Keith Buckley Details ETID’s Breakup to Packed Solo Crowd: “I Was at the Top of My F***ing Game…I Did Not See This Coming”

Airing your band’s dirty laundry on stage is a really messed up thing to do, especially when your family is involved. But that’s exactly what former Every Time I Die frontman Keith Buckley did at one of his ‘An Evening With…’ solo shows in London the other night, telling a captive audience his side of the band’s recent breakup.

For those of you who were on vacation during the whole thing, here are the nuts and bolts of what happened:

• Every Time I Die canceled a number of shows so that Keith could focus on his mental health.
• The band announced they’d broken up when it was clear that Keith was going to release legal documents without their permission/agreement.
• Keith released a long, confusing statement that basically portrayed him as the victim of mistreatment within the band.
• Then bassist Steve Micciche released his own statement, which was a much more coherent explanation, saying that Keith basically went off the deep end while the band busted their asses to accommodate him.

Now, Keith took a moment to address a packed crowd in London this past Monday, February 7th, to further explain his side of the story. And once again, he portrayed himself as an open-minded and hard-working addict in recovery, and the other band members as a Big Bad who just couldn’t handle it.

You can read Keith’s full statement below, via Metal Hammer. And look, we do not know the exact details of Every Time I Die’s break-up beyond what the band members have told us. However, we will say this:

• Airing your grievances with your band onstage is a small, classless look.
• Doing it at a solo show is an even worse look, because you’ve basically surrounded yourself with people who paid to see you and only you. You’ve put yourself in an echo chamber, and that’s lazy and disrespectful.
• Unlike Steve Micciche’s statement, Keith’s statements continue to be full of coded, flowery language that never gets to the point. It seems like he’s living out the drama in his own head, while the other band members are doing it in real life.

Here’s what Keith told a room of his fans:

“The term ‘artist’ never came up in my family. We never referred to each other as artists, we just kinda existed. And it wasn’t until I got sober that I realized that that artistic spark is fundamental to every venture that you do as a human being, and if that spark isn’t there, then there’s no energy to push you into the next thing.

“So once I got sober and I realized that that spark in me had just been caked with resentment and anger and confusion and a lack of faith in anything, I saw it for what it was. And it was this poor little thing that was inside of me from the beginning, that made me want to be a writer, that made me want to be a musician, that made me want to go on tour, that then made me figure out how to deal with life in the public eye…

“There’s been something that’s been driving me on. I think that it’s an objective fact that Every Time I Die existed for longer than most bands, so there was something in that formula that was alchemic, that was completely singular to us. And I think it was the rivalry… I think it was just those two forces constantly battling which kept pushing the band along. And once I got sober, and I realized that that was a very antiquated way to power shit… [I thought] we don’t need to push the band forward with negativity, we can talk about things now….

“I went to the band, and I went to the manager at the time, and I said, ’I fucked up a lot.’ A lot of it was because of my drinking, a lot of it was exacerbated by a co-dependent marriage, but I said I’m on to that now, now we can really just address the problems that aren’t coming in from any outside sources, now it’s us. That’s all I ever tried to do….

“I really felt that that was was a good thing good thing for everyone, because I knew that there was friction between Jordan and I. There were a lot of things that happened during the pandemic that still haven’t come out between he and I that led to this, there were multiple attempts at communication, therapy and everything. I love therapy… and I went to it, and I encouraged it for the band, but it was cut off, and I didn’t know why.

“I just feel like I was looked at in bad faith. And I understand that, because I was an alcoholic and I did a lot of terrible things, and so it’s easy to see someone who’s constantly fucking up their own life and just realize that every decision they make is gonna suck, no matter what… And I know that that bad faith filter had been put on for 20 years…

“All I hoped to do was get a clean start and say, take all those filters away and try to look at me now as someone who is totally changing the way they’re living and thinking and speaking and interacting and communicating, and give it a chance: just pretend that I’m not the guy that you got used to. And they couldn’t do it. And it broke my heart.

“On that [final Every Time I Die] tour… it was undeniable that I was performing better than I ever have. I was at the top of my fucking game. And I did not see this coming… I was led to believe that everything I was doing was working for the betterment of the band.

“I wanted the band to come out of the pandemic shot out of a fucking cannon, Because I knew that [2021 album] Radical was going to do it for us, it was going to be the one that finally got us to a Mastodon level, or whatever… I’d come out of a marriage with a new approach, and a new confidence to life…and I just wanted the band to have their time to shine.

“It’s heartbreaking, heartbreaking. However, it is not the end of anything: I can’t even say what the state of the band is right now.

“I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that, right now, this is exactly where I fucking want to be, and I’m very thankful to be here.”