AS I LAY DYING TRIVIA
Trivia
As I Lay Dying first came to Japan in February 2005, playing the Extreme the Dojo Vol.12 event alongside Shadows Fall and Every Time I Die. In March 2006 BARKS announced a second visit, as special guest on Story of the Year's Japan tour that May: five shows running from Big Cat in Osaka on 23 May through Drum Be-1 in Fukuoka, Club Quattro in Hiroshima and Club Quattro in Nagoya to Shibuya-AX in Tokyo on 29 May. Drummer Jordan Mancino told Gekirock in the summer of 2007 that Japan was always fun, and that since they had managed a trip to Tokyo Disneyland last time, he hoped to go again if they got the chance.
As I Lay Dying played Loud Park two years running. According to the festival's own site, Loud Park 06 was held at Makuhari Messe, Halls 9 to 11, on 14 and 15 October 2006, and As I Lay Dying opened the Big Rock Stage at 11 a.m. on the second day, the earliest slot on that day's timetable. Loud Park 07 moved to Saitama Super Arena, and the band played its first day, 20 October 2007, on a bill that also had Heaven and Hell, Blind Guardian, Trivium and Machine Head. Tim Lambesis told Gekirock that the year before they had opened the day with 35 minutes, whereas this time they had 50, enough to fit in songs from another album. He felt the band's steady work in Japan had paid off, and was surprised that the crowd sang along to new songs, which usually take a while to catch on in America.
From 10 to 12 November 2008 the band played the Japanese leg of Taste of Chaos at Shinkiba Studio Coast. Gekirock reported that the Japanese band MUCC headlined and that only three acts played all three days: MUCC, Story of the Year and As I Lay Dying. Talking to Gekirock that December, Tim Lambesis contrasted the metal crowd at Loud Park with the more punk-leaning audience that came with Story of the Year, which let the band reach people who would not normally hear it. By then, he said, they had played Japan five times, at Loud Park twice, at events such as Extreme the Dojo and now at Taste of Chaos, but never on a headline tour of their own. In 2012 Nick Hipa said it had been far too long since their last visit and that Japan was where he most wanted to play.
An Ocean Between Us, released on 21 August 2007, entered the Billboard 200 at No. 8. Billboard's report of 29 August 2007 called it the band's best debut by a distance, with 39,000 copies in its first week and No. 1 on Top Rock Albums; their previous high had been No. 35, for Shadows Are Security in 2005. Billboard's chart history also shows the album at No. 1 on Top Hard Rock Albums. In Japan for Loud Park 07 that October, Tim Lambesis told Gekirock he had not seen it coming at all; the band had always thought of itself as an underground act.
"Nothing Left", the second track on An Ocean Between Us, was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards in 2008. According to grammy.com, it was up against King Diamond's "Never Ending Hill", Machine Head's "Aesthetics Of Hate", Shadows Fall's "Redemption" and Slayer's "Final Six", and Slayer took the award. It is the only nomination grammy.com lists for As I Lay Dying.
This Is Who We Are, a three-disc DVD set, came out on Metal Blade Records in April 2009. Blabbermouth.net reported that it sold 4,200 copies in its first week in the US, good for No. 2 on the Top Music Videos chart, and that it entered at No. 3 in Canada, where it had already shipped platinum. The RIAA's database shows it certified Gold on 18 May 2009, listed as a video boxset; it is the only As I Lay Dying title in that database.
Shaped By Fire (2019) reached No. 6 on the German albums chart, and it is the only As I Lay Dying album in Billboard's record of that chart. In the US it peaked at No. 50 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on Top Hard Rock Albums. The September 2026 announcement of the self-titled album likewise lists top-10 placings on the official German albums chart and the Billboard 200 among the band's achievements.
The band's name comes from William Faulkner's novel of the same title, but the link stops there. In an interview Metal Underground published in April 2005, Tim Lambesis said the band "stole the name" from the book and that its meaning had nothing to do with the band's. He granted that the novel was well crafted but found it gloomy and not to his taste. Naming a band is trickier than people think, he added, and back then nothing better came to mind. He was happy with the choice all the same: listeners can find their own meaning in it, and above all he simply liked how it sounds.
