HALESTORM: “new studio album is half done”
15-08-2024
In a new interview with Liv Maddix of the 105.7 The Point radio station, HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale and guitarist Joe Hottinger spoke about the progress of the recording sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2022’s “Back From The Dead” album. Lzzy said: “Well, this has been an interesting process for us — very new.” Joe added: “Yeah, the record, it’s been fun. We’re working with a new producer (Dave Cobb) we’ve never worked with. And he has a house in Savannah (Georgia) that it’s just a studio house and a band house. So we go in and all four of us move in and wake up and we just start writing.”
Lzzy continued: “Doing it with Dave Cobb, who is a closet metalhead, but he’s gotten his due from Chris Stapleton and Brandi Carlile. But he’s got such a great sense.” Joe concurred, saying: “Oh, yeah. He’s just a song guy. He loves songs and he knows all about rock and roll. He’s done RIVAL SONS and GRETA VAN FLEET. He’s a rocker, too. But it’s fun. We have it half done right now. I think most of the basics and music is done. It’s neat because we have this big break between here and we’re gonna hopefully finish it by the end of the year. And you get to kind of think about it a little bit, let it live with you a bit. And then, like, ‘All right, what are we saying? What do we wanna say?'”
Elaborating on the songwriting process for the new HALESTORM album, Lzzy said: “Well, the beautiful thing about (having a break in the recording), too, is that even just now on this tour, I am, for better or worse, kind of a sponge, and I am absorbing all of these experiences and seeing how they’re actually fitting into the record. So I’m drafting and redrafting as we’re going, just so I can get back in the studio and be, like, ‘But wait. What about this?’ Because that’s actually what the experience called for. So, yeah, it’s very interesting, but we’ve been taking our time with it because we’ve been having fun doing that. ‘Cause, as is tradition with all of these other records, we’re like, ‘Okay, we have this amount of songs. All right. When can we get in? We’re gonna go in for a month. We’re gonna bang it out, do the touring thing all over again.’ So it’s kind of nice.”
Earlier this year, HALESTORM guitarist Joe Hottinger told Monica Strut of Knotfest Australia about the songwriting process for the band’s next LP: “Our goal as a band is may the best song win. So riffs are great and all, but at the day, it comes down to the song. Is it a good song or not? And not only is it, like, good, but it’s gotta be great. We have, like, stupid standards. And so really anything goes. If it’s a riff and it starts there, a riff and a melody, cool. Lzzy writes constantly, so she’s always got songs that we’re putting together.
“We haven’t been in a studio since — I mean, recording for a record — since September,” he revealed. “We’ve been busy. We’ve been traveling a bit. But we’ve been writing since then. And while we were at the last one, we just kind of rolled in and wrote a song in the morning and recorded it that night, and it was kind of everything fresh. We started out a few riffs, but, really, the idea was more about being in that moment. I was talking with Lzzy about it while we were in there, and it was, like ‘Yeah, it’s kind of like we came into the studio with nothing but 20 years of being a band together.’ (Laughs) So, we know how to play — we’re all players, we can play, we can write. So, like, ‘It’s a good idea. Cool. Yeah, let’s do that. All right, let’s record it. Here we go.’ And I don’t even remember what I played. I haven’t listened to those songs in a while. And I vaguely remember any of them because it gets so intense. I think we did, like, 13 of them. Day after day after day after day after day, to the point where you’re just, like, ‘I don’t know anything anymore.'”
Joe also talked about HALESTORM‘s writing and recording approach with producer Dave Cobb after making three records with Nick Raskulinecz.
“We had a few ideas going in, but we told (Dave) we didn’t really… We’d been touring constantly and we didn’t get together and put together anything solid,” Hottinger said. “And he was, like, ‘Great. Even better.’ And that was exciting, ’cause we’ve never really done that before for a record, like just sit in a room and knock out a song a day — just go, go, go. And it was really intense. And I think it’s great. And that was just round one, the first volley of songs. We’ll see if any of ’em even make it. But we’ve got just a boatload more songs now. We haven’t even gotten together and riffed them all out yet or wrapped our heads around them. We just have these demos. We’re, like, ‘All right.’ Lzzy‘s writing right now. We love doing that. She’ll go and write with friends or other people that she respects, which I think is great, ’cause she gets to bounce ideas off of somebody else, somebody that… Every song is like a puzzle, and she gets to put it together with somebody else who’s better at different parts of the puzzle than maybe one of us. And then we grab a hold of it and make it a HALESTORM song.”
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