Even if you barely had a half pinch of punk rock blood in you as a high schooler, chances are overwhelmingly great that you can still recite every word to “Niki FM.” The band that wrote the soundtrack to your freshmen year is making its way to Chicagoland this Saturday, April 2, to remind you why you wished Ohio was your home state (“Ohio is For Lovers” anyone?).Hawthorne Heights is hitting the road this week to headline a national tour with Veara, After Midnight Project and Handguns. The platinum-selling rockers are promoting 2010’s “Skeletons,” their fourth full-length album, making vinyl copies of the record available during the tour for the first time.
The show is at Another Hole in the Wall – 3236 Union Ave., Steger, Ill. – no, not Lincoln Hall, but a short Metra ride to the south suburbs may be worth the tiny-venue intimacy. The DePaulia talked to Hawthorne Heights’ lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, JT Woodruff, in anticipation of the Windy City gig.
The DePaulia (DP): Can you describe what it’s like to play for a Chicago audience?
JT Woodruff (JW): We’re only about 5 or 6 hours away from Chicago living down here in Dayton, so Chicago people are always really awesome to us. We typically go there on every tour because we genuinely love the city and the fans there are great. Everybody is always really cool, super appreciative. You know, it’s a Midwest city, so it’s always kind of close to our hearts. I’m really looking forward to it, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, like usual.
DP: I’m sure Ohio is your biggest show, right?
JW: Yeah, typically.
DP: Are you guys kind of obligated to end a show with “Ohio is For Lovers” in Ohio?
JW: No, we don’t subscribe to any obligations these days [laughs]. In the past, mostly, but we have so many songs now that we do as we please a lot of the times, and hopefully everybody likes it [laughs].
DP: Generally speaking, what is it like to see Hawthorne Heights live?
JW: I’d say that we’re really loud, we are energetic, we try to move around a bit, and I try to be funny on the microphone as much as I’m allowed to be. But, you know, we tend to go pretty quickly from song to song, because we think its important for our fans to get to hear as many songs as they want to so we try to speed things along. I like to talk, so I’ll try to be funny a little bit.
DP: Is this tour in support of “Skeletons?”
JW: Yes, yes, we’re still supporting “Skeletons.” It’ll [have been] out for right around a year right after this tour.
DP: You’re re-issuing it on vinyl for this tour too.
JW: Yeah, we’re really excited about that. That’s another reason to hop back on the road and play a lot of these songs from “Skeletons,” which we’re excited about.
DP: Why’d you choose to do that?
JW: Oh, we’re nerds. We’re nerds, a couple of us collect vinyl. We just thought it’d be cool to get it out on vinyl and to choose our colors and our little layout and to hear one of our favorite records of our own on vinyl. It’s going to be really cool, I’m really looking forward to it.
DP: You were talking about collecting vinyl, what are some of your favorite vinyl records?
JW: I’m a big Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen collector, so I’m always on the hunt for ones that I don’t have. Unfortunately at this point I have like all the classics, it’s the newer ones that are a lot harder to find because, you know, they don’t make as many on vinyl. You have to pay a lot, but I’ll keep digging. But, I don’t know, a lot of music just sounds really cool on vinyl, we definitely live in a digital age which is more convenient but not more satisfying. So I try to get as many records as I can. It’s great, you can get a classic album a lot of times for a dollar. And it just sounds so warm and kind of takes you back to when they were playing those songs and when they wrote those songs. One reason that I listen to music an why I play music is to kind of take me away to a different place and it does that a lot of times.
DP: Yeah, it definitely makes listening to music a lot more intimate, versus just playing it on your iPod, plus bringing back that nostalgia too. It’s really cool that you guys are bringing that back.
JW: Yeah, I really like the idea of putting a record on and listening to it all the way through and not skipping around, because you really gotta work to skip around when you’re playing on vinyl [laughs] but I like the idea of the idea of sitting down and listening to the whole thing that the artist created because if I want to listen to Bruce Springsteen, I want him to tell me the story and I don’t want to skip around, you know?
DP: Yeah. So then as far as your album history goes, there was your debut album, “The Silence In Black and White,” which I think everyone I grew up with could sing you back every track, but since then you guys have done three albums. I’ve noticed from album to album there are some musical shifts. But then when I was listening to “Skeletons,” it’s actually surprisingly similar to your first album. Can you talk about the band’s musical evolution?
JW: Yeah definitely. We’ve had to kind of adapt and go through a couple changes when we lost our good friend Casey [Calvert, guitarist], so you know that was a big shift in our band. And you know a lot of people don’t realize what it’s like to lose your best friend who happens to also be in your band, and it took us a little while to get through that. Not get over that, you never get over something like that, but we had to get through that and to just realize how to write as four of us instead of five of us. So coming around with “Skeletons” we just had a lot of time and we wrote it in a bunch of different locations and had a lot of fun writing it, we rented out a cabin in Hawking Hills in Ohio which is kind of like a southern resort area, and we wrote a lot of it in Times Square in New York City and wrote a lot of it in our houses in Dayton, so we had a lot of fun just going to different locations trying to grab inspirations from wherever we can, you know, hanging out with each other and trying to make everyone happy. Everyone in the band has to be fully invested and really digging what you’re doing or it doesn’t turn out as well. So I’m really happy with this album and I think everybody in the band is as well.
DP: You guys have had a really unique journey, obviously, and an unusually hard time too since you started recording. Like you mentioned, Casey, unfortunately, and the big legal battle with Victory Records. Those kind of things have definitely got to challenge your motivation as band, and your ideas about your future. How have those things affected you specifically?
JW: You know, anytime you’re going through some sort of hardship, you definitely reflect on that in music. I always tell everybody that I tend to write kind of downer-type lyrics, but there’s always a little hope in there, and unfortunately my personality does not fit the let’s go out and party and dance and that’s just not who I am, I’m not making fun of those people, that’s just not why I play music, that’s not why I write music, that’s not how I write music. So, anytime we got through something extremely horrible or frustrating or anything like that whether it be within the band realm or just in my personal life or somebody else’s personal life, you’re going to see that. I think that’s important for our fans to know that they’re not the only ones who kind of have hard times every once in a while so that’s kind of how Hawthorne Heights operates.
DP: So then looking to the future, do you guys have any plans in mind? Lofty goals? What does the future look like for Hawthorne Heights?
JW: As of right now, we’re going to finish this tour up, which runs about five weeks, we’re going to continue to promote “Skeletons” and get this vinyl out there. Then we’re going to settle down and spend most of the summer writing some new songs, hitting it pretty hard in our own studio in Ohio and just try and see what we can come up with, see what we can write, see where we are, and then probably get back on tour in the fall. We’re all totally excited about writing some new music while continuing to promote “Skeletons” too. We’re stoked, we’re into it.