Thursday, Sep. 01, 2011

Hawthorne Heights goes the D-I-Y route

Hawthorne Heights. Courtesy photo.

 

If ever a band would seem to welcome the growing trend of groups leaving record deals to start their own labels, Hawthorne Heights would have to be near the top of the list.

The Dayton, Ohio-based group famously fought with its first label, Victory Records, over (among other things) what it saw as unpaid royalties - a dispute that eventually saw the band sue Victory.

Now, after moving on to Wind-up Records for a one-album stint, Hawthorne Heights has gone the do-it-yourself route by starting its own label called Cardboard Empire. The group's first release on its label, "The Hate EP," became available digitally on Aug. 30.

And the back-to-basics approach is extending to the band's tour, which is favoring intimate venues, such as tonight's gig at Pirate's Cove in North Myrtle Beach.

It probably won't come as a shock that singer JT Woodruff sees creative independence as a key reason Hawthorne Heights left the security of being on a record label.

"I think the most important aspect of all of this is we get to make the decisions," Woodruff said in a mid-August phone interview. "And the best thing was if we wanted to do it this way, all we had to do was agree to it all four of us, which is cool. That's kind of liberating in a way."

What might surprise some is that Woodruff and his band mates (guitarist Micah Carli, bassist Matt Ridenour and drummer Eron Bucciarelli) actually aren't soured on record companies at all.

In fact, Woodruff said if the band had it to do over again, it wouldn't have filed suit against Victory Records and taken such a confrontational approach to its dispute with the label. Instead, he said, the band should have tried to talk out its differences with label executives so the legal battles could have been avoided. As it was, after two years of legal wrangling, the band and Victory settled their differences, clearing the way for Hawthorne Heights to release its third CD, "Fragile Future," on Victory before moving on to Wind-up to release the 2010 CD, "Skeletons."

As for Wind-up, the group left the company on good terms, recognizing that the label was accustomed to marketing mainstream rock acts to mainstream rock radio. But Hawthorne Heights, with its more indie rock-oriented audience, requires more of a grassroots approach to promotion and marketing - something that wasn't familiar for Wind-up.

Hawthorne Heights is giving up a few things by taking the do-it-yourself approach to releasing music. For instance, Woodruff said the group won't pursue much in the way of retail distribution of "The Hate EP." Fans that don't want to download the EP through a digital provider will probably have to buy a physical copy at a Hawthorne Heights concert.

But fans will benefit, Woodruff said, because Hawthorne Heights won't have to play by the rules of a record label in releasing music.

"The Hate EP" is an example of this new found freedom. Woodruff said the band studied its options for releasing a full-length CD on iTunes and discovered that any CD of 10 or more songs would be priced at a minimum of $9.99. By going with a nine-song EP, "The Hate EP" can be priced at $7.99.

"I know that's kind of over-thinking it a little bit, but we wanted to provide the value, and the value was nine instead of 10 songs," Woodruff said of the decision to use the EP format.

The kicker is that Hawthorne Heights won't have to adhere to the kind of two-year touring cycle that record labels commonly favor to promote a CD release. Instead, the group plans to release two more nine-song EPs during the next year.

"Two years is such a long time (between albums)," Woodruff said. "Think about everything that can go on it two years. I like the idea of giving people music as I write it."

At this point, little of the next batch of music has been written, and Woodruff said he isn't sure what sort of lyrical themes he will pursue as he writes the next two EPs.

But with "The Hate EP," he and his band mates had a theme in mind - as the title "Hate" suggests.

Many will assume that the dark tone of the new EP was inspired by the band's own tough times. In addition to the record label issues, the group suffered a far more profound loss in November 2007, when guitarist/screaming vocalist Casey Calvert was found dead on the band's tour bus outside of the Washington, D.C. venue, the 9:30 Club. Calvert's death was ruled the result of a drug interaction. Calvert had been taking medications for depression and anxiety problems, and members of Hawthorne Heights have emphasized that he never used illegal drugs.

Woodruff said some lingering feelings about Calvert's death may have fueled some of the harsh emotions on "The Hate EP," but the EP is centered around more universal inspirations.

"There's just a lot of isolation, that's the best way I can put it," Woodruff said, addressing the lyrics on "The Hate EP." "It's about people who are in the position of not wanting to be where they are...It's about what life's like when it's bleak, and what life's like when it's barren, when your emotions just take you into a dark place instead of flipping the script and taking you into a happier place.

"And as always, there's a light at the end of the tunnel in our music," he said. "I'm an eternal optimist. I always want to wrap things up in a positive way because I think that no matter what, no matter how shitