AS I LAY DYING guitarist talks about 'christian metal' tag

I love bands like this that are Christ followers, yet they tour and perform with some pretty dark bands. I could name several just like them. Flyleaf, P.O.D., Blindside...and I could go on. What better place to be an example than touring with Korn, Ozzy, etc.

I just read a lengthy interview of the guitarist from AS I LAY DYING...and the interviewer asked him the "christian band' question. Check it out:

Blasting-Zone.com: All things considered, do you feel AS I LAY DYING is a Christian metal band? It seems the group gets lumped into the genre without necessarily displaying a lot of the atypical characteristics…

Nick: "Yeah, we do. It's hard because a lot of the bands that are vocal about being Christian bands tend to cater to a very Christian audience…by pretty much playing every Christian festival under the sun and only playing with other Christian bands. All of us in the band are Christian dudes and we're vocal about it and I think our lifestyles and our lyrics reflect that. But at the same time, we also tend to opt to play in the normal music scene because that's what we love doing. I think it's just easier to give yourself that label and succeed in a Christian market than it is to do what every other band does and play in the real world. At the end of the day, we're just a band, but if you really get into it… we're vocal about what we believe in, I guess. Everyone has their own beliefs, but you don't necessarily label someone that type of band just because they believe that. I would say we're just a straight-up metal band that just happens to believe in all these things. I don't care about being lumped into a category. It seems like the harder you try to disprove something, the more you just kinda get thrown into it. We just focus on writing and recorded albums that we're stoked about and then just touring off of them. We leave the menial stuff to whoever feels like handling it."