On the eve of new album Everest, we join Halestorm's fearless leader Lzzy Hale in London to reflect on their ascent to the summit, the personal and professional obstacles she and the band had to overcome, and why nothing is going to stop her living life to its absolute fullest...
The weirdest gig Halestorm ever played was at a funeral. The year was 2003, a point at which the young band from the boondocks of Pennsylvania likely thought they knew a few things about paying their dues. They’d performed at redneck bars and at family-friendly restaurants that paid them in ice cream. They’d set off homemade fireworks that melted the second-hand wedding dress the group’s singer, Lzzy Hale, used to wear onstage. But they hadn’t counted on being asked to play a selection of cover tunes in front of a coffin before an audience of distraught mourners for the handsome sum of 50 bucks per song.
A gig’s a gig, they thought, and went to work.
“We didn’t know anybody at the funeral,” Lzzy Hale recounts. “It wasn’t a family member or anything. We got hired by the wife of a man who had just died. She needed an act to come in and play a couple of her husband’s favourite songs.”
At the service, in Harrisburg, Halestorm played standards by Bryan Adams, Jim Croce and – Lzzy squints in the hope of reclaiming the memory – perhaps, Ozzy Osbourne.
“It was kind of a bummer of a gig, though,” she adds, “because every time we stopped playing, of course, there was no applause. Everyone was just bawling in the aisles. And it wasn’t like I could say, ‘Hey everyone, give it up for the dead guy!’”
Compare and contrast this with the group’s fortunes as they exist today. In the wake of the release next month of their sixth album, the crunchingly accomplished Everest, by the time the summer leaves have fallen from the trees, in November, Halestorm will headline a four-date tour of Britain’s largest indoor arenas. We’re talking the Hydro, in Glasgow, and London’s 02. As well as this, just 24-hours after her interview with Kerrang! at the Gibson Garage guitar emporium in Central London, the group appeared as special guests to Iron Maiden at the London Stadium. A week after that they performed at Black Sabbath’s Back To The Beginning bonanza at Villa Park.
And there’s more. As if to underscore the truth that the days of driving to gigs accompanied by a trailer borrowed from the Hale family farm, in Bethel, that made their gear smell of hay, in the middle of our interview, Lzzy’s torrent of words is interrupted, temporarily at least, by Slash (whose own group, Guns N’ Roses, appeared at Wembley Stadium a day earlier). After perusing the many dozens of guitars adorning the walls of this air-conditioned private space upstairs from the shop itself, he's swung by to say a quick farewell. Although perhaps not a close friend, nonetheless, the kindly exchange exudes genuine warmth.
“You know, you can believe so hard that you’re capable of achieving or doing great things, but there’s a difference in those things actually becoming a reality,” is how Lzzy rationalises her group’s ascent to the heavy music scene’s higher reaches. “We’re very humbled by the fact that there’s so many amazing bands that we know that never even make it past their first record on a major label. And we’re now on our sixth album, and we’re about to go out with Maiden, and we’re doing the Black Sabbath show next week. It’s amazing.”
Wearing a Burberry-style pleated skirt, Lzzy Hale is an ebullient interviewee. Reclining into the creaking crevices of a sumptuous leather settee, she doesn’t so much answer questions – or even, for that matter, let Kerrang! reach the end of a question – as use them as a springboard for flights of verbal fancy. As befits the public face of a band whose heightened style has helped revivify the once overlooked space in metal’s mainstream, her words betray a fondness for the apocalyptic. Perhaps unaware that in this city double-deckers travel at about two miles an hour, she maintains that her life could end tomorrow if she were to step out in front of a bus. In pursuing an equilibrium that doesn’t depend on the permission or approval of strangers, she’s more declarative still. At times when she’s happy, she says, “the rest of the world can burn”.
In reviewing her life’s work, the question, Lzzy believes, is “have I done everything that I want to do?” The answer, at least to this point, is ‘yes’. “I can be satisfied in everything that I’ve done,” she says. “However, I have this innate belief that I probably shouldn’t be here after everything that I’ve survived. But for some reason I am.”
Which begs the question, what has she survived?
