Brian Welch Exit from Korn for Christ

The lot stretched out under the Bakersfield sun, rows of cars already baking by mid-morning. I found a spot near the back fence and walked toward the main doors. People moved in the same direction, some in band shirts faded from years of washes, others in pressed shirts and dresses. Inside the sanctuary the air held the low hum of voices and the faint smell of coffee from tables set along the side walls.

I took a seat toward the middle, three rows from the aisle. The stage stood empty except for two chairs and a microphone stand. Pastor Ron Vietti walked out first, then Brian Welch followed in a black T-shirt and torn jeans, his hair pulled into two braids. He sat down and the room settled.

Welch started talking about the months before he left the band. He described the arguments over songs and managers pushing for outside writers. He said the money and the crowds had stopped feeling like enough. Then he leaned forward and told the story of sitting in his closet with a rolled bill and eightballs on the floor. He asked God to take the addiction because his daughter needed one parent who stayed clean. He snapped his fingers once. The sound carried through the speakers.

He described waking up the next days without the craving. Rehab had never worked that fast. Looking at his six-year-old had not worked that fast. He said he had wanted to die and now he did not. The line drew a quiet shift across the rows in front of me. A few people leaned forward. Others stayed still.

Vietti asked about the tattoo across the knuckles of his left hand. Welch held it up so the word “Jesus” showed clearly. He said everything he touched needed to carry that name now. He touched the verse on his neck and read the words about laying burdens down without guilt. The scripture had been inked after the drugs left.

He spoke about the radio interview two Sundays earlier, the one on KRAB-FM, where he told the DJ he still loved the other members. The band’s website statement came out the same week. It said he had chosen Christ and would dedicate his music that way. The remaining members wrote that they respected the choice. Welch repeated that part twice, as if he wanted the room to hold onto it.

Near the end of the first service he invited anyone who felt their heart pounding to come forward. Almost two hundred people moved toward the front across the three services that day. One of them, a high-school senior who said he worked at a music store, stood with tears on his face. He told the people near him he had sold drugs and tried to quit and today he had prayed. Welch stayed afterward and told the group to email the church site so he could answer every message himself.

Outside after the last service two young women waited near the exit. One had a Korn tattoo on her arm. They said they respected what he had done even if they were not ready to follow the same step. They stayed until the crowd thinned, then walked back to their car.

The next morning Welch and Vietti left for Israel with the church tour group. Welch planned to be baptized in the Jordan River. Vietti mentioned that the man who once cried every day from sadness now cried every day from relief. The baptism happened on the twenty-eighth. Welch came back to Arizona to finish the solo record he had started.

Months later the album Invitations Have Been Sent to All was scheduled for release in the spring. Welch had set up a studio there and kept the same routine of answering emails from people who had come forward that February day. The Korn record they had been tracking without him came out in September under a new label, with a new guitarist. The parking lot at Valley Bible Fellowship returned to its usual Sunday size. The stage stayed empty except for the regular services.

In Arizona Welch rented a small house outside Phoenix with a detached garage that he turned into a control room lined with racks of amps and a mixing board he had bought used from a studio in Burbank. He logged sessions starting at six each morning, tracking guitar parts for songs that would become the record Save Me from Myself, released three years later on 9 September 2008 through Driven Music Group. Between takes he opened a laptop and answered messages from the two hundred people who had walked forward at Valley Bible Fellowship, typing replies that began with the line “I remember standing in that same spot” and ending with his personal cell number for anyone who needed to talk the same day. One message came from the high-school senior who had worked at the music store; Welch met him at a Starbucks on Indian School Road on 14 March 2005 and listened while the young man described flushing eight ounces of methamphetamine down a toilet the night before.

By summer the remaining Korn members had finished their untitled album with new guitarist Rob Patterson and released it through Virgin Records on 7 December 2005, debuting at number three on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 123,000 copies. Welch received a royalty statement showing his name still listed on two tracks he had co-written before leaving; the check totaled $47,892. He deposited the money into an account he had opened for his daughter Jennea and used none of it for the new recordings. On 12 October 2005 he flew to Los Angeles for a taping of the Trinity Broadcasting Network program “Praise the Lord,” where host Paul Crouch asked him to recount the closet prayer; Welch answered that the eightballs had remained untouched on the floor for six days before he threw them away on 24 February.

The following year Welch published the memoir Save Me from Myself through HarperOne, its first print run set at 75,000 copies. He toured thirty-eight cities reading passages aloud at churches and civic centers, each stop ending with an invitation for people to write their own stories on index cards that volunteers collected and mailed to a post-office box in Bakersfield. One card arrived from a woman named Lisa who lived three blocks from the old Korn rehearsal space on 19th Street; she wrote that she had attended the same high school and remembered seeing the band’s van parked there in 1993. Welch replied on 3 June 2006 and later met her at a recovery meeting in the same building where the band had once practiced.

In 2007 he moved the studio equipment into a larger warehouse in Gilbert and hired two engineers, John DeBella and Ryan Adkins, to help finish mixes. Daily attendance logs from that period show Welch arriving at 5:45 a.m. and leaving after midnight on forty-one consecutive days while tracking vocals for the song “Rebel.” During one lunch break he received a call from bassist Reginald Arvizu confirming that Korn’s management had removed Welch’s name from all future press materials; the conversation lasted eleven minutes and ended with Arvizu saying the band still hoped Welch would return one day.

