Warnings to Tim Lambesis ‘Fell on Deaf Ears,’ Says As I Lay Dying Ex-Bandmate

Imprisoned for hiring a hit man to kill his estranged wife, former As I Lay Dying lead singer Tim Lambesis has insisted his fellow rockers failed to reach out to him before he was convicted of the heinous crime.

“They were all pretty aware of what was going on. But none of them called me out on it,” Lambesis told Alternative Press in an interview before his conviction.

“Looking back, I wish they had been like, ‘Yo, dude, is this really how you want your life to unfold?’ I understand it was awkward. ‘We know he’s cheating on his wife, we know he’s going to end his marriage, we know he’s on steroids.’ They all definitely knew I had [strayed] from my marriage and at least some of them know about the steroids.”

Now, ex-bandmate Nick Hipa is setting the record straight.

Hipa would like to put the horror story behind him, but he sat down with The Weeklings last week to make it clear to the Christian heavy metal world—and everybody else—that Lambesis was well aware of how his bandmates felt about what he did. Hipa called Lambesis’ behavior a complicated dynamic. Preferring to stay silent, As I Lay Dying rockers only responded publicly to Lambesis after he started making untrue claims.

“We would always choose the path of silence over trying to create drama, but when somebody challenges you like that and says things that are simply false, you have to set the record straight and in both circumstances we said something, it’s because it was instigated,” Hipa said.

For example, Lambesis, now a self-professed atheist, claimed he wasn’t the first guy in As I Lay Dying to stop being a Christian. He says he was the third and the other two stopped talking about it.

“We talked about whether to keep taking money from the ‘Christian market,'” Lambesis said. “We had this bizarrely ‘noble’ thing, like, ‘Well, we’re not passing along any bad ideas. We’re just singing about real-life stuff. Those kids need to hear about real life, because they live in a bubble.'”

Hipa said he has no desire to speak of Lambesis’ character as he and his bandmates had known it for the past few years. He and other As I Lay Dying members now have a new band—and a new singer. Wovenwar’s debut album is ready to hit the market. But Hipa did shed some light on the past.

“Clearly he needs a lot of time to work on some things and we had tried our hardest for years to pull him aside and get him to see things the way they were and not actually the way he thought they should be and it just didn’t work, to the point where we felt like our voices were falling on deaf ears,” he says. “And no pun intended—that’s an As I Lay Dying song—but we had just lost any sort of hope in getting through to him.

“Even still, when this all went down, we tried to just move on with our lives. I wish him the best—I was like ‘Dude, you have to figure a lot of things out’—but for one reason or another, I don’t know if he was threatened by the fact that we were starting a new band or that he thought we were trying to continue as As I Lay Dying, but he just chose to say things that diminished what we were doing. He was trying to hinder some of the progress we were trying to make personally, apart from him, and it’s just unfair because it’s very unnecessary. So our responses were warranted only in the sense that he was publicly trying to discredit us people and as a new band moving forward.”