“I mean mentally,” she replies, “and family-wise. I’ve gone through a lot of see-saw ups and downs. Pushes and pulls. Even the fact of just making it in this business and getting everything where it is today… Like, I’m not cool. I didn’t get into this because I’m cool. I got into this to try and find something in myself. To find something that made me feel special that nobody else could take away from me. So, I think that at this point in my life I’m going to fight for that. But the fluff that comes with that, that doesn’t matter. So, I try to keep that as my guiding light.”
It's probably fair to regard Lzzy Hale as a work-in-progress. It might even be that this is how she views herself, too. As she sings on Everest, the (ahem) mountainous title track from Halestorm’s new album, ’All my life I’ve had to fight, and I don’t know why I just keep going, but there’s a light and I just might get that high if I just keep going’. This lyric, Lzzy explains, flew right out of her; it took about an hour, that’s all, top to bottom. In prose as in poetry, the language used to describe its genesis is similarly elevated. As she explains, “For some reason every single decision is life or death for us. Every song we write. Everything that we do. So, for me, it was important to talk about this journey.”
As it goes, the analogy of a life in rock’n’roll with the ascension of a hazardous peak is a pretty good one. Both endeavours require maddening persistence in which the odds of success are vanishingly slim. Both are fraught with danger. Demanding singularity and sacrifice, both take their toll on the mind and body. But there are differences, too. Unlike mountaineers, musicians tend not to retire by choice. Participants who do wish to stay the course, though, may be required to radically reappraise behaviour that appeared to serve them well in their younger years. Survival depends on keeping oneself sane and well.
“There were a lot of people involved in my life that were not healthy for me that I had to say goodbye to”
In a manner less publicly dramatic than any member of Guns N’ Roses, say, Lzzy Hale herself has been required to change tack in order to safely guide her career into its middle act. Like Slash before her, she learned the pursuits that were an unquestioned aspect of her younger years had begun to do her real harm by the time she entered her fifth decade. It was time for change.
“I’m recently sober,” she says. “I stopped drinking when I turned 40 [last year]. It stopped being fun. Whereas when I was in my 20s, when we started touring, it was, like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll have beers or whatever’. But that becomes normalised and, also, for me what happened is that in my mid to late 30s I started drinking a little bit more and I started doing it because I needed everything to shut down. I need an escape somewhere and I need everything to freeze time. And I didn’t like that feeling. I watched enough [erstwhile VH1 documentary series] Behind The Music when I was a kid to know that I didn’t want to become a stereotype.
“Since I freed myself from that, it helped me learn more about myself, too,” she continues. “To rid myself, systematically, of some of the things that no longer served me. I started doing that with people as well; there were a lot of people involved in my life that were not healthy for me that I had to say goodbye to… I have enough friends. I have enough people that support me and know me and that are there for me.”
But if eschewing alcohol is a routine private matter that is spoken of only as an aside, at other times, when circumstances demand it, Lzzy Hale has the lungs of a pioneer. Motivated by the suicide of Jill Janus, the 42-year-old frontwoman with the American metal group Huntress, for example, in 2018 the singer issued a tweet in which she invited people who felt burdened by their own mental health to respond, under the hashtag #raiseyourhorns, with pictures and stories. In short order, the many thousands of posts that greeted this clarion call represented the better qualities of the rock world. Strong and supportive, and anything but alone, there was a power in this union.
Rather strangely, though, it wasn’t until two years later that Lzzy herself sought formal assistance for her own occasionally unreliable brain. Never mind her willingness to speak publicly on the issue of mental health, in private, she found herself hampered by the inhibitions that she’d encouraged others to dispel. Rattling away like an empty can, inside her cranium, an immature and unserious voice sought to persuade her that seeking help was a sign of weakness, of dangerous vulnerability. She was letting down the side, didn’t she know, and letting down the band. Yada yada yada, bullshit bullshit.
So she had a word with herself.
