Fans were surprised (well, only a little given everything that’s happened) to learn that Dance Gavin Dance had supposedly ousted singer Jonny Craig. While the singer was the first to confirm the news, it didn’t take long for the band to release their own statement.
The remaining members of Dance Gavin Dance had the following to say about parting ways with Craig, as well as all of the events that lead to it:
“When Jonny rejoined Dgd, we were about to call it quits. Tired of touring and being away from home for 8 months of the year, we wanted to shake things up. We thought it’d be fun to do a dbm sequel with Jonny and go out on that. We recorded dbm2 and felt it would be a disservice to our fans not to let them hear the new record live.
We did a tour and felt rejuvenated but Jonny wasn’t in a good place. After trying to convince him into getting help over warped tour, we canceled a headliner in November/December 2011 and told him we wouldn’t tour until he sought out real help for his addiction. We got our good friend Matt Geise to fill in for a short run we did earlier this year while Jonny was in rehab. He was released and wanted to be out on the road immediately.
We weren’t sure how things would go so we only booked a small portion of the All Stars Tour to see if Jonny could still function as our lead singer. After a week and a half things were not going well. Everything came to a head when Jonny was publicly scolded by the owner of Sumerian Records for multiple offenses. It was then that we realized that our time with Jonny had reached its end.
We wish Jonny the best in his future endeavors but he will no longer be a part of DGD. We however will continue playing and writing music because it’s what we love doing.”
Craig indicated in his tweets that his ousting had to do with Dance Gavin Dance’s new music direction, and nothing to do with incident surrounding the All Stars Tour. That makes the band’s statement even more interesting, since they essentially say that the move had a lot to do with that very incident. As to who will replace Craig permanently is still unknown.
