Hello ACR readers, and followers! Do I have a treat for you!
This interview was near and dear to me in so many ways – not only as a writer, but as a true fan of Halestorm, and of Rock music, in general.
As a writer who has been in the business and interviewing for several years now, I do not normally get starstruck. This was a different case,” A Strange Case”, if you will. Halestorm has been an absolute favourite band of mine for a really long time. I never thought I would ever get to see them play live let alone interview Lzzy Hale. To say this was an absolute honour was an understatement, and I was so happy to do it.
To Lzzy and Halestorm – Thank you, again for allowing me to sit and chat with you about the upcoming tour and Halestorm’s amazing new album, “Into the Wild Life.” It was a real treat, and I cannot wait to finally witness Halestorm’s awesomeness live, loud, and in the flesh!
Without further ado, Here is my interview with the amazing Lzzy Hale – Enjoy! I know I sure did! <3
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SM: First of all, I have to get this out of the way. I pride myself on being a consummate professional when it comes to interviews and my writing, but this interview is one I’ve wanted ever since I found out about Halestorm coming to Atlantic Canada. I am a true blue and devoted fan, and have been for a long time so this, for me, is an incredible honour and a real pleasure so thank you SO much for being able to take the time to chat! It means the world. ** Yes, I did tear up at this point… luckily she was a gem and was totally flattered! HAHA!**
LH: I am so honoured!! Thank you! You’re too sweet.
SM: Will this be first time you’ve visited this far East in Canada?
LH: Yeah, we’ve never actually done a full-fledged tour up there. It’s always kind of up and back, up and back. We’ve done some festivals and we’ve done some one-offs. So this is going to be awesome to get to spend a few weeks there, see some new things and meet some new people, it’s going to be fun!
SM: As soon as we found out about you guys coming, we promoted the Hell out of it. The following you guy have here is insane. It’s so crazy. The feedback we’ve been getting, especially from the people who are heading out to the shows in Atlantic Canada, they’re mostly excited to see you guys. This has been a long time coming for a lot of the East Coast fans. We cannot wait to support you guys!
LH: That’s so cool to hear because you never really know how it can go. It can really only go two ways: Either you’re really wanted there the first time you come, or nobody knows who the Hell you are. That’s so cool to hear and I can’t wait. The most enjoyable thing about touring for me is getting to meet new people. It’s where I get a lot of my inspiration for songs, of course. It’s going to be such a crazy adventure for us. It’s just so good to hear the people actually care.
SM: Your shows are so unique in that you never have the same set lists. What kind of show can fans expect?
LH: What fans can expect is controlled chaos. They way that we grow as musicians, and the only way that we can create magic on stage is by having a couple of elements that we don’t even know what’s going on. We get so many people coming to 5 shows in a row and to me it seems unfair to the fans to just play the same set night after night. We’re gonna be doing that this entire tour. It’s funny, we’ll make up the set right before we go on, and then we’ll very seldom follow that. I just got back from tour last night. We were out on a six week US run and it was so funny because we’d have an idea of what we wanted to do and so we’d write it down just so that everyone would have a guideline, and then someone in the audience would yell something and we’d be like “Do you remember that – Let’s just play that!” It’s a great way that we’re developing this relationship continually with the fans. It’s not just about us rockin’ and them watching, we all get to do this together. It’s one big group chaos.
SM: I absolutely LOVE “Into the Wild Life!”. How has the fan reaction been since its release?
