After the Band: Life in Your Way

Solid State Records' melodic metalcore band Life in Your Way broke up in the summer of 2008, after three albums and almost a decade of music. Noisecreep caught up with vocalist and founding member Joshua Kellam about what everyone was up to since the breakup, including possible future projects.

What have you been doing since the band broke up?

Good Question. I get kids writing to me all the time finding my e-mail address -- which, I have a new one -- and it's hard to get back to them. I get back to about half of them. I've been working with my dad doing carpentry. I've been doing that. It's been slowing down a bit. It's kind of weird. It's slowing down, and I've been moving a lot in the direction of working with two different churches right now. One that I've been working a lot Sunday mornings and one doing this thing called Elevate. It's more like geared towards young adults and people younger than I am. It's pretty neat seeing it grow and get powerful. That's a lot, you know?

It's been nice to be home a lot more, and not to have so much of a focus, but then again I miss a lot, too. Doing another band is always in the back of my mind -- me and some other people, me and two of the guys from Life in Your Way and a few other guys. A lot of that to me is just finding the right time, the right passion, for everyone to line up. Kind of like how Life in Your Way did.

Do you think the new band will be anything like Life in Your Way?

Yeah, yeah, I think it would be. It wouldn't be -- well, a few of us have actually written a few songs and we haven't really told many people about that. We'll see how it goes. The only thing we can come up with is that it wouldn't be the next Life In Your Way record, but there would be a big focus on doing everything better, so to speak,
like putting more emphasis on our -- to have like merch just totally represent who we are and the Lord a lot. We have the songs, we have the lyrics, we want the music to be as powerful as possible. Just more focus on that, and I think that starting over is kind of a neat idea. There isn't kind of a legacy, although I don't mind Life in Your Way's legacy at all. It might be neat to start over. So we'll see where that goes. Maybe by the end of the year, there might be something more solid.

Lately, God's been putting on my heart some ministry stuff, and I don't know exactly yet what that is, but I feel that long term I'll be working on getting out of doing carpentry and construction -- what I always did growing up with my family -- and doing ministry full time. So right now I'm not really sure what it is, but I feel God always tugging at my heart, especially the last month. So I'm just trying to get connected -- like I'm working at two churches and wherever I can help out, and I'm going to Musicfest next week and they have a prayer tent there, and a lot of the bands that we've played with and toured with are going to be playing there, so I'm excited to see some of the guys I know. But they have a prayer/ministry tent, I think I'm just going to be hanging out there a lot, praying for people and in general just minister to people.

Do you know what the other guys have been doing? I mean, you still keep in touch with them, I know.

Pretty much everybody is really still in touch with music, whether it's playing in a church, like a church band, or a worship band, writing music, solo stuff. I know John Gaskill -- he's the only one kinda not from around here, he's from Virginia -- so he's back at home, and I know he's doing like drum lessons and drum clinics, teaching kids drums. Awesome stuff. Everybody's staying plugged into music somewhat, but nobody really jumped to a band. Nobody went another touring band -- which kind of makes sense because we wound down and we ended the band because we were all kind of collaborated that we wanted to stop. As far as work -- the last year, when Todd came back -- I know he is now working at a coffee roasting company in Providence [R.I.], which is a pretty neat job. Corey -- I know Corey is working [at a] restaurant right now. He's like the manager at a restaurant.

That's a stressful job.

Yeah. Tough job. Neat little café place. Jeremy is always working on cars and houses, either with me and/or other people, and something like that. He's actually been trying to sell electric motorcycles and dirt bikes from a company out in California. That's about it.

What about James?

James and Dave, who wrote the CD with us -- wrote the past two CDs. They're actually both working at churches, two different churches, full-time, on salary. Dave's working full-time as a worship leader and that's his main duty, as well as helping to run the church. And then James plays music a lot in the band. He leads sometimes, but he's a big coordinator in his church. They're both on salary, full-time. It's cool.

So this new band you mentioned, do you know about who else will be involved?

I think right now, the only definite person I would say -- and even that -- well, no, it's definite, it's so grassroots right now. Things have taken a shift the past few months that I think -- a few practices that we've had, even those people aren't going to be in it. But the only definite person I can say is Todd right now. Todd is super talented, he's been one of my best buds for years and years, so that's just natural and awesome. So we'll see. He played guitar at the end of Life in Your Way, but he's also a great drummer so he can do either pretty easy. We'll see, though. We don't have a whole lot put together you know? I couldn't say that we have a full few songs with names, or even have them recorded, so we'll see where it goes. But hopefully by the end of the year or the next few months we'll have something together.