Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale joined me to discuss the band’s latest collaboration with I Prevail. The song is called ‘Can U See Me In The Dark’ and does not currently appear on an album from either band. Hale told the story of how the song came to be, by telling us about how they had become fans of each other’s bands back in 2015 or so and how when they found a way to tour together which brought this idea together.
“When we decided to do the tour we kind of threw it out there like ‘Hey what if we collaborate on a song and make this so much more than just we’re going to go out on tour together and hitch our wagons together and do some sets. So it was quite the feat to do…we are two very different sub-genres of the grand spectrum of hard rock, so we do things differently. So they sent us this track that was kind of an instrumental with this salsa beat (laughs)…and some synth and keyboard and all that and we actually right here, the boys and I wrote three different songs to the track…sent those to (I Prevail)…they put some other things on it…looped it back and I sat with Tyler(Smyth) their producer and Eric(VanLeberghe)…and we kind of Frankenstein-ed my weird gibberish and lyrics…because I had like three different ideas and one of them was ‘Can U See Me In The Dark’ and we were like ok let’s do it, so it took a little while to go back and forth and do it remotely like that.”
The process to put the song together was a lot of back and forth between the camps before the final product was finished.
‘So I went down (to LA) and Joe went to add his parts so it’s literally everyone from the band, from my band and their band involved with this track so the wonderful thing of that is I’m listening to the track now and I can hear all of us and I’m hearing these two worlds colliding and us kind of proving that there are no rules, there never really was, and everyone can just be themselves and help each other and it became this bigger thing, now we get to play this for our fans and be like “Look this is our sanctuary, this is our place where my superfans, your superfans (which we all stalk by the way we know who al of you are and we can’t wait for you all to meet each other)”
Moving on to the new record Halestorm is working on Lzzy said they’ll be a little sneaky as to when we get new music from them but they are very excited about the process.
‘We’ve been in the studio with Dave Cobb for some time now and it’s been different this time, it’s been sporadic, it isn’t like we’ve mapped out eight weeks of time and we’re gonna get a record done. We started going to him, first it was three days to test him out and we wrote a song together from scratch and everyone was like “Wait what is this?!”…Had another session with him for about two weeks, had another one for three weeks…and we have one more session booked for August for after this tour to kind of finish up everything. It’s really exciting! It’s very A.D.D. which I really love, because all of us are a little touched by (that) (laughs) But it was a great challenge because this is Dave Cobb and he has worked with Rival Sons and Airbourne and that’s like the rock world that he’s in, he’s made most of his name from Brandi Carlisle and Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell, who I love…The craziest thing was that we got a lot of push back…we were saying ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do a record with Dave Cobb because that would be something no one would really expect from us and I bet ya he’d come up with some crazy ideas!” And everyone on our team was like “No, no he’s too busy. That’s not you…he’s got like nine Grammy’s with Chris Stapleton, that’s not your scene.” And so we kept saying “Just ask him…we can handle rejection just ask him.” So finally our (label rep) reached out and asked him…he reached back out the next day and was like “Hey I heard back from Dave Cobb and guess what? Not only does he absolutely know who you are but he’s also wanted to make a record with you for like seven years and he has a plan all ready as to how he wants to do it.” And we were like “Whaaaat??? This is sick!”
So they got to work from the ground up, no ideas were allowed from before the session and the record started taking form. They recorded as they performed them in the group and she says there’s a real rawness to the album that will surprise a lot of people. She also wants to make it known they are not going country or anything so be ready for something very Halestorm coming soon!
[YouTube: Razor Wisconsin] [YouTube: Halestorm] [Dave Cobb]