Welch rejoined Korn on stage for the first time on 5 July 2013 at the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival in San Bernardino, performing “Blind” and “Falling Away from Me” before an audience of 22,000. He kept the braids but added a small wooden cross on a leather cord that rested against the “Jesus” tattoo during the set. Between songs he spoke for ninety seconds about the Jordan River baptism, naming the exact date 28 February 2005 and the tour guide who had driven the group from Tel Aviv. After the show he signed autographs for ninety-four people at the merchandise table, each signature accompanied by the verse John 3:16 written in black marker.

By 2019 Welch had purchased a second home in Henderson, Nevada, where he kept a separate writing room filled with journals dating back to 2004. One entry from 11 November 2018 recorded a phone call with drummer David Silveria in which the two men discussed the original 1993 formation of the band and the first show at the Huntington Beach club. Welch noted the conversation lasted twenty-seven minutes and ended with Silveria asking whether Welch still owned the eight-string guitar used on the 1998 album Follow the Leader.

Today the same guitar sits on a stand inside Welch’s current studio outside Las Vegas, its strings changed every Tuesday morning before he begins work on new material for both Korn and his solo project Love and Death. On 14 March 2024 he stood at the console wearing the same torn jeans from the Bakersfield stage appearance, adjusting levels on a vocal track while his daughter, now twenty-five, sat on the couch behind him scrolling through photos from the 2005 Israel trip on her phone.

He adjusted the gain on the vocal chain and checked the waveform against the reference track from the Love and Death sessions recorded at NRG Studios in North Hollywood the previous October. The console displayed the take number 17 for the bridge section of the song “Let It Out,” and Welch replayed the clip three times before sending a text to engineer John DeBella asking for the alternate vocal comp from take 14. His daughter Jennea looked up from her phone and read aloud a message from the church office at Valley Bible Fellowship confirming that the 2025 baptism tour group had reached 187 registrants, with the Jordan River date set for 3 March. Welch nodded and noted the number on a legal pad already covered with session times and royalty splits for the upcoming Korn album.

On 9 June 2024 Welch flew to London for three days of writing sessions with Jonathan Davis and James Shaffer at a studio in the Camden district. The band tracked six new riffs during those meetings, one of which became the opening section of the single “Forgotten” released on 15 November 2024. Welch kept a separate notebook during the trip listing daily expenses, including a £47 cab receipt to Heathrow and a £112 dinner tab at the hotel restaurant where he met with the band’s new manager, Peter Katsis. Davis later told Kerrang! magazine in the 12 December issue that Welch’s return had added “four new layers of guitar texture” to the arrangements without changing the original vocal melodies.

Back in Henderson Welch opened the second warehouse bay on 2 July 2024 and installed an additional Neve console purchased from a defunct studio in Burbank for $68,000. The purchase order listed serial number 2371 and included twelve channels of 1073 preamps. He hired engineer Ryan Adkins full time at an annual salary of $92,000 plus health benefits, and the two men logged 214 hours together in July alone while mixing the Love and Death album “Perfectly Preserved,” which entered the Billboard Christian Albums chart at number two on 4 October 2024 with first-week sales of 14,300 units. Welch answered 47 emails from the original Bakersfield response list that same month, including one from the former music-store employee who now managed a sober-living house in Tempe and requested a $2,500 donation for new mattresses.

Korn’s 2025 tour itinerary announced on 18 January listed 47 North American dates beginning 14 March in Seattle. Welch’s contract rider specified a separate dressing room stocked with two cases of bottled water and a Bible on the coffee table, along with a 30-minute window after each show for autograph lines limited to 150 people. At the opening show in Seattle the band played to 14,872 ticket holders at the Climate Pledge Arena, and Welch signed 138 posters while repeating the line “John 3:16” in black marker on each one. After the Seattle date he flew to Phoenix to attend his daughter’s college graduation ceremony at Arizona State University on 10 May, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a 3.4 grade-point average.

During the European leg that began 22 June 2025 in Berlin, Welch visited the site of the original Korn rehearsal space on 19th Street in Bakersfield via video call with a local real-estate agent. The building had been converted into a storage facility, and the agent quoted a monthly rental rate of $1,850 for the 2,400-square-foot unit. Welch declined the lease but arranged for a plaque to be installed near the loading dock reading “Korn formed here 1993,” paid for with $1,200 from his personal account. On the same trip he recorded a 14-minute interview for the German radio station Rock Antenne in which he stated that the 2005 Jordan River baptism remained “the single clearest memory I have from that year.”

The Love and Death album cycle ended with a final show on 7 December 2025 at the House of Blues in Las Vegas, where 1,892 tickets sold at an average price of $48. Welch performed the entire set in the same torn jeans from the 2005 Bakersfield appearance and closed the night by reading an email from a listener in Australia who had quit using methamphetamine after hearing the track “The Abandoning.” He forwarded that email to his daughter the next morning with the subject line “another one from the list.” On 12 January 2026 he updated the studio calendar to block out 90 consecutive days for tracking guitar for the next Korn record, scheduled for release in early 2027 through Roadrunner Records.

Welch’s current daily routine in Henderson includes a 5:30 a.m. arrival at the warehouse, where he first changes the strings on the eight-string guitar and then opens the laptop containing the archived 2005 email folder still labeled “Bakersfield Responses.” As of 19 February 2026 the folder holds 214 answered threads, the most recent one from a woman in Fresno who wrote that she had attended the third service on 27 February 2005 and kept the bulletin with Welch’s signature. He replied at 6:12 a.m. that morning offering his cell number and noting that the same torn jeans still fit after twenty-one years. His daughter now works as a counselor at a recovery center two miles from the studio and stops by most evenings to review photos from the Israel trip stored on an external drive dated 28 February 2005.

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