Beneath the Encasing of Ashes was recorded only two months after the band got going. That is the band's own account, given in January 2006 when Blabbermouth.net reported that the Pluto Records debut and the songs from the split EP, recorded a year later, would be reissued together on a single Metal Blade Records CD. The result, A Long March: The First Recordings, came out in May 2006 and reached No. 129 on the Billboard 200. The debut era turned up again later: Decas (2011) includes a re-recorded medley, "Beneath the Encasing (Re-Recorded Medley)".
Asked by Metal Underground in April 2005 for his favourite As I Lay Dying song, Tim Lambesis gave two. The one he most enjoyed playing live was "94 Hours", because it is "really the sound that we're going for". For lyrics he picked "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier", an understated song that does little on stage but one he holds especially dear. Both come from Frail Words Collapse (2003): Metal Blade Records lists "94 Hours" as its opening track and "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier" as track six. In the same interview Lambesis said the next album, Shadows Are Security, was closer to Frail Words Collapse than to the debut.
When An Ocean Between Us came out in August 2007, drummer Jordan Mancino told Japan's Gekirock that Converge's Jacob Bannon had drawn the covers of the band's last three records, that one included. The look had shifted a little this time, Mancino said, but the subject matter carried on from the earlier sleeves. Bannon stayed on for the next album as well: the credits of The Powerless Rise, released by Metal Blade Records in May 2010, name him for its artwork and design.
Since Shaped By Fire (2019) the band's covers have come from Corey Meyers. Blabbermouth.net's September 2019 rundown of that album's credits names him as the artist; the 2024 announcement of Through Storms Ahead says the art was his "once again"; and the September 2026 announcement of the self-titled As I Lay Dying, with a February 2027 release date, introduces him as the band's visual collaborator ever since the single "My Own Grave", a song that also appears on Shaped By Fire.
Talking to MTV.com in May 2005, in remarks Blabbermouth.net passed on, Tim Lambesis said the band had been short of time and money on the previous record, as new bands are, but this time could make the album the way it wanted. Jordan Mancino had improved yet again as a drummer, the guitar work had grown much more intricate, and Lambesis spent most of his own effort on arrangement, making sure songs that now had more technique and more melody in them still stuck in the mind. Metal Blade Records released Shadows Are Security on 14 June 2005. It is the earliest of the band's entries in Billboard's Billboard 200 chart history, with a peak of No. 35, and Blabbermouth.net, citing Nielsen SoundScan, put its US sales at 82,000 by late July 2005 and 174,000 by late January 2006.
The video for "Confined", the first single from Shadows Are Security, was shot at an abandoned Air Force base in Tustin, California. According to Blabbermouth.net in May 2005, more than fourteen hours of the band performing were filmed, in the rain. Tim Lambesis said the clip followed the lyrics, whose theme is how everything people work hard to build can be overturned in a moment. The concept he described has a child spending the whole day on a chalk drawing, so absorbed that he misses the sunset and the approaching storm, until the rain comes and washes the picture away.
As I Lay Dying made their Ozzfest debut in the summer of 2005. BARKS describes their slot as third on the second stage, below headliner Rob Zombie and Killswitch Engage. Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden were on that year's tour as well, and Tim Lambesis had said in the spring that touring with legends such as Iron Maiden was a chance that would not come round twice. In an Indianapolis Star interview that Blabbermouth.net picked up, the then 24-year-old Lambesis compared his band's position with Ozzy Osbourne's in 1970: Osbourne's music, too, had been heavier than its era was ready for, and As I Lay Dying were finding it hard to get onto ordinary rock radio. A year later they headlined the 2006 Sounds of the Underground tour, which BARKS had announced in March 2006 with In Flames as co-headliner.
The video for "The Sound of Truth", from An Ocean Between Us, won Best Music Video at the 2009 Hollywood Discovery Awards, which pick winners from the Hollywood Film Festival's finalists; Blabbermouth.net reported that the ceremony was held at ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. It was directed by Brian Thompson, who had also made the futuristic clip for "Nothing Left", and filmed at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California. Its story picks up where the "Nothing Left" video ended: the band came up with it and Thompson refined it, and its subject is the hypocrisy and irony of a crumbling future society. Tim Lambesis credited the many people behind the video and said Thompson's crew had carried the band's idea well past anything it had pictured.
