The Afters
American Christian pop rock band
The Afters is an American Christian rock band founded by Josh Havens and Matt Fuqua. Havens and Fuqua first worked together in a Starbucks coffee shop in Mesquite, Texas, where they performed songs for customers before deciding to form a band. They were initially joined by Brad Wigg from the same Starbucks and drummer Michael Burden and performed with the name Blisse. When Burden left the band, Marc Dodd, who also worked at the Mesquite Starbucks stepped in. Their song "Never Going Back to OK" was the most-played song on R&R magazine's Christian CHR chart for 2008.
History
As a precursor to Blisse, Josh performed several shows around Dallas with his band The Screaming Mimes which included Charlton Parker, who later formed Deaf Pedestrians, and Hans Grumbein. While Brad was a founding member of Blisse, he took time away from the band to perform with his own blues project, playing lead guitar. Shows at the Door in Deep Ellum, part of Dallas, were filled in by Dallas bassist Eric Kitchens and bassist/filmmaker Niko Red Star.
Under the name Blisse, the band recorded a six-song EP in 2000. From the recording they made enough money to cut their first album, When the World Is Wonderful, which was released independently in 2001.
The public source identifies “The Afters” as american Christian pop rock band. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Afters, American and Christian.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2147388. VIAF identifies the subject as 168389712. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2000 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Afters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.