Name - Jerrod Cunningham

City of Birth - Lincoln, NE

Favorite Food - Bone-in Ribeye at Texas Roadhouse

Favorite Color - Red

Favorite Bands or Musical Influences - 

My Chemical Romance, Coheed & Cambria, Maylene & The Sons of Disaster, Showbread, Norma Jean, Demon Hunter, Bon Jovi, Journey, AC/DC

Dream Line Up for an IATP Show -

We would open for Coheed  and MCR (black parade members) so that we could play a 30 minute set and then watch the best show ever!

Favorite IATP song -

Off of "The Story So Far..." I'd say it's a toss up between "The Cardiac Kid" and "Lead You Home." We have a song on the new album called "Burn It Down." IMO, it may be the best IATP song ever.

What got you into music? -

I would sing all of the time when I was a kid. I started taking drum lessons in 4th grade and in Jr. High, I started my first band with a couple of friends where I was the drummer and lead singer. One of them never came to a practice and the other guy and i partially wrote just a couple of songs. One was heavily inspired by the music video for Linkin Park's "Crawling" and I called it "Black Tears." It was terrible.

My second band was called Tomorrow's Heroes. We started to get Myspace famous in our city before we even played our first show. We eventually changed our name to The Dream's Awake. We had a really successful summer of booking shows and starting to build a following and then the band collapsed. we did a couple of reunion shows as a missions trip fundraiser before I went to India for 3 months. After that, I played on the worship team for my church for awhile but i didn't do anything else musically until I started IATP.

Why did you start IATP? -

I had basically put the idea of pursuing a career in music to rest. I was working as a shift lead cook for a restaurant and had been a volunteer youth leader at my church. I was working towards getting my credentials and trying to become a pastor. I was not happy. I asked my wife if she thought that that was what I should be doing and she basically told me she had always felt that I would eventually get back into music and do that full time. That is when I started IATP in 2010. I called up a few of the best musicians that I had played with in the different projects that I had been a part of and we started playing shows. We cycled through different people over the years, never having a consistent lineup long enough to build any real momentum. 

It was 2016, and at this point I was part time at the church and starting to get offers to be a full time pastor at other churches in our city. I talked to my wife again and we both felt like God was telling us to decline the offers and on top of that, resign from my staff position in order to fully invest in the band (which at this point was just me.) It was a crazy, senseless idea but we both had a peace about it so that is what we did. I spent the next few months compiling all of the IATP songs that i had written over the years and decided to get the best recordings I could possibly do in my basement by myself. These recordings were released in January, 2017 as "The Story So Far..." Right before the release, I met Dave after he responded to a post on Facebook I had made about looking for Christian musicians to join my rock band. He was absolutely the right guy at the right time and played live with me for the first time on a cajon for the song "Breathing Life" at the album release show.