Making a long-awaited return with their first-ever appearance at 2000trees Festival this summer, letlive. arrive as a changed band from the one that stepped away in 2017.
Their Sincerely Yours tour was initially interpreted as a final farewell but it’s become something else entirely. It is less of a goodbye and more of a recommitment to being present and in service of everything letlive. have always stood for.
Their journey to Upcote Farm comes during the first leg of a worldwide celebration of the soul-punk band after almost a decade away. Among a few carefully chosen stops, alongside Warped Tour and When We Were Young, 2000trees stands out. Why?
“It is everything I want out of a festival,” Jason explains, his enthusiasm building as he talks about the line-up, the forest setting and the festival’s independent roots.
“That’s what I want. I want people to be there because they want to fucking be there because they want to experience music with each other. They don’t necessarily need to take a photo and tell everyone they were there. They just need to experience it,” he adds.
As he scrolls through this year’s line-up, the singer is giddy. “I know the homies in Alexisonfire. They’re playing. Wade is sick. Love is Noise. I’ve been a proponent of that band for a while.”
He keeps reading. “Taking Back Sunday! Coheed! That’s so sick!? Fucking FIDLAR! They’re from my neck of the woods,” he exclaims.
He picks out Million Dead and La Dispute, too, but one name stops him in his tracks. “I adore Kneecap,” he says with a smile. “Everything about Kneecap is exactly why I play music. It is exactly why I speak truths. It’s exactly why I think that we are here to do something bigger than just this, than just our physical bodies.”
“I mean the essence of Kneecap,” he clarifies. “The music is sick, but there’s just so much more holistically powerful about Kneecap, and I think that will be the group that saves music. I think that’s the group. I’m calling it now.”
“Obviously, you put a lot on the line when you do that. I think that they have all the workings to be the most vital and critical pieces of music that I’ve ever seen. Ever. I believe that.”
It’s not a surprise that he sees a kindred spirit in the Irish rap trio. Their vision, politics and approach to music as cultural resistance all closely align with his own. Whether in letlive. or Fever 333, Jason has consistently spoken truth to power. His work has long served as a voice for the underrepresented, much like Kneecap’s.
Jason’s passion has always drawn from those who came before him – the emblem of the Black Panthers was stitched into the fabric of Fever 333 – but seeing Kneecap blaze their own revolutionary trail has clearly reignited something in him.
And he’s not wrong about 2000trees. This year’s edition is stacked. Alongside the bands Jason flagged, there’s Pvris headlining, Hot Milk closing out the Wednesday night and a double-bill of Kid Kapichi, too. Twin Atlantic, The Hunna, RØRY, Vukovi and Sprints join a host of rising alternative, punk and metal acts for what is shaping up to be an almighty few days in the Cotswolds.
But it’s letlive.’s name on the bill that casts one of the longest shadows.
“Everything about Kneecap is exactly why I play music. It is exactly why I speak truths”
Their return comes after seven years of silence. It was an abrupt statement in April 2017, acknowledging that, while they as a band may be over, their legacy would be eternal in the community they had built.
That break-up came just a year after releasing ‘If I’m The Devil…’, an album that hadn’t quite landed with the same force as the breakthrough ‘Fake History’ or the seminal ‘The Blackest Beautiful’. Tension had felt high for a while, but then there was always seemingly a big turnover of band members, too. And, within just a few weeks of the split, Jason was charting new territory with Fever 333.
“Admittedly, there’s a large amount of onus on me. It was largely my decision when that happened,” Jason admits, looking back at the announcement. “I said that the guys were more than welcome to continue without me but I just want to make it clear a lot of it had to do with me.”
He was just a kid in 2002 when he started the band, and it had become the way he processed life – the output largely being raw, visceral and loud.
“I started this project because I didn’t know how to talk about myself in a way that was… emotionally levelled or therapeutically,” he considers.
“A lot of it was just me thinking it was enough to write a sad song and to yell on stage, and then I’d be healed.”
“And what that did was collect, and there was a large aggregate result of things I hadn’t dealt with, and so, I was having a child, my first kid, and I was just hit with a massive realisation that I needed to be here for my kid and the track that I was on [wasn’t healthy]. There were a lot of people around me who had concern for me, for my health – physically, mentally, emotionally – and I hadn’t been able to see that; I actually thought that people just didn’t understand me.”
The struggle ran deeper than music. Even while letlive. were performing at their chaotic, combustible best, Jason was crumbling. He started to become “a little less agreeable,” as he puts it, when he was first trying to prioritise his health.
“I used to just take shit, and then I would snap. So, it seemed like I just snapped one day but it was certainly there was much, much more underneath the water of that iceberg,” he concedes. Part of walking away from letlive. was the self-preservation to be a better father, husband and friend.
