Biography

His band's third single from "a beautiful lie", "From Yesterday", made history by being the first American rock video ever shot in China.

A photograph copyrighted by Shannon Leto appeared in People magazine's May 1995 issue of The 50 Most Beautiful People in The World (May 08, 1995).

Older brother of Jared Leto.

His band, Thirty Seconds to Mars' second single, "The Kill", from the album, "A Beautiful Lie", made history by being the longest-running song in history.

Did most of the photography on the Thirty Seconds to Mars self-titled album.

[on growing up with his brother, Jared Leto] We've experienced a lot growing up, moving around a lot, so we read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, things like that. So we drew a lot from our life experiences. We don't sit around and think about what other people were doing. I don't even think my brother and I really went to concerts growing up! I didn't go to school for drumming or anything, we just had these instruments around when we were four or five years old, and we used them as toys! It all just sort of came full circle and made sense that this is where we ended up.

[on how he started his own business] It started out of my love for coffee, which goes back to my childhood watching my grandfather prepare chicory coffee in Louisiana. So I decided to start Black Fuel Trading Co. to be able to share my love of coffee with the world by coming up with my own proprietary blends, each of which have a special meaning to me. But I didn't want to just stop at coffee; I want to share my vision for apparel, accessories, style and beyond, so I'm developing a full lifestyle brand and will offer other like-brands in addition to Black Fuel Trading Co. products.

[on his relationship with Thirty Seconds to Mars fans] It's a real natural thing for us. We make an effort to do all that we can do. I remember when we were doing our first shows, we were always interested in how the audience was participating, and most importantly took those responses into consideration and respected it. Then we just built our performance and interaction from there. It became much more of a back-and-forth conversation, so now we have our own family out there. It's pretty awesome.

[on performing emotional songs with Thirty Seconds to Mars] With "Alibi," we wanted to create something that we never had done before. So we put a mic in the middle of the room with Jared on the piano, Tomo on guitar and me on the drums, and then pressed record. This is a very raw, intimate stripped-down song. This song is very precious to us and evokes an emotion unlike any of our other songs.

We were very poor. My mom worked two jobs, leaving us kids alone. What we've been through as children not everybody goes through. Sadly some do, it was hard. This is a totally different life than we imagined and we are so grateful.