“The hardest thing to do was to go, ‘Hey, I do need help, and I do need to figure some things out about myself,’” she says. “Because there’s this element where you go, ‘Well if I ask for help that means there’s something wrong with you. Why can’t you figure this out on your own?’ There’s always been this thing where I’ve been riding on this confidence that I had as a teenager where I feel like I can figure things out and I can solve things so long as I dive right in. I’ve made it this far, right? But there’s a freedom in knowing that you are brave enough to say, ‘I don’t know everything‘, and, ‘I don’t have the answers.‘”
There is a freedom in that, yes. Because alongside a loud and beautiful noise that brings pleasure to many scores of thousands of people, with Halestorm, Lzzy Hale’s engagement with matters of the mind is a legacy of which she can be proud. After all, in 2018, her statement to Kerrang! that “famous rock stars are affected by mental illness” and that “fame, money or acting like it doesn’t exist won’t fix the problem” was a far from a widely accepted position at that time. In fact, many were the people who just weren’t having it. Never mind that seven years later things have changed to the extent that conversations about mental health have become the 21st century equivalent of ’80s hair bands talking about sex and drugs, just be thankful that the tone of the conversation has improved, even if there’s work still to be done.
“It’s in that phase where people are happy to talk about [the issue] but not a whole lot of people are able to do anything about it,” she says. “And then there’s the state of the music industry… Because you’re kind of thrown into this on your own. Here, go figure it out. And then there’s the drugs, the sex, the alcoholism - it’s all celebrated, still.”
In searching for balance, and in looking inward to excavate her best self, Lzzy Hale doesn’t seem to have spent a great deal of time evaluating her impact on the lives of others. This is much to her credit. Sometimes, though, the evidence becomes too overwhelming to overlook. Case in point: in the attic of the home she shares with Halestorm guitarist Joe Hottinger, just outside Nashville, there are boxes and boxes of handwritten letters from people who claim that her decision to make public her attraction to both women and men, in response to a post on Twitter more than a decade ago, has inspired them, too, to emerge into the light.
“It's just a beautiful thing,” Lzzy says. “You never would have been able to tell me when I was a teenager that one day somebody else would see themselves reflected in me and be brave enough to come out. But they tell me that because I’ve done this, they too have told their parents and their friends and are now able to live their lives out in the open because of what I’ve said or done. Obviously, I’m fully for that. Because for all we know, we only get to take this ride once, so you might as well live it as best as you possibly can.”
Thankfully, though, the news that one of the scene’s leading lights happens to be bisexual is so unremarkable that the only aspect on which it is worth remarking is the favourable light it casts upon the world of rock music. In its capacity to allow people the freedom to be their genuine selves, its space is truer and kinder than that of society at large. At the time of her coming out Lzzy Hale had conversations about respective sexualities with Rob Halford, whose own coming out, in 1998, had no effect whatsoever on the long-term popularity of Judas Priest. Round these parts, it’s just not that big of a deal. Far more interesting, in fact, is an anecdote from Lzzy about the time she sat in with a scratch band made up of members of Aerosmith, Skid Row, Winger and Joan Jett’s Blackhearts to sing a Priest song at a local bar in Nashville.
“I was sitting on stage thinking ‘what is life right now?’” she says. “Like, this is amazing!”
“We only get to take this ride once, so you might as well live it as best as you possibly can”
This response, too, says rather a lot about Lzzy Hale. Despite the increasing success harvested by the group for which she sings, never far from the surface, if beneath the surface at all, is the person she used to be before strangers learned her name. The young child whose tastes were awakened by her parents blasting Panama, by Van Halen, or the schoolgirl who, in the company of her brother Arejay (who plays drums in Halestorm), would watch a VHS tape of the late Ronnie James Dio singing at Donington in 1987 is today present and correct. She remains a fan. Uncynical and unspoiled, with Halestorm, the joy of now being a part of it all, and of being able to contribute to the cause of loud music, is evident in the work. It courses through their veins.
“This should never have worked out for us,” is Lzzy’s belief. “We didn’t have a rich uncle who worked in the business, my dad’s… a mechanic, my mom occasionally cleaned houses but who stayed home mainly. I was home-schooled through most of high school because we were gigging a lot… [But] this is such a weird fluke accident that we actually get to say, ‘Not only are we still doing what we love, and doing it together, but we can call it a career now’.
“It’s kind of mind-blowing, actually.”
Everest is released August 8 via Atlantic Records
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