Another force was pushing him away, too, though. As letlive. grew so did external controls that were threatening to dilute the sanctity of the band. While built on anti-corporate rage, they were slowly feeling the pressures of an industry machine they’d long opposed. Unfortunately, it’s a cycle Jason is starting to see creep into Fever 333, too.
“We’re stuck underneath this massive capitalist weight, and everyone is told they have to do things because we need to send the money up, and we need to send all the efforts up,” he explains.
It was stifling him then, and it’s threatening to happen again. “I had to step away to heal,” he admits. It’s why, only a few months later, he was jumping out the back of a van in the car park of a Randy’s Donuts with Fever 333. It had to be new. It had to be wild. And most of all – it had to be unfiltered.
In the years since letlive. went silent, Jason’s journey has been anything but steady. Grammy nominations. The murder of George Floyd. Fever 333 line-up changes. A return to his rap roots. A global pandemic. Raising a family. Rediscovering himself. “A high level of turbulence on the existential plane” is how he describes his recent mental health journey.
It’s a path that led to a reevaluation of what he wants from his career as an artist. It has to make people happy, including himself. That is non-negotiable. Then it has to be in service to the art and to his family.
The path also found him reconnecting with letlive.’s long-time guitarist, Jeff Sahyoun. It started, simply, with dinner. It was the kind of catch-up where the past, once heavy with obligations, pressure and expectations, begins to fall away.
“What we really came to realise was we are just friends,” Jason says. The years had stripped the noise away. Touring demands, label politics, inner-band tensions – all gone. What remained was a friendship. They started to hang out again. Jean Nascimento, another of their former long-term guitarists, joined. Soon, they were jamming in Jason’s garage in Venice with laptops open and amps humming. Ryan Jay Johnson, the band’s bassist, respectfully declined the invitation – his journey is taking a different route.
Still, something was forming, organically and quietly – at least as quietly as letlive. could ever be. For once, without pressure. “We just started kicking it. Honestly, we just started hanging out,” Jason explains.
The feeling started to come back between them. Jason refers to the three of them as “natural born sceptics” who, together, were always wary, insular and protective over the band. Gradually, as they got together more and more, they uncovered there were still solid foundations to letlive. from which they could build.
“We kind of started to return to that feeling: just remembering how it felt like us against the world,” he adds.
Despite that, Jason was honest with everyone – he didn’t know what any of this would be. “I know that we never did a farewell tour, so that was the first idea, but I don’t know what this is, and I don’t know what this is to become,” he recalls telling the band.
Then, almost seven years to the day, letlive. posted on their social media: “We shouldn’t have left you without one final dope beat to step to,” confirming their farewell shows and a re-issue of ‘The Blackest Beautiful’. It was DIY. No venues were booked. No polished PR rollout. Just a “come and get us” plea to promoters worldwide and a year to book the shows. A leap of faith.
Things went silent again. Behind the scenes, though, something was taking shape. Jason was adamant: whatever came next would be on their terms. “The reality is for us to go out after almost 10 years apart and just throw us back into a gruelling, the interminable, touring schedule that we used to be on, I actually think would be a disservice to the effort and disservice to what we’re actually trying to achieve,” he states.
Instead, they built a new vision. No endless grind. No compromise. Each show had to count. “We just wanted to make sure that when we go somewhere, we’re able to do the thing that we have always wanted to do as letlive. We’re just able to perform and able to connect, able to see some friends, able to meet new people,” Jason explains.
By the end of the year, they’ll touch down across Europe, Australia and North America and it’s really a litmus test for what comes next. “I don’t know what happens after this,” he reiterates. “It sparked like a farewell, and then we got together, and we started jamming music, and it’s not like we released anything, but who knows? Who knows what happens?
“I don’t want to prematurely put the fire out by wringing us dry over a year of touring,” he reasons.
Currently, with one warm-up show under their belt, Jason is eagerly and optimistically looking forward to what these shows will bring. “Everyone’s happy. We’re older now. The sort of more juvenile, young manhood, level of ego has certainly eroded, which is helpful in any situation,’ Jason explains.
“We had so much angst, and I think that now we’ve accepted all of that and why, and now we were able to shape that into something that is more of a tool than a hindrance, and we share that with each other.
“We’re all very grateful to be able to come back and have people care about songs that we wrote when we were completely different people in completely different times of our lives and when we played those songs, we and the people feel like no time has passed and that’s a real blessing.”
“That is not lost on me or anybody involved,” he reflects.
