Lzzy Hale spoke to Australia’s Heavy about the support she and her drummer brother Arejay received from their parents during HALESTORM‘s early days. When the band was first formed, it was still a trio consisting entirely of the Hale family. Lzzy and Arejay were joined by their bass player father, Roger Hale, while their mother served as HALESTORM’s manager and publicist.

“I was 13 when we started this band,” Lzzy said. “It’s been my first band. I’ve been in this band longer than I haven’t been in this band in my life. And it’s interesting, the type of attitude that you get — not in a band way — but this tunnel vision that you get when you find something that’s yours. You find this thing that, ‘Wow! I can put music together. And I understand this in a weird way. But it’s something that none of my friends can do and nobody that I really know can do and it’s something that’s mine.’ And so I think that we weren’t necessarily gonna let anyone take that away from us without a fight. So we got in a lot of standoffs…”

She continued: “We were relatively good kids, but with each other and with this band, it was kind of an all-or-nothing decision from a very early age. And I think about that now, and I think about how crazy that sounds to say. But it really was like that. We didn’t tell anyone to literally fuck off, but we literally were, like, ‘You don’t understand. You just don’t get it. And you won’t get it unless you’re us, and we’re still going to do this. My poor parents caught a lot of flak for that stuff too. They would get letters from, not only teachers, but they would get letters from our extended family members that are, like, ‘You are leading your kids down the wrong path. Why are you supporting them in this?‘”

Lzzy added: “My parents just recently confessed to me… ‘Cause they were always very supportive of our musical career — they helped us get gigs, and they would drive us to all the shows, and helped us build equipment — that kind of stuff. And they recently confessed to me that they were terrified — they were, like, ‘No, we were absolutely terrified.’ Because everyone was kind of right, that this is not a guarantee; you’re immersing yourself in this business that, especially at the time, was not necessarily built for a girl either. So [my mother’s], like, ‘We’re literally allowing you to do something that has the potential for so much disappointment.’ But my parents are, like, ‘But we saw it in both your eyes. You were gonna do it anyway. So we might as well support you.’ They always kind of reminded me, with every step of the way, ‘Look, you always have time for that normal job. You always have time to go back to college. You always have that time to go do something else. But if this is what you wanna do, you should go in head first and you should figure out how to do it.’ You always have time to, like, ‘Oh, okay, that didn’t work out.’ But what if it does? So we kind of went after that very slim chance that maybe it would work out. And so the little bro and I have been having a lot of those moments where we’re, like, ‘Man, it’s working out. We’re like a real band.”