Heidi Shepherd has talked about being the only singer in Butcher Babies, two years after Carla Harvey left. "I think the hardest part about it all was really just the loss of a best friend of 20-something years, you know?" she told SPIN. "I didn't know it was going to be so hard."
"I had this link on my arm, a BFF right here with me for 20 years," she went on. "And now it's, like, where do I stand as an individual not attached to that? It's still something that I have to look at and think, will I ever get to that friendship again with someone else? Or is that friendship gone forever?"
Harvey stepped away in 2024 to recover from what was described as a serious eye injury. She later told AL.com that she felt "kind of squeezed out" of the band when "they went and did a tour without me". She has since formed The Violent Hour with her husband, the Anthrax and Pantera drummer Charlie Benante.
Two voices at the front were the thing most people knew about Butcher Babies from the start, and the band carried on without replacing one of them. Shepherd has been in it alongside the guitarist Henry Flury for more than a decade, and the two are a couple, which she says has changed how the writing goes now.