Flyleaf vocalist Lacey Sturm opened up about her return to the band in 2023, seven years after she had stopped performing with the group, sharing candid reflections in an interview with Garza Podcast.
Sturm described the energy of the reunion shows and how audiences have responded so far.
“It was fun. It was a cool show,” Sturm said. “It’s been really — the shows have been really rowdy. The crowds have been really rowdy.”
She went on to explain how her relationship with the material, and with her faith, has evolved since she first wrote and toured the songs.
“The way that I sing the show, these songs are very different in my heart, I suppose, than when I sang them, when we wrote them and when I toured them before,” she said. “My relationship with God is very different today than it was back then. Although it’s the same, but there’s a lot of things that are different, too. I guess my role in what God is doing in the world has shifted — my focus of how I should orient my perspective is different. So it makes the songs very present and to do with me, as opposed to having to deal with the audience or the world at large always.”
Sturm elaborated on how that shift in perspective has affected her outlook on performing and her personal well-being.
“I’m not as much focusing on the world at large as much as my own heart and what I need to grow into, or learn, or be changed by, which I think is better for my mental health, and I think everybody’s probably too,” she said. “You know, Jesus didn’t say save the world. He said love your neighbor. So if we’re just doing that, we won’t have to go out and, you know — but if He sends us, great, you know. But it’s a different feeling. The focus is humbling, you know. It’s humbling to be in front of people and to love them, strangers, and watch them sing the songs and know that something about it helped them in some way, or they just feel it really strongly. And it’s really cool. But my personal focus is on my own drawing near to God and correcting my own stuff. And that’s enough.”
Sturm then turned to the band’s dynamic. She spoke about the bond between the original members and a serious accident that nearly kept one of them off stage.
“The chemistry is a lot of years of growing up together. It’s like reuniting with your family — it’s like a family reunion,” she said. “Our guitarist was in a motorcycle accident less than a year ago and he broke his back. He almost didn’t make it. They did surgery on him and they said, ‘You’ve got a year recovery.’ But he’s doing better. He’s standing up, he’s holding a guitar, you know. He didn’t know if he’d be able to hold a guitar.”
Sturm also addressed the difficult period surrounding her original departure from Flyleaf and the toll it took on the band.
“It was easy to see what I needed to do. It was hard to do it. It was very painful. It was very difficult for everybody,” she said. “I think the guys felt abandoned. They were kind, and we didn’t talk about each other in the media or anything like that in any negative way, but there was a lot of things that needed to get healed, I think, afterwards, too.”
The story behind this reunion stretches back further than the current run of shows. It helps explain why the emotions Sturm describes carry so much weight.
Sturm’s split from Flyleaf dates back to 2012, when she left the band she had fronted from its earliest days. Kristen May stepped in as her replacement and led the group until 2016. After that, Flyleaf went inactive for several years without a permanent vocalist.
The reunion itself began taking shape quietly in late 2022. On November 7 of that year, Flyleaf surprised fans by updating its social media accounts with new branding reading “Flyleaf with Lacey Sturm.” The announcement confirmed that its original frontwoman was returning to the fold after a decade away.
That announcement set the stage for the band’s actual return to the stage. Flyleaf played its first reunion show with Sturm on April 27, 2023, at Schoepf’s Backyard in Belton, Texas. The performance marked her first live show with the band in eleven years and gave fans their first real glimpse of the chemistry she described as feeling like a family reunion.
Those early shows, along with festival dates that followed, laid the groundwork for the rowdier, more present performances Sturm now describes — ones shaped as much by her personal growth as by the years the band spent apart.
