Underøath’s Spencer Chamberlain’s recently did an interview on his new Sleepwave project and opened up about how he lost everything following Underøath’s breakup last year. Read below:
What do you mean you lost “everything?”
Like, everything. I have no car, I have no house: I have nothing. I have the songs that I’ve been working on—that’s it. I’m not the kind of guy who blew money. I didn’t buy nice cars; I didn’t buy anything. I just had a string of bad luck. A tree fell on my car and smashed it, and it wasn’t covered by insurance. In Underoath, we all bought houses about eight months before the market crashed. You buy a house for X amount of dollars, then eight months later, it’s worth half. At a certain point, when taxes and insurance went up in Florida, my mortgage doubled. I wasn’t prepared for the Underoath breakup, so I didn’t have a job to go to. Tim was working at Merchline everyday, Chris was working at a church, and I just kept working on my music. At one point, I was seriously laughing, sitting on my dining room table, with two gold records on my wall, emptying out my piggy bank to eat a 99-cent burger, for the first time in two days. I was just like, “This is ridiculous. This is insane.” All I had were those songs.Some people would be like, “Why didn’t you get a job?” I haven’t worked anywhere but Underoath since I was 18. I didn’t even have a car to deliver a pizza in. The only thing I could do at this point in my life was put all of my chips in one basket. And that basket is myself. I believe in myself; I believe in music and what it can do for people. I’ve been around the world many times and people who don’t even know how to say certain lines of English have my words tattooed across their throat. I know what music can do. I also know in order to gain everything you have to be willing to lose it all—and I’m totally fine with that. Does it suck, and is it uncomfortable at times? Yeah, for sure. But I think it’s the only way this project will ever do what it’s supposed to do. I had to learn how to start for the bottom again. It was a long process.