As I Lay Dying have spoken out after controversially returning with frontman Tim Lambesis – who was jailed after confessing to a plot to have his wife murdered. Check out their lengthy video below.
Lambesis was sentenced to six years in prison for plotting to kill his wife back in 2014. He was sentenced after pleading guilty to paying a police officer posing as a hitman $1,000 (£630) to kill his then wife, Meggan Lambesis. After being released in December 2016, Lambesis last year took to the band’s official Facebook page to post a lengthy statement, “apologising to everyone” for his actions.
“It’s difficult to encapsulate all of the topics we want to address with a written statement,” they wrote last week. “We understand there are many questions and we plan to address them this week”. Now, they’ve shared a 30minute+ roundtable discussion video covering their history, controversy and current relationships. Watch it below.
“So there’s, there’s a lot of awareness of things that happened very recently in music and stuff,” said Lambesis. “And then last year there’s an awareness of the public apology in my expression of remorse.
“But behind all that there was the individual conversations we had and it was for me, expressing more remorse publicly. It’s one like one thing and that will be shown very slowly over time, people have to kind of get to know and see if they can trust that I was sincere or not.”
He continued: “But in terms of individual conversations, those went back even a year and a half before the public apology, almost two years before that. And those conversations were much more in-depth than anything we could ever like explain, you know even just this discussion or a written public statement or anything like that.
“So, I first reached out to Jordan and Josh because I felt like that was just… I had to start somewhere and I felt like that seemed the most natural place for me. And I reached out to them in an email a long time ago and the first individual conversations we had were mainly me listening so that I could better express my apology for the ways that everything… Like I guess what the concept I talked about, the ripple effect.”
Lambesis went on: “There’s the obvious wrongdoings that I made and there’s the little ways that they sort of spread out beyond that and hurt people in so many ways that like I really wasn’t entirely aware until I got home.
“And those conversations kicked off and I was sort of better able to understand what they’d been through and I think more sincerely apologize because of that.”
Speaking of his arrest and time in prison, Lambesis revealed: “Immediately after I had been arrested I went into this mode of just like ‘How do I kind of survive this situation?’ And you hire people, you find the best attorney who knows how to put together the best defence and all these people are speaking on your behalf. The mentality is like defend, defend.
“I definitely bought into that and that influenced the person I was while awaiting my sentencing. There was that person Nick had all those hard feelings about. He was right, so it was literally leading up to the actual sentencing. That was the timeline of when I had said all those things [in the Alt Press interview.] Those things had been said and recorded, to come out sometime later after my sentencing.
“Then my sentencing happened and my moment in the courtroom was true and genuine, but I didn’t have any ability to follow up with it in any way. So the way that Nick viewed it made absolute sense to me when he explained it to me. I get that because how insincere does that seem? I’m in tears in this courtroom and then you read this statement by me that says something opposite of that.
He added: “And then there was such an unbelievable sense of relief after my sentencing of like, defence is no longer in my vocabulary. I don’t defend what I did because there’s no defence for it…”
As I Lay Dying formed in San Diego in 2000 and released six albums, including 2007’s ‘An Ocean Between Us’, which reached Number Eight on Billboard’s charts. A single from the album, ‘Nothing Left’, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Metal Performance.