LH: Thankfully, it’s been very good! Actually we were kind of nervous about that. We definitely threw away everything that made us comfortable with this record. We went with a new producer, in a new town, a new mindset. We recorded it so much differently which was super scary because we were having to trust ourselves, which is the most terrifying thing in the world. I’d rather just have somebody tell me what to do, and then have it be their fault, hahaha! This time we ended up recording it instead of using the age old assembly way of recording, which is the way we recorded our first record and the second record. For instance for “A Strange Case Of” and “Halestorm”, we’d go into the studio with all of the songs already written, and my brother, Arejay, would do all the drums in like two days, and then I would add all my guitars, and Joe would add all his guitars, then we’d do bass, and then I would sing, and then that was it. It was kind of like building a cake, and going layer by layer. On this record, “Into the Wild Life,” we decided not to do that, we decided to do every song as a performance live, playing these songs together from beginning to end and recording it that way with very minimal layering afterwards.Which, again, talking about the element of chaos, we screwed up every song that we put on this record. Not one of these songs ended up the way we had originally wrote it on the demo, in such a good way. So, to me, this ended up being what we call a series of happy accidents. We’d be all, “I don’t know if we’d ever be able to do that again! I don’t know how that happened – but let’s keep it!”. To answer your question, we loved this record so much when we finished it. Then the release date kept getting pushed back. So to finally when it was finally out into the world, we were like, “Oh, God is everyone going to like this, because it would suck if they didn’t!” But so far, so good. People have been very accepting.
SM: I read that you recorded the album live, all four of you in a church? What prompted that decision?
LH: Oh yea! Our new producer that did this record, his name is James Joyce and he is out of Nashville. He bought a church and made it into a studio. The coolest thing ever was when you walked into this studio and you then enter this huge congregation room that has been gutted, obviously. There’s pianos everywhere, and guitars, and amps and drums and it’s all set up to record at any point and time so you could just play and go. There were these big, tall windows with lots of light coming in. It didn’t even feel like a recording studio . In my experience over the years being in many of them, a lot of recording studios kind of feel dark, not sunlight, very dentist office-y. This whole new environment really contributed to the record. We really made it our own place. I would totally do that again. It was really cool.
SM: With being in a church, the acoustics must have sounded amazing for recording.
LH: Oh, absolutely. There’s a piece of a song that I ended up writing while we were recording the record. That’s the brilliant thing about recording a record, especially when you’re in that environment where I could kind of hide. I started writing these songs even though we already had the songs that were already going on the record. I wrote this kind of a capella, Mercedes- Benz-esque song, and I am working it out in the other room. Then the producer comes in and he’s like, “Hey, what is that?!” And then I’m all, “I don’t know, just something I’m working on.” He then says, “Do you have it done?” then I say, “Yeah, I could have it done in a little while.” To which he says, “Okay, meet me out in the congregation room in like a half hour.” So, I meet him out there and he had turned all the mics on, and he said, “Okay, stand in the middle of this church, and sing me your a capella song.” So I did it, and we ended up putting it on the end of, “I Like it Heavy”. It’s the kind of thing where you can hear the room. We did so many things like that on this record. So many things that weren’t planned to which we were like, “Ya know what, let’s just do it!” For lack of a more professional term, literally as the song goes, “Do whatever the F@#K we want!”
SM: This album really brought with it so many different styles in terms of lyric and medley. I know for me, I felt like I was taking on a journey, and I know fans felt this way as well. Was this your intention when you began writing and recording?
LH: Ya know, I don’t really know what the intention was other than just chasing after whatever got us excited. Kind of what was leading us was – “Do we feel something from this part? – Awesome, Let’s do it!” “Are we excited about this song-Let’s do that!” We weren’t really thinking in terms of genres. That was something we thought way too much about on the last two records. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of our first record and second record. But, there was this mental game that I was trying to play. I’d have meetings every week with my label and management and be like, “Okay, is this too much of a rock song, is this too much of a pop song?” “What are we going after for radio?” “Do we know what the singles are going to be?” There really was this politics side to the first two records. For this record, I kind of said, “Screw all of that”. Our label maybe visited once, and nobody talked about genres, or talked about whether this was heavy enough, or light enough, or pop-y enough. We just kind of did our thing and then handed it in. Which is, again, something that we’ve never done before. There’s this element of transperency to what we are as a four-piece . I think that if we are too used to doing something a certain way, or we get bored with a certain method, it really shows. If you don’t like something, you’re gonna know. If you’re bored with something, you’re gonna know. So we made a valiant effort to just throw ourselves into the fire and make ourselves really uncomfortable and make us say, “We are just going to follow our gut here,” and then of course, we ended up with this record! That’s what got me so nervous about this record! I still wanna have a career, ya know? Hahaha!
SM: I don’t think you guys have anything to worry about there. I think Halestorm will be around for a long time.
