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Only one place to start and that has to be the sign on the front door that says “Halestorm – sold out”, you must be buzzing! “Oh yeah, the whole tour is nearly sold out now. In the UK it is, and in Europe it’s almost. It’s exciting, it’s a good indicator I think that we made the right record. We busted our ass on the record and the response feels good.” Bigger venues, bigger productions, bigger crowds. Bigger pressures? “It’s a different kind of pressure that we put on ourselves. We noticed that in the Spring, we were playing some of the bigger festivals in America. We had played them a few times before. I realised that when we went on that most of the people there had heard of us, or seen us, because it was our fourth time at some of these festivals, and we were moving higher up on the bill, which is awesome. We weren’t like fighting to get their attention anymore. It’s more like now we have to prove that we deserve to be there at that slot, and not earlier. We were like, how do we rethink this? We have a catalogue of songs now and we could do a ninety minute set of all singles.” That’s a good problem to have! “Yeah it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong, but you also want to do justice to the songs and the crowd, make the show special, not the same as just listening to the record. How do you make it better than that, and that’s what we focus on.” On that note, in a band you can’t win either way, through the advent of social media, as soon as a set list is posted there will always be moans about what wasn’t played. “Yeah, we switch the set list every day. This tour in particular we are challenging ourselves by playing songs that we haven’t played in years, songs that I can’t remember how they go! I make room in my brain for other things, y’know, so every day we’ve been relearning songs to play live. Tonight we are going to play a song that we have never played live before.” Yeah? I’m intrigued to discover which one! “We bombed it in soundcheck! So we still have a lot of work to do, but we’ll do it. It’s on the vinyl version of the album that finally comes out this week. There is a few extra songs that haven’t been on anything else, and we are going to do one of those tonight. It’s exciting, its a great song.” – Sidenote the song that was aired was ‘Golden’ You’ve also changed the opening of the set quite a few times so far. Is it a case of trying to find out what works best? “Yeah, we’re switching things around. It’s fun and keeps us on our toes. The last tour we did in the States, we had two or three weeks in the middle of the tour where we did the same set every night as we only had 75 minutes and knew that it worked. We couldn’t get too crazy with the set, but shit just got boring. You could tell it with our crew, within the band, it felt like we were phoning it in, so we were like… no more! So we started to switch sets and push ourselves. The other night, we started with ‘Do Not Disturb’. It’s a fun, slow and wide open way to start the show. The way that it starts slow, then comes in… cool!” The internet has a lot to blame for setlist spoilers. It takes away the surprise! “Yeah, you can’t try out new stuff… well you can, that’s something that we’ve talked about once we get a looser schedule next tour. We want to play longer sets. If we do too many shows in a row then Lzzy has to take it easy and rest her voice, so we’re talking to our agent about booking less shows and we can do higher quality, longer shows. It would be more fun for everybody.” Kind of like the “Evening With Halestorm” shows a few years back where you played a short acoustic set followed by a full on electric set? I have fond memories of the gig in Liverpool! “Those were fun. We miss doing that kind of thing. On that tour, if Lzzy wrote a song, we would just go out and play it. Try it out, it was just fun!” This particular tour is very eclectic. Halestorm (obviously), with Rews and Avatar both supporting. That’s a quality line-up! One extreme to the other. “I’m glad you like it. I like it when it’s weird and different. It’s totally one extreme to the other, and that’s how it should be. That’s why I like festivals over here, cool line-ups. I think it’s neat to expose people to something different. I think that’s something Rock needs.” On the making of ‘Vicious’, how did it work doing the guitar parts with Lzzy? In particular, my favourite track on the album – “Killing Ourselves To Live”, that solo! Was that you jamming? Was that you bringing something that you already had? “Kind of. Lzzy and I wrote that chorus a few years ago and bounced it around every few months. Kind of like… ‘remember this one?’ She had tried it on the piano, trying to write this ballad around it. We were on tour last October and we knew that we needed more songs for the record, so I was like…. ‘that chorus is great, but not fucking ballad-like, what if we just made it a fucking rock song?’ Then it was a case of how would it go? Sing out the riff and everything. Next day, I demoed it up, and you just follow where the music takes you. I wrote the solo on the spot and thought… that works! But to answer your question… for writing, we figure it out as we go along. We might be writing together in the studio and one of us will say… ‘this needs a lift, you want to come in with something?’, and then we just go with it.” I’m not one for memes etc. Unicorns and trite quotes on pictures of waterfalls and rainbows do nothing for me, but there is a famous one that relates to guitarists and “god given talents”. It has someone practicing, and I’m paraphrasing here, but the quote is something like “I practice 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year… and you are putting my talent down to a fictional entity?” With that in mind, how much practice do you put in? “I try to play everyday. I always have a guitar with me, (exhales) Yeah man, I’ve come a long way! The other night we played this song ‘Take My Life’ from our very first live EP, and we hadn’t played that in so many years. We were kind of going over it and I heard the original recording and was like… wow, I have come a long way! You just learn on tour. You have to work hard to develop any kind of finesse. I was so terrible when I joined the band that I didn’t do solos! Lzzy would be like, ‘we need a solo here’, and I would be, ‘I can’t do that!’. You can hear it on those early recordings, that I am just feeling my way, there is no vibe. I’m getting better!” The Music Modernization Act has just been passed in the House of Representatives, following a vote in the US Senate. It now awaits a signature from the President before it becomes legal. As a songwriter, this is long overdue, and will it help musicians everywhere. “You know, I’m not really sure about what it is involved in it, I don’t know the details.” It looks like it’s in two parts, The Classics Act for legacy artists to ensure that songwriters and artists receive royalties on pre-1972 songs. Then the other part which updates licensing and royalties to include streaming. “That would be great. We live in Nashville, and that’s a songwriter town. That would be great for those guys. That whole industry has been decimated by streaming and the lack of payment. I am curious to see what that means for us. I know it will be good for us, but I don’t know all the details. Anything that makes streaming a little more fair has to be a good thing. From our perspective, our label signed those streaming deals, not us. Our contract was written with the label before streaming even happened, so whatever. I don’t even know what’s going on there!” Last question, Joe Hottinger cover shot, centrefold and everything with Guitar Player magazine, or platinum record with Halestorm? “Haha! Oooooh I’d go for the platinum. I’m a team player! I’m the guitarist, I want a big sound, don’t want the “look at me” stuff! My favourite thing in the show is that we have some improv moments, and to me that is like pure music. It’s alive and it’s expression and creating a moment out of that is fucking tough, but when it hits, it’s magic!” Cheers for the chat Joe, and good luck for the remainder of the tour. Halestorm continue their European tour through October, all dates can be found here. Interview: Dave S Images: Dave J]]>
