An Interview with Michael “Kalel” Wittig of Pillar: On Life Updates, New Music, and “Pillar: Beyond The Frontline”

After a long career in Christian music, spanning nine-full length albums and many awards, rock band Pillar took an extended hiatus from touring and creating new music. In 2015, they released One Love Revolution and then slowly faded from the scene. However, news broke last year that Pillar was returning for a few comeback shows and fans went wild. 2025 brought a short run of shows, coming to our hometown of Manheim, PA at the Junction Center. Of course we had to go! Check out our review of that incredible show! We had the opportunity to connect with the guys in Pillar and a few weeks later sit down with Michael “Kalel” Wittig, the bassist to discuss their comeback, what the guys are up to, and what’s on the horizon.

Pillar is:

Rob Beckley: Lead Vocals

Noah Henson: Lead Guitar

Michael “Kalel” Wittig: Bass

Lester Estelle II: Drums

J.R. Baresis: Touring Guitar

Solid Rock Unplugged: Pillar took almost a 10 year hiatus from touring. What made you guys want to return to playing live shows again?

Kalel: It’s something we wanted to do for quite a while. We’ve kept in touch and we never really broke up, but we just kind of stopped playing. We all got busy with other things in life, raising kids, and different career opportunities had opened up, so we just kind of stopped playing. We’ve been in touch for most of that time. We have this text chain where we say “Happy Birthday,” we’ll share stuff that we think is funny and just kind of keep in touch. We talked about doing shows for a while. 

Back in 2014 we actually started writing some new music and we released that in 2015. We played one show that year in Michigan at a festival. Then we just got busy again! We had our own paths we were taking, but for the last few years, we were in touch about doing something. Then it just kind of took time, the right time where we were available at the same time. 

We decided to start doing shows in 2023. We made that decision and we were booked for Alive Festival in Ohio the summer of 2024, so that started us coming back together, getting ready for that show. Then a few other shows popped up, so we ended up doing three last year where we came back. But it’s something that was on our heart for a long time to get back to [shows] and not as a full time career. Since we never finished, we really didn’t ever close that chapter, it just kind of hung out there. We thought it proper to come back together and do some things right, go out there and play some shows. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: Was it easy or hard to get back into that routine?

Kalel: So we had our first rehearsals in June. Around the rehearsals for these shows last year, we booked a show at the end of rehearsals in our hometown of Tulsa, where Rob and I lived. Rob’s a singer, I’m a bass player, so we’ve always lived in Tulsa since the beginning of the band. The other guys live all over the place. We had rehearsals here for two days to get ready for ‘24, then we had a show in Tulsa at the very end of rehearsals. 

The very song we fired up, I don’t remember what song it was, we made it through and we’re like “Dang guys!” It’s like we hadn’t stopped.The magic came back instantly, just immediately. That first show in Tulsa, when we played the actual show, ended up being almost a two-hour long show, which we had never played that long before ever in our career! It was just an amazing experience, it went off really awesome. It was easy.

Now, we had all practiced on our own before we came together, though. It wasn’t like we hadn’t touched the songs for 15 years and then started playing them. I personally was the most detached from ever going through our music for a long, long time. So I had to start getting ready for about six months ahead of time. Just listening through stuff, playing it, relearning stuff that I couldn’t remember how to play. I prepared for about six months before that rehearsal. The other guys, they’re a little bit better than me, so they didn’t have to practice as much. Especially Lester. He probably listened to it once, probably on his flight over and then played it, you know? He’s that good!

Solid Rock Unplugged: He’s insane on the drums.

Kalel: Yeah, he’s one of the best in the world and it’s just a lot of fun playing with him. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: With this mini-comeback, doing three shows last year, this year, and then again next year, are there any plans to record new music?

Kalel: Yeah, we have been talking about that. Now, we don’t have definite plans or anything concrete that I can share. There are a couple of pieces of music that we share amongst ourselves that are pretty much ready for us to record. Rob’s going through the ideas and lyric ideas for them. I think once he gets a little bit further along, there’s a couple singles we want to record and hopefully have out next year. 

At some point we would like to re-record some of our greatest hits. We’ve talked about doing that as well. Some new music is re-recording some of what we consider our hits and have new recordings of that. Because Lester never did play on the Fireproof record. I kind of would like to hear a new recorded version of Fireproof with Lester on drums. Maybe a couple of those songs too. So that’s something we’re throwing around as well. 

