, FL (full schedule below). Neon Trees, Violent Soho and New Politics will support Thirty Seconds To Mars on select dates.

Thirty Seconds to Mars began the “Into the Wild” tour in early 2010 in support This Is War. The first leg of the tour took them to 89 cities in 27 countries where they played in front of over 1.3 million ecstatic fans. The European leg of the tour was the band’s first arena headline tour and they sold out shows around the globe including gigs at London’s Wembley Arena and Paris’ Bercy Arena. The band will play festivals in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and throughout Eastern Europe before returning home for the new U.S. dates. Thirty Seconds To Mars will return to Europe in November to play gigs through December and will play at London’s O2 arena for the first time on November 30th.

Alternative Press praised This Is War with 4/5 stars and The Los Angeles Times declared that the album is “the most confident sounding thing the band has done.” This Is War debuted at #2 on the alternative album and digital album chart, selling nearly 71,000 albums in the first week of release. The album has 2000 different album covers, as friends, fans, musicians, artists and many other notable persons submitted their own photos to be used on individual covers as part of the band’s innovative Faces of Mars campaign. Not only are fans on the album’s different covers but thousands of fans from around the world can be heard singing on tracks throughout the album. The band invited fans to attend summits in 8 different countries and online, where they recorded a variety of sounds, choruses and versus for the album.

Formed by brothers Jared and Shannon Leto, Thirty Seconds To Mars have over 100 million views on YouTube, 50 million plays on MySpace and more than one million fans on iLike/Facebook. The band have won numerous awards and accolades, including an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV EMA’s, an MTV Latin and Asia Award, a Fuse Award, and three Kerrang! Awards. Thirty Seconds To Mars’ sophomore record, A Beautiful Lie hit multi-platinum status after two years of heavy touring and winning fans over, one-by-one, garnering the band a growing and loyal fan base.

RockLouder writes:

We’re big fans of 30 Seconds To Mars’ massive, epic rock music. But they’re so big now that when we were offered a chance to hang out with them, it made sense to spread the love and get questions direct from their fans, who are some of the most dedicated (and borderline obsessed) we know of. So we took to our Twitter page, put out a call for questions, picked out the best ones and posed them to Jared Leto & co in a posh London hotel. Handily, we also filmed the whole thing, which you can check out above.