ROY KHAN, as part of his “Breaking Absolutes With Peter Orullian” interview, talks about the reasons that prompted him to leave the KAMELOT lineup:
“The whole thing was just a combination of a few things that happened to culminate at the time. As you all know, KAMELOT was getting more and more popular, so I was going away for a few months a year – about six months at least, I was gone. I got a family, and that’s when I started getting torn apart. And then I wasn’t living a very healthy life – let’s put it that way – and I did a lot of stupid things back then that… I knew in my heart that it was all going down the drain.
I remember every night when I was singing [KAMELOT’s song] “Karma,” I felt like at some point that shit would hit me in the back of the head. Whether it would be tomorrow, whether it would be two years from now, I don’t know, but the way I live my life, it can’t last. So then it happened. I knew for so many years that it wasn’t going to work, and suddenly it did. I broke down. I had a whole summer where I hardly slept – about six or eight weeks, during which I didn’t sleep for six or eight whole hours, and I just went crazy. And a lot of stuff happened in relation to that.”
According to Khan, leaving KAMELOT after 13 years of work was hard for him at the time:
“Leaving KAMELOT was the best decision I ever made, and I don’t mean that. KAMELOT was a fantastic experience in my life, and Thomas [Youngblood, the founder of KAMELOT] and the other guys – they had nothing to do with it; it was all me and my lifestyle, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. And I was also overworked – I was working all the time. Even when I was at home. The first thing I did when I got home was to take my shoes off in the hallway, sit down at my computer and start working. I really wasn’t a good husband and I wasn’t a good father. There were a lot of things that didn’t suit me at that point.
Leaving KAMELOT at that point was both easy and hard. It was easy because I had no choice. I was very depressed. And at the same time it was hard because I had been working to get to this point, all my life, in fact all twenty years I had been working towards this goal. But I did give up and I said: “Hey, guys, I’m not going on the next tour.” – “Okay. What happened?” – “Actually, I’m not going back.” And, of course, that was it. My mom said: “Are you kidding me? Are you serious? “‘ Then the guys in the band thought it would go away. But I knew in my heart, already in the summer [of 2010], in August, I knew it was over.”