The mood within the band is what Jason has been hoping to rediscover: something easy and unburdened. “It feels like we’re in a fairly popular local band again. That’s what it feels like, and I fucking love that feeling!”
letlive. are back and ready to roar again. There’s a DIY ethos and an excitement to see where this can take them. The question that lingers is what this means for their frontman. Following a journey of pain, growth and healing, does reuniting letlive. come as some sort of redemption or closure?
He takes a moment before answering: “I need to prove to myself that I can be the person that I wanted to be in letlive. for real this time. That I can observe the person I was and not let him grab the wheel when I try this again and do this in a way that is not only as impactful but more so than before because I am healed, because I did the work that I mentioned through those records, because I had the experiences and the heartbreak and the joys that I yearned for on stage, because of all that shit that I did that really put me in a position of what seemed like it could all fucking fall over at any moment.”
He takes a breath. “I think that I want to prove to myself that I can step back into this role in a healthy way and I didn’t need to hold on to my pain to be good, to be an artist or to be accessible or to be able to connect with people.”
He adds, “I think I misidentified a lot of my sadness with anger and volatility,” and compares it to the “Dark Passenger” that Dexter, the fictional serial killer / anti-hero, refers to. “It still exists within me,” he says. “But I’ve got space for it now.”
Revisiting old songs in rehearsals has forced him to confront how far he’s come. “There’s a few songs that I certainly sing and it really, really tries me,” he admits. “Like Dark Passenger is taking its seatbelt off. Reaching over to the wheel and even on my lap and trying to take over the car. But I’m able to witness that and almost make more space in that emotional vehicle to where I’m not so close to the bad parts,” he adds, laughing at his own metaphor. “It’s a cleaner burning fuel now. It’s still like fucking really fiery when I play these songs, but it’s a cleaner burning fuel.”
Revisiting ‘I’ve Learned to Love Myself’, the opening track from ‘If I’m The Devil…’, is one of those moments for Jason. “I’ve learned to love myself / I’ve learned to love my self-abandonment,” he cries. “There was so much irony and satire in that song,” he says, looking back at it. It’s a line he first used in the song ‘Younger’ on the album previous, but here it’s crystallised. It’s clearly an important idea for Jason and one which has only grown more power in the 11 or so years since he first wrote it. It was once a line he was projecting, but now it arrives for him with the clarity of someone who’s lived enough to mean it.
“If I get to really love myself, even in my darkest and most difficult times, and be able to love the ‘bad’ parts and the ‘uglier’ parts of me, that’s gonna be a really beautiful thing once I do, and I’m actually able to say it and mean it versus trying to project it,” he explains.
With distance, much of what Jason sang across letlive’s discography has only grown more powerful, too. The years away have deepened the meaning. Whether it’s part of a cultural awakening, one that’s begun to question millennia-old systems of control – or simply the raw exposure to injustice we now carry in our pockets – letlive.’s message feels more urgent and essential than ever.
While never claiming prophecy, Jason has always been attuned to those systems of oppression and actively fought against them. It’s one thing to highlight those issues, but for him, it’s about how to turn that into action.
Revolution can come in many forms, and the return of letlive. at 2000trees might just be an opportunity for one. Jason believes “a spiritual and metaphysical level of revolution” is possible, and it’s not “fucking sound baths in Venice Beach and fucking patchouli.” It’s not about protest but about presence. It’s communion.
“I’m talking about the human experience that we all share, and that can be identified at a show. Can be identified when we all sing along and you feel the vibrations move through you and the person next to you and the person on stage, and you find this connection that you then leave that venue and you realise that life isn’t just my house, my job or me having to pay taxes or fucking whatever,” he offers.
That connection is what defines letlive.. Always has. Always will. Yes, the band stopped. But the idea didn’t. The community didn’t. The connection didn’t. Over the years, even during their silence as a band, their logo continued to surface – in art, graffiti and tattoos. Their legacy held strong.
Their return, then, comes as an opportunity to celebrate all of that again. It’s an opportunity to realign with what letlive. stands for: defiance, connection, vulnerability and hope. It comes with the whole band, not just Jason, ready to perform in service of those values.
“I think that we’re doing this because we think that we can serve as letlive.,” Jason explains. “So this isn’t for just the people, it’s not for us, it’s this idea. We feel like we’re in the position now to properly service and serve that idea, and that’s really why we’re here.”
So this July, letlive. will return to the stage with shows in London and an appearance at 2000trees. It might be their farewell. It might be the beginning of something new.
Jason’s journey is about finding comfort in being less certain of what happens next. He no longer needs to define what comes next. He just needs to show up, mean it and give it everything he’s got.
Whatever happens, letlive. will show up with fierce passion, sincerity and an abundance of llove.
2000trees will take place from 9th-12th July at Upcote Farm, near Cheltenham.
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