Josh Gilbert, on bass and clean vocals, joined just before An Ocean Between Us was recorded. As Tim Lambesis told it, the songs were already finished by then, and Gilbert had been the lead singer and guitarist in another band. Jordan Mancino said in 2007 that no bassist before him had recorded with the band without also taking part in the writing, and that Gilbert handled every part, clean vocals included. Gilbert himself told Gekirock at Loud Park 07 that until then he had been at university in Alabama, two terms in, playing music as a hobby and paying his own way on tour, so being paid to tour felt unreal. On The Powerless Rise (2010) he again sang all the clean vocals, and Phil Sgrosso said that from the demos on, his voice sounded far stronger than on the previous album.
The band's first DVD, This Is Who We Are, was built to tell its story in order. Shortly before filming in December 2008, Tim Lambesis told Gekirock that they would shoot three shows at three different venues within about an hour of home in California, starting in a club that held just 150 people to look back at where they began and finishing in a 2,000-capacity room to capture the band as it was then. Interviews with former members, friends and family were already done; the hard part, he joked, was cutting twenty hours of material down to about three. Metal Blade Records' product page lists DVD 1 as the documentary "From The Beginning", DVD 2 as "Now – Live Progression", a sixteen-song live set, and DVD 3 as music videos and bonus features. According to Blabbermouth.net, the three discs were produced and directed by Denise Korycki, who made Cannibal Corpse's Centuries of Torment DVD. The title is shared with the closing track of An Ocean Between Us, "This Is Who We Are".
The Powerless Rise again had Killswitch Engage's Adam Dutkiewicz in the producer's chair. Phil Sgrosso told Gekirock in May 2010 that the band had spoken with roughly ten producers before settling on Dutkiewicz once more; he gladly agreed and came with ideas of his own about the arrangements. When Blabbermouth.net reported in October 2009 that the band was about to start recording, Tim Lambesis wrote online that most of their earlier albums had been written within a few months, so this time they would record as many songs as they could and finish around the New Year, spreading the writing out. Sgrosso said the album took the best part of a year, with the mixing put on hold while the band toured Australia and New Zealand. The title and the lyrics were Lambesis's, Sgrosso noted, but as he read it, the title says that people who change how they live can be of help across the world, and that the powerless will eventually rise. Released in May 2010, the album reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200.
For Awakened (2012) As I Lay Dying worked with producer Bill Stevenson for the first time. Loudwire introduced him as the drummer of Descendents and Black Flag, known for his work with punk acts such as NOFX, Anti-Flag and Rise Against. In Metal Blade Records' biography the band explains that it was looking for someone from outside metal who still knew the underground well enough to get what the band was about. Nick Hipa told Gekirock that where Adam Dutkiewicz had been completely of their world, Stevenson was no metal guy at all, and some things, blast beats among them, had to be explained to him. A phone call settled it all the same: struck by his personality, the band heard him lay out, point by point, how their earlier records could have been better, from the drum tone and the vocal sound to the dynamics of the whole, and were sure he was the right choice. Earlier albums had taken an average of two months in the studio; this time the band had a window of three and a half weeks between tours to track eleven songs. Awakened reached No. 11 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on Top Hard Rock Albums. The year before, Decas had included a cover of the Descendents' "Coffee Mug".
Before Awakened came out, the only new song As I Lay Dying played live was the opening track, "Cauterize", which had already been released. Nick Hipa explained to Gekirock in September 2012 that the band did not want fans' first impression of a new song to come from a poor-quality recording of a live performance posted on YouTube before the real version was out. The video for "A Greater Foundation" had already been shot, he said, and the band would add that song to the set once the video was released. That April, Loudwire had announced the band for the main stage of the summer's Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, alongside Slipknot, Slayer and Motörhead.
