While you wouldn’t know it from looking at their Facebook page, A Life Once Lost have broken up. In an interview with Doylestown PA magazine Fig, frontman Robert Meadows reveals that he’s stepped aside from the band to focus on carpentry. On the eve of his first art opening, Meadows discussed his decision to leave the band:
I feel like I need to step back a little bit from that to just better myself as a person. I just felt like I wasn’t really able to handle that aspect of being in a band or that commitment. I really had to put so many things aside. I’m 33 years old now and I feel like my life has been on hold since I was 19. I’m not complaining about where it’s taken me, it’s been pretty awesome. I’ve been able to put out 6 records, film videos, see countries I would have never seen before and I’ve taken a band further than a lot of people have in their lifetime. It’s a lot of fun and it feels really rewarding.
Meadows states that there were a lot of things that he wanted to do that he hasn’t been able to because of his commitment to ALOL, and now he can focus on those things. Right now, it’s manifesting itself in “Mount,” a project in which Meadows has placed concert posters he’s collected into window frames, and is displaying them at Doylestown’s Estetiks Boutique.
You do something for such a long time, it ends and you’re just kinda like…shit. What now? It’s wild. Ending it, to me, is like being released from prison. I have to step out into the world and find myself again. All I knew was getting in a van, sleeping on floors and playing shows at shitty bars for 14 years. But, at the same time, I wouldn’t have changed anything. While I was on the road, all my friends were going to school, becoming teachers and doctors, having kids…all that. I’m really envious. But, the stories I have are pretty awesome. It’s really hard to NOT do something that you’ve trained yourself to do, for so long. It’s hard to break habits like that.
It definitely comes as a surprise, especially after the band signed with Season of Mist and released last year’s Ecstatic Trance, which was well-received. The band were playing as recently as June (at the Scion Rock Fest). For Meadows to acknowledge it for the first time in a local paper as opposed to via a publicist is interesting as well. But while there are no immediate plans for him to do anything musical, he states that the band could return.
Time heals all wounds, so I’m sure that when things pass we’ll get out there again. I just need to re-energize and re-focus. It’s for the best. I can look at it like a downer, or a big fuckin’ mess, but it’s really a just a hurdle. I have to be able to jump to this ‘next level’.
[via theprp.com]
