Adam Agee Gets Emotional While Addressing the Audience Before Newsboys’ Show
“We’re just so grateful to be here right now, and we wanted to come out before we play, and just just tell you, for just a few minutes, a little bit about what’s been going on,” Agee said as he stood beside bandmates Jody Davis, Jeff Frankenstein, and Duncan Phillips.
The Newsboys members were welcomed with applause—applause that got louder after Agee announced that “Duncan, Joey, and Jeff have been in a band for over 30 years.”
“My first tour with the band, my first experience with Newsboys, was in 2007. I had a band called Stellar Kart,” Agee continued. “So we have known each other for a long time, and I’ve been blessed to be a part of this band now for about three years. We’ve been doing a lot of life together.”
Referencing Tait, Agee explained that “as a lot of you guys know, our former singer the last 15 years played his last show with us in November of last year. In January, he came to us and he confessed that he’d been living a double life and he wanted to get help.” Agee said that Tait then “checked into a facility in Utah” after the band encouraged him to do so.
“We had to ask ourselves, you know, what’s next,” Agee said. The audience applauded the Newsboys frontman after he said that the band “prayed about it, and we all felt that God wanted us to move forward. And we felt like we still had a ministry and a mission to do.”
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In the last six months, Agee said that Newsboys has played “everywhere, from New York to Florida to California to right here in Arizona.” Agee added, “We have seen the most amazing people in the most amazing crowds, and we’ve seen the Spirit do things that have been been so encouraging. And we’ve just had the best time as a band with you guys on the road.”
“And then a couple of weeks ago,” Agee continued as he became emotional, “our world was rocked by the devastating news about [Tait’s] confession and what [his] double-life really was.”
Agee expressed that he and the band were shocked by the allegations against Tait. He said:
We were shocked, because in January, he had mentioned a few things about substance abuse and personal struggles he was having at home when he wasn’t on the road, but never anything of the magnitude of what we read and what was recorded, and never anything that could have made us ever think that it could possibly be a danger to others or anything like that. So it was so shocking to us, because it’s not the guy that we knew. The guy that we knew, that we’ve been on the road with, he was our our family. He was our brother, and he was a friend to our families, to our kids. We’ve got 14 kids between us, and he was a friend to our families. He would come over to our houses and hang out. We’d go over to his house and take our kids over there and watch the Super Bowl at his house—it was awesome. It just has been devastating for us.
“And our families have felt like our names [have] just been dragged through the mud because of all this, and it’s really, really hurt our kids,” Agee said, holding back tears.
