Do you regret breaking up when you did?
I think we all kind of do. It was a different scene back then. A touring band in a van could not make a living. A lot of these kids today are doing well by anyone’s standards.
Do I regret breaking up when we did? A little bit, hindsight being what it is, but maybe we would have lasted a few more years and fizzled out. Maybe the getting back together wouldn’t have happened the way it did.
How does playing shows today compare with playing back in your heyday?
Oh, it’s so much more fun! I mean we definitely had great shows back then. Without doing a thing over the last ten or so years, our myth has been built up by these other bands and all these kids got turned on to us and somehow this legacy got built up. We started playing shows again and Philly and New Jersey sold out immediately. Like 600 tickets! That would have never happened to us before. We’re way bigger now than we ever were back then.
Is that strange to you?
It’s a little weird. We love doing what we do, but when there’s a crowd there giving it back to us, it’s just so much fun. If you’re in a band, obviously you want to sell a place out.
Are you guys doing Lifetime full time now?
No, unfortunately. It’s been ten years so we all have lives now. We all want to be a lot busier than we are right now, but a lot of us had kids. We’re no spring chickens anymore so we’re trying to figure that out.
A few years ago, guitarist Dan Yemin was quoted as saying that he was never interested in playing with Lifetime again. What do you think changed his mind?
(Laughs) Saying never is never a good idea in general! I think it was that festival in New Jersey, Bamboozle, kept offering us money to play, and every year that money got to be more and more. Finally, it was just this ridiculous amount of money so we talked about it.
None of us really cared about the cash and decided that if they could donate half of it to charities that we specified, then we’d do it. When it became not about us, I think that’s what changed his mind. We had such a great time and such an amazing reconnection, we were like, “Let’s give it another shot.”
– Emily Zemler with Chris Force