LH: You are gonna have to drag me off that stage, I’ll tell you that! I can only do a few things well. This is one of them, so I am hanging on for dear life! Hahaha!
SM: You ,yourself got to work with a gaggle of different artists and genres (Lindsey Sterling, Eric Church, etc.) two artists on completely different ends of the musical spectrum. Do you think that had an influence on the new record in any way?
LH: Yeah, ya know both of those artists didn’t want me to be anything other than myself. I was kind of blown away by that. You’d think that with someone like Eric Church, he’d be like “Okay, you’re on a country tour, maybe you ought to tone it down and cater to the audience a little bit.” But, he was absolutely adamant about be just being myself, and us being ourselves as a band. The same thing with Lindsay Sterling. She approached me about it, and when I was in the studio singing, she was adamant that I don’t sing in the style of her genre, or sing like a pop star. She wanted me to sing the way I sing. The same thing happened when we (Lzzy and Lindsey) would perform together. She’d be like, “You’re wearing your leather jacket, right?” The moral to the story is that no matter who you are, whether you’re into country, or pop, or rap.. everybody wants to rock! Haha! I think it was a really neat and I was absolutely flattered to be apart of those projects. Ii was a real confidence booster and made me think, “Okay, maybe I’m doing something right!” Every now and then, no matter who you are, you need that boost. If I believe in it, I will totally do it a duet!
SM: Do you have a favourite track off the album that stands out that one you love?
LH: That’s such a difficult question. It’s kind of like having a plate full of food. No one wants JUST the meat or JUST the potatoes, they want all of it. Two of the songs that are most personal to me are”Dear Daughter”, of course. The other song that was one of my favourites and one where we thought we really should take a chance on this song. That song is “New Modern Love”. It comes with such a weird riff. Joey (Lead Guitar) had been playing with that riff forever and we really didn’t know what to do with it. I had this title called “New Modern Love” I wrote that song just from my own personal view of taking ownership of your life and allowing yourself to love who you want to love, however you want to love.
SM: You guys have had a crazy ass busy year so far, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping any time soon, for the next few months, at least. Do you have any definite plans once the touring is complete, other than the obvious well-deserved rest, perhaps some time in the studio?
LH: There’s always plans to create new music. I have tons of weird songs that I have been writing on the road lately. We don’t have plans to go back into the studio, however it would be a decent time to do that. Other than that it’s just business as usual. To be honest, we’re booked through June 2016 as of right now, and we haven’t even announced most of those dates yet. You’ll all be sick of us before long!
SM: Well hopefully after this tour, you’ll be back this way again after seeing how awesome the Atlantic Canadian fans are!
LH: That’s the beauty of it, darlin’! If we come out there and everybody wants to have us back, then we will most definitely be back. It will only be a matter of time!!
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Halestorm will be coming through Atlantic Canada for the first time EVER this November with Three Days Grace. We at ACR encourage you to attend their performance and SING as loud as you can, SCREAM as hard as you can, and Headbang until your neck hurts! We want Halestorm here as often as possible after this!
Here is how you can go out and show that Atlantic Canada loves Halestorm!
** MONCTON SHOW AT CASINO NEW BRUNSWICK IS NOW SOLD OUT**
Tickets for their performance at Casino New Brunswick are available and range from $50.53 – $55.53 (including tax and applicable surcharge) and are available at the Casino Gift Shop (located at 21 Casino Drive in Moncton, exit #450 off the Trans-Canada Highway), by calling 1-866-943-8849 and online at casinonb.ca and evenko.ca.
Tickets for their performance at Halifax’s Multi-Purpose Forum are available and range from $46.00 – $51.00 (including tax and applicable surcharge) and are available by calling 1-888-311-9090 and online at ticketpro.ca and evenko.ca.
** Doors open at 7PM, with the show starting at 8PM!
Enjoy the show!
Peace, Love, & Music!
~Sarah
WIN tickets to the Halifax show!
Want to WIN a pair of tickets to the Halifax Three Days Grace / Halestorm show?(Ticket info above!) Just comment below a song by either band you want to hear! Just make sure to enter a valid email when asked as that’s how we contact you! Ends Tuesday 10/27 at 7pm! Good luck to all!