With the Tim Lambesis trial going on for the better part of the last year, the rest of the band kept relatively quiet. Besides Lambesis' wife and kids, I always felt the most sympathy for his band members, whose careers were tarnished through no wrongdoing of their own.

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I was elated to run into guitarist Nick Hipa at the NAMM convention a few weeks back. Nick is one of the true nice guys in the metal scene. He was all smiles and as upbeat as ever. It was great to catch up and hear what he'd been up to although he understandably seemed a bit hesitant to really get into any details.

While at NAMM, he also spoke with guitar legend George Lynch, of Dokken fame. Fun fact: Hipa dates Lynch's daughter, and I assume Lynch guilted Nick into his first on-screen interview since this entire ordeal but kept the discussion mostly to playing guitar.

If you pay close attention to Nick's phrasing, you can get a hint of what the future holds for the band:

"With As I Lay Dying it was very much a specific sort of genre"

"Maybe one of these, especially now that we’ve got more time, we’ll be able to explore that"

Two quotes from the interview that stuck out. Maybe I'm reading too much into the interview, but he was referring to the band in the past tense. Maybe, in the context of his statement about being classified as metalcore, he was talking about a specific time in the band's history, and not necessarily implying he is no longer in the band. But to me, it certainly seemed like he was hinting at his feelings on the future of the band.

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We may never see As I Lay Dying live again but one thing is certain, Nick promised me that, one way or another, you will hear from him again musically, and that made me really happy. He's a great dude and it would be a bummer not to have his and the rest of the band's presence in the scene anymore.