How THE GHOST INSIDE triumphed over tragedy.
Four and a half years on from the deadly bus crash that changed them forever, The Ghost Inside are back with a new message of hope
ON THE EVENING
of November 18, 2015, The Ghost Inside frontman Jonathan Vigil laid down in the bunk of his band’s tour bus thinking about Star Wars. “We’d just binge-watched all the movies because The Force Awakens was about to come out”, he tells us today. “I remember going to bed feeling like a little kid, all excited to see it. The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed with my mom staring at me. It was surreal.”
The events of that day still sound as shocking as they did in 2015; The Ghost Inside’s tour bus collided head on with a tractor trailer just outside of El Paso, Texas, killing both drivers and severely injuring the band and their five crew
“YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH OUR FANS HELPED US”
JONATHAN VIGIL
members on board. Jonathan, guitarist Zach Johnson and drummer Andrew Tkaczyk were all hospitalised in a critical condition and, although all survived, each member paid a heavy price: Jonathan counts a fractured neck, back and ankles and the loss of several teeth amongst his many injuries while, most distressingly of all, Andrew’s right leg had to be amputated.
“I didn’t want to go on”, Jonathan says when recalling the crash’s direct aftermath. “Sitting there in that hospital bed I kept thinking that I was done with music. I didn’t think I could face being in that situation again.”
Fast forward to today and it’s a very different Jonathan Vigil that speaks to us; the intervening years have seen he and his band overcome some incredible obstacles, put the doubts that sat with him in his hospital bed to one side and turn The Ghost Inside into a functioning band once again.
“You know we had this reputation for being a super-positive band”, smiles
Jonathan. “And, actually, it was pretty easy to be that way for us because our lives were pretty great. So, when this happened, we had to step up. It’s no good spending your entire career preaching that you have to show strength of mind, rise up, and overcome adversity if you can’t do it yourself when the time comes.”
The first big step was the band’s live return, for a hometown show at the 6,000-capacity Shrine in LA back in July of last year, which sold out in four minutes flat. It was a gig that Jonathan describes as “inspiring”.
And now the band have confirmed that their fifth album, The Ghost Inside
– their first since 2014’s Dear Youth
– will be released on June 5. Inspiringly, it was written and recorded by the same five men that went through that tragic event.
“All five of us play on the record, even me, I don’t play guitar but I rang out a chord on there”, Jonathan tells us. “We all sang on it, we all contributed lyrics to it, it’s the work of the five of us that went through that experience together. There are no guest vocalists or collaborators, that was very important to us: that all of us that survived the accident were present and represented on this record to say ‘This is The Ghost Inside.’”