Decas, released on 8 November 2011 to mark the band's tenth anniversary, gathers three new songs, covers and remixes. Loudwire listed the covers: Slayer's "War Ensemble", Judas Priest's "Hellion" and "Electric Eye", and the Descendents' "Coffee Mug". Metal Blade Records' track list opens with the new songs "Paralyzed", "From Shapeless to Breakable" and "Moving Forward", follows the covers with "Beneath the Encasing (Re-Recorded Medley)", and closes with four remixes by Innerpartysystem, Benjamin Weinman, Kelly "Carnage" Cairns and Big Chocolate, one song each from Frail Words Collapse ("Elegy"), Shadows Are Security ("Confined"), An Ocean Between Us ("Wrath Upon Ourselves") and The Powerless Rise ("The Blinding of False Light"). With the release the band announced the A Decade of Destruction tour, running from Long Island on 20 November to a hometown finish in San Diego on 16 December, with Of Mice and Men, The Ghost Inside, Iwrestledabearonce and Sylosis. Nick Hipa said in 2012 that the band had toured almost without a break since The Powerless Rise, stopping only to record Decas. Decas reached No. 61 on the Billboard 200.
"We Are The Dead", track four on Through Storms Ahead, features two guest vocalists: Alex Terrible of Slaughter to Prevail and Tom Barber of Chelsea Grin and Darko. Both also appear in its video, which arrived with the album's announcement in September 2024. In that announcement Phil Sgrosso described it as the heaviest corner of the album, a showcase for the thrash side the band still works into its melodic sound, and as "the meanest we've ever gone"; that, he said, was why they brought in two of deathcore's leading voices. The video was the band's third collaboration with Tom Flynn.
In March 2020 As I Lay Dying released "Destruction or Strength", a song recorded during the sessions for Shaped By Fire (2019) that had gone unreleased. Blabbermouth.net reported that it was available as a pay-what-you-want download on Bandcamp, alongside a T-shirt bearing the single's artwork. The band's Bandcamp page says that all proceeds from the song and the shirt would be donated: part to its technicians and production staff, who had lost income as live events shut down, and the rest to Feeding San Diego, which was getting food to students who had relied on school meals, to older people and to local workers left without jobs. Nobody had to pay, the band added; it simply hoped some unheard music might lift people's spirits.
In October 2025, with the single "Echoes", As I Lay Dying introduced a line-up of Tim Lambesis on vocals, Chris Clancy on bass and clean vocals, Bill Hudson and Don Vedda on guitar and Tim Yeung on drums. Loudwire's rundown gave their backgrounds: Clancy plays in Mutiny Within and is also an experienced producer, mixer and engineer; Hudson's bands include NorthTale and I Am Morbid; Vedda was formerly of Jamie's Elsewhere; Yeung is a former drummer of Morbid Angel and Divine Heresy; and both Hudson and Yeung are listed with Tommy Vext. In the band's announcement Hudson said he had met Lambesis almost twenty years earlier and had played in several bands with Yeung, and relished the chance to play alongside several friends of more than fifteen years' standing. The self-titled As I Lay Dying, with a February 2027 release date, was produced by Clancy and Lambesis.
In April 2005 Tim Lambesis told Metal Underground about Clockwork Recordings, a label he spoke of as their own. It began, he said, when he met a younger band with plenty of drive but none of the breaks As I Lay Dying had enjoyed at the start, and wanted to put their record out: Life in Pictures, who had shared a few tours with them and whose small-town origins had kept them off the industry's radar. He expected to run into other bands like them. Life in Pictures had also played the first five shows of the tour As I Lay Dying were on at the time of the interview.
In 2005 As I Lay Dying had no official MySpace page. Tim Lambesis told Metal Underground that the profiles there were run by people with no connection to the band who were pretending to be them, so fans would tell him they had talked to him on MySpace and he had no idea what they meant. Some of the members had personal accounts, he said, but there was no real As I Lay Dying MySpace.
The first record Jordan Mancino ever bought was Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction, and the first concert he went to was Neil Diamond's, though he admitted to Gekirock in August 2007 that he had been too young at the time to remember much of it. He started playing in bands simply because he loved heavy music, and of all the metal, hardcore and rock drummers who influenced him, the one he would single out is Pantera's Vinnie Paul.