We will be playing a few shows next year. I don’t know of all of them yet. There’s only one that I know for sure and the other ones are still waiting. But we’re hoping to release a new song or two next year as well. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: So something to look forward to in 2026.

Kalel: Yeah, we’ve got something to look forward to at the end of this year. Then in 2026, some more shows and hopefully new music.

Solid Rock Unplugged: So outside of Pillar, Lester’s playing with Kelly Clarkson…

Kalel: He’s been playing with Kelly for a long time now. I think longer than he played with Pillar. Honestly, he’s been with Kelly for a long while. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: I remember when you guys announced he was leaving to go play for Kelly, thinking that’s going to be tough shoes to fill. Then Noah’s playing guitar for Brantley Gilbert.

Kalel: Yeah, he’s been doing that for a really long time too. Not as long as Lester’s been with Kelly, but a long time. Longer than he was with Pillar again, he’s been touring with Brantly as his guitar player. I think he’s the band leader now too. So that’s their full time gigs. Then they do a lot of producing on their own. Each of them have their own studios, so they’re producing other bands and up-and-coming artists. 

Lester’s gigging, which means he’ll play on other people’s albums all the time. A lot of times I don’t even know what he’s playing on, but he does that a lot. Just because he’s so good. He’s in high demand. People call him and want him to play on their stuff. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: What have you been doing? I know you’ve been doing bodybuilding. 

Kalel: I do a bunch of crazy stuff. I do acting, commercial acting and movie acting. I’ve done modeling for about a decade. I’m a master trainer with fitness. That’s kind of where all my other stuff started off. I always liked to work out. Even when we toured back in the day, we always had weights under our bus. The bus kind of leaned because of the amount of weights under it. We would all work out and I’d kind of lead them. I’ve always had a passion for fitness. It’s not something new, it’s something I’ve always done. 

Once we got off the road, I got certified as a trainer. I’m a master trainer. I’ve written a lot of articles for fitness magazines. I’ve been on a bunch of covers. I started competing at natural competitions when I turned 39. I got my pro card at 40 and I’ve had 29 pro championships since then. So acting, modeling, fitness. Because of the fitness and the education that I’ve done on social media, I have a handful of sponsorships that I’ve been with for a long time, which is kind of my primary job, I guess. Just promoting and talking about the sponsors I have. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: Rob, is he still working at a church?

Kalel: He’s worked at a couple of churches. He worked as a worship pastor then got promoted to campus pastor. I don’t know what his current position is actually called. He’s in a church called Battle Creek here in Tulsa. It’s based in Tulsa, but they have a lot of satellite churches. Five or six or so, he kind of oversees. He kind of manages the operations for all the campus, above all the pastors, there to support, encourage, or lay the hammer down sometimes. Whatever needs to be done to help the church do its job, run effectively, and make a positive impact on people. He’s really busy, he has more kids than I do. He has six. 

So, all four of us keep really busy. For us to come back together for any shows, it is a really big undertaking. Besides us four, we’ve been having another guitar player join us. Then we always have a crew guy or two with us. We’ll go do a show, but we’ve got guys coming in from four or five different states to converge. Then we’ve got to figure out equipment, because we’re flying. It’s always a lot of logistics to make even one show happen. 

We’ve been blessed that all the shows we’ve done since coming back have gone really smooth. It’s been a lot of fun! The best part of them is just meeting our fans and reconnecting with familiar faces. They’re bringing their kids to shows now that are seeing us for the first time. It’s just been really awesome. Really a blessing!

Solid Rock Unplugged: Speaking of a fifth member, how did J.R. end up joining the band?

Kalel: So J.R. knew Noah first. He and Noah connected because J.R. has played with a lot of friends of ours. He plays with Spoken now at the moment. But he’s played with a bunch of bands, including Brian Head Welch from Korn, who became a believer and had his own project called Love and Death. J.R. had been playing with them since he was really young, like a teenager. And come to find out, J.R. was a big Pillar fan. So he started to play guitar with Pillar because of Noah. 

I didn’t know this, but Noah met him and learned this. When we decided to do our shows, Noah’s on tour with Brantley Gilbert, that’s his main job. When we booked our shows, Brantley hadn’t figured out his tour schedule yet. He’s not going to book his schedule around us, he’s going to book what he needs to do. If something got booked when we were playing, Noah couldn’t be there. We knew that, so it was kind of rolling dice. 

Honestly, every time we play a show, it’s rolling dice, because he doesn’t quite know his schedule yet. He’s kind of locked in. That has to be a priority to take care of his family. So Noah said we needed a back up in case. Also, the guys do enjoy having a second guitar player on stage. On our recordings, it’s more than two guitars. There’s a lot of guitars going on. When we toured back in the day, we had a second guitar player for a while because of the sound. It's a lot more energy and we can do more musically. So in addition to wanting a second guitar player, we also just needed a backup in case Noah wasn’t available.

Noah suggested “Hey, let’s get J.R.” We all knew who he was and heard of him, we just hadn’t met him. So we flew him in for rehearsals. He was stoked when we called him, “Hey do you want to play with us?” He was super excited. Even though he’s played in Europe with Korn, he’s excited to come play with Pillar. Because he’s been a big fan forever. So he was excited.

When we did rehearsals, Noah wasn’t there the first couple of days of rehearsals because he was out playing with Brantley. He couldn’t be there for rehearsals, so J.R. was there! When we started playing, if you just closed your eyes, his sound was so similar to Noah, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Every guitar player has their own sound, their fingers, the way they hit the strings. J.R. had Noah’s Pillar sound down to a T. It was like magic. Now we try to get him at every show we can. Even if Noah’s there, he’s there. Then if Noah can’t do a show, we have J.R. to make it sound right.

Solid Rock Unplugged: We’ve seen J.R. with Love And Death, and with Spoken. When he came out, I was like “Oh, this is going to be a good fit.” So, what’s your favorite song to play live?

Kalel: Right now, for me and probably for the band collectively, “Underneath It All,” It wasn’t one of our singles off of Where Do We Go From Here, but it was always a popular song. It just hits so hard live. This year in 2025, we used it as our encore. Normally people would think “Frontline” or “Bring Me Down,” but we come out and just kick people in the teeth with that one. I personally like playing “Awake,” but we didn’t play that this year, we played it last year. That’s because of the bass work, but that’s probably just me though. And “Simply,” I like playing “Simply” because of the bass lines on that one. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: Prior to your concert, we did a throwback album review of Where Do We Go From Here. Looking across your catalog, I always felt that WDWGFH was your best record and I loved the bass work in “Simply.”

Kalel: There’s a great story behind that song. We played the See Spot Rock Tour in the early 2000s in Pennsylvania. This huge snowstorm came in and it was like, you can’t even go out on the roads. It was illegal. They had it on the news not to go out because the roads were shut down. We were on tour and we were in our room, and me and Noah were writing. 

On that tour, we tried to write every day for our next record, just every day. That bass line was written in Pennsylvania during that snowstorm, just the main bass line. It just came out of nowhere, just popped out of my fingers! Noah was like “Yeah, dude, yeah, yeah, that! Then he started writing his part for it. That’s how the song started. 

Then when Rob had to write lyrics to it, he had a real hard time. Because it’s in 6/8, it’s complex. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that song. He had a block, he didn’t know what to do with it. He was hanging out with Kevin from Disciple and Kevin was like “Dude, that’s rad!” He goes, “If you’re not going to use it, I’ll use it!” Kevin told Rob, “Just keep it simple, man, keep it simple. That word simple stuck in Rob’s mind and he came out with simply and the lyrics kind of came out after that. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: That’s a great nugget! Rob made the comment in the encore how there’s songs that the fans like to see you play live and the band likes playing covers because they aren’t your songs, so if you mess up it’s no big deal. But then there’s songs that you really just like to play and you went into “Underneath It All.” You guys looked like you were having an absolute ball up there, just having fun. 

Kalel: Another reason we were having so much fun, that song just hits so hard, takes so much energy. The thing I like about the encore is we get to walk off stage, catch our breath, then come back and play the song. When we played it earlier on our set, just “boom, boom, boom,” we were wiped out! We have a little bit more energy because we’re using it as an encore, so it can hit even harder. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: You can just leave it all out on the stage then!

Kalel: We did. Every show we played this year, we were definitely sore for several days afterwards. It took recovery time!

Solid Rock Unplugged: What do you guys have to say to the fans?

Kalel: We just thank you! Just thank you for caring. Thank you for all the love and support, for showing up, for sharing your stories about how our music impacted you. It’s been a blessing to us and we’re just really thankful to be able to see you guys again.

We’re not done yet! We have no more shows, no new music, but we did record 100 hours of footage last year. Interviews, our rehearsals, all of our shows last year, fan interviews, just so many hours of footage. We have a full length documentary that’s about 55 minutes to an hour long. It’s done and ready, just getting the bows and the whole process is being done to it. We’re going to be releasing that in December. I don’t have an exact release date yet, but I will soon. 

It’s called Pillar: Beyond the Frontline and it tells our story in depth with just a really emotional tug on it of how we got started, why we do this, and what brought us back. What that whole process of us coming back looks like. It was the first time any of us had seen it. It took a year to edit it. We were watching for the first time with a bunch of fans that showed up and it was awesome, because there was stuff in there that I hadn’t even seen!

I went to the director, who’s my son, and I said “Where did you get that footage?” It was stuff from the early days. I was like “Where did you find that?” It’s pretty powerful, so we’re really excited for everyone to see this. We’ll have it in DVD, Blu-Ray, autographed, and some other holiday merch kind of bundled up ready to go in December. Then it will stream probably early next year. We’ll release it physically first, then stream it later. 

Solid Rock Unplugged: How was that, seeing your son get to pull that all together?

Kalel: He’s always been very talented. Of all our kids, only our oldest kids remember Pillar. Kaden’s my oldest. He’s 21 now and he was a little dude before we stopped, but he’d come out on stage a couple of times and remembers us. Rob’s oldest remembers, but all of our other younger kids, we were done by the time they were old enough to know what was going on. 

His name is Kaden, Kaden Wittig. At a very early age, he just got into filming stuff and editing, making stop animation and dressing his brother up in costumes. Just videoing stuff all the time using my flip video camera that I used to take on the road with Pillar to do Pillar vlogs. He would take it when I was home and make videos. He just never stopped, it’s all he’s done. Now, he’s only 21, but he’s been making short films and documentaries for years now, since he was in high school, winning at film festivals. He’s got quite a name for himself for such a young age here in Oklahoma, working at movie sets and for the news. He’s very, very talented.

So he actually had the idea of doing this. When we were coming back together, he just presented the idea, “Dad, this would be a good opportunity to film this and make a documentary.” I trust his talent so much that I just let him run with it. So we weren’t looking over his shoulder, we didn’t tell him what to film, we didn’t give him a direction. We were just like “just do it.”

It’s all him, the story that he told and he told it really, really well. It’s much more than a normal rockumentary. He told the story in a very creative way and really, really well. So I’m very proud of him. I’m super excited and I hope it helps him out too. He was at the premiere screening in Dallas, signing autographs with us. He got to come out on stage and intro the documentary, and had people clapping for him. It was really really cool!

Solid Rock Unplugged: Last question, what’s your favorite tour memory?

Kalel: Man, there’s a couple that come to mind. One is touring with P.O.D. on their Warrior 2 tour. It was amazing! It was clubs all over the U.S. At the time, there was a Nokia Theater in Times Square, so seeing P.O.D and Pillar in Times Square, like right there, was pretty ridiculous! Or the House of Blues shows we played on that tour. 

One of the memories from that tour is the very last show, in San Diego, where they’re from, where P.O.D. is based out of. So their friends and family were there. Rey Mysterio was there, who’s a friend of theirs. It was just a great final show. Well, bands, they plan pranks normally early, so we were planning our prank on them at least a week before. They had a wardrobe case. Now, we didn’t have a wardrobe case. We weren’t at that level yet. We just put our stuff in the bus, in the suitcase.

But they had a special case that opened up and had their clothes in it. Over a period of a week or so, we were slowly stealing some of their clothes. So when we were to go up, we had the lights off and we had all their clothes on, which is all Rastafari, baggy, military-looking stuff for the tour. The lights were down and we started playing Southtown. The whole place freaked out. Everyone came running, their family, “Oh! They’re on!”

We started playing that song and then P.O.D. came like “What’s going on?” and we’re all wearing their clothes and Rob’s like “What’s up!” It was pretty funny. They thought it was funny and they let us keep the clothes. I think I had one of Sonny’s shirts. It’s like a military shirt, buttoned up and patches on it. I think it’s still in my closet. That was really cool!

Then the two-week tour with Switchfoot in Australia was really, really awesome. Those guys are just super nice and just were always really cool to hang out with. To see Australia like that, on tour with them was pretty amazing too. Those two pop out at the top of my head.

Many thanks to Michael “Kalel” Witting for taking the time to sit down with us. Keep an eye on their social media for updates on 2026 shows, new music, and their documentary, “Pillar: Beyond The Frontline” coming out in December!