Chad Taylor
August 30 at 5:58am

"LIVE is not the same without Ed,” this statement has been written many times of the walls of social media and is a dead-on accurate statement filled with 100% factual truth. And it’s not really much of a statement at all is it?

I think what these authors are really trying to say, is that they want the good feelings and memories of their past to stay in tack. They don’t want the band that created the music to their first kiss, prom dance, getting laid, birthing, or making of their children to change. LIVE touched so many aspects of peoples lives that they simply want to hold on to those moments and “how could these jackass band members be so selfish!”

I get it!

But there is also a completely different message being sent at the same time. What these authors are also saying is that they’d like the band to fake our allegiance and loyalty to each other so that they can feel more comfortable. That we should return our former lead singer to a broken creative process that yielded personal pain, and more importantly produced uninspired music, just so they can have things as they were.

If you read that, you might understand why Chad Gracey would occasionally tell these authors to get the fuck off his Facebook page. Why there could be some hostility in his tone. Either way, there is a self-serving mechanism in all human beings to protect the things we love. In fact, the one and only unifying quality we may have is the band itself. It’s incredible that so many want to hold onto it.

None of us want to see relationships to the things and people we love end but we have to face the reality that this happens hundreds of thousands of times per day. Our creative relationship as a band had devolved to where it had no integrity left and the only value was the substantial income generated by standing on stage with people who stopped caring for each other. To continue forward would have been grossly undervaluing the importance of the art, and of course, vile in that it would be akin to stealing from our fans. To the bands credit we didn't let this happen. We broke it up, broke it down, retooled and rebuilt it from the ground up (I'm hearing Million Dollar Man). The new LIVE simply put, is not the same.

Consider that our primary motivation was to find happiness (I believe we accomplished this), and secondly we wanted to work in a healthy environment (I believe we accomplished this), third we wanted to return to our roots to create passionate music integral to our journey (I believe we accomplished this), and fourth, we wanted an honest, open relationship with our fans (how are we doing?).

I’d like everyone to consider that we’re human and have lived lives filled with all types of perfect imperfection. It’s our connectivity to this push and pull that births our songs. Our journey just happens to include the end of one era, and the beginning of another. I hope our fans will stick around and judge us from our ability to provoke the ‘now’ mind rather than just the distant memories from albums in our past. After all, we’re not called previously recorded but LIVE.

You can preorder the new LIVE album The Turn at http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/live