At its core, Hawthorne Heights is both of those things put together.” On one side, we had killer pop-punk songs, on the other there were super-heavy songs. “What we realized was we were separating the songs more than we realized. “Are we a heavy band with melodic vocals, or are we a pop-punk band with screaming?” he asks rhetorically. But Woodruff and his bandmates were also undergoing a bigger identity crisis: Just who were they this many albums into their career?
There was a lot pulling at the singer, not the least of which was the wife and daughter he once again was forced to leave back in Ohio while he was out living his dream. It was the first time in our career I had no vision of a record. “It was just exhaustion – from running out of gas and breaking down on the side of highways, from never being able to get the smell of diesel fuel out of your head. “I developed nightly panic attacks,” Woodruff says. When it came time to decamp in Southern California with Grammy-winner Cameron Webb (Alkaline Trio, NOFX, Megadeth) behind the boards, things came to a head.
Hawthorne Heights weren’t just burning the candle at both ends they were splitting it in two, then letting the flames engulf the smaller pieces completelyĪlmost immediately, the line between the end of the Bad Frequencies era and the beginning of a new one blurred to an unrecognizable Rorschach test. The shows were epic, celebratory, and cathartic for the band as they refound their footing, but they also complicated things tremendously when it came time to start working on Bad Frequencies’ follow-up.Įager to hit the studio again as soon as possible – and probably a bit naive about how much they could physically take – the writing sessions for LP8 took place in unusual places: in sound checks and dressing rooms, in far-flung rehearsal studios after marathon overnight drives.
#Hawthorne heights the silence in black and white rar series
Throughout their long and storied career as one of the most iconic emo acts of the new millennium, the quartet have overcome obstacles at every turn – but these roadblocks always seemed to come from external forces, from unscrupulous record labels and the shifting whims of fickle audiences to unimaginable personal tragedy threatening to derail them.ĭespite the odds, Hawthorne Heights have overcome it all: earning two Gold albums (2004’s The Silence In Black And White and 2006’s If Only You Were Lonely), penning some of the genre’s most well-known songs (“Ohio Is For Lovers,” “Saying Sorry”), and remaining a hard-touring act nearly two decades after forming in Dayton, Ohio.īut in 2019, the band – Woodruff, Matt Ridenour (bass, backing vocals), Mark McMillon (guitar, unclean vocals) and Chris “Poppy” Popadak (drums) – found themselves staring down maybe their biggest foe yet: themselves.Ģ018’s Bad Frequencies, the group’s first album for Pure Noise, had re-established Hawthorne Heights in the scene after a series of self-released efforts, and they followed it by – what else? – heading out on tour with the likes of New Found Glory and Silverstein. “It was an 18-year breakdown in the making.” “I couldn’t sleep at all while making this record,” admits HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS frontman JT Woodruff of his band’s eighth full-length, THE RAIN JUST FOLLOWS ME, due out Septemvia Pure Noise Records.
0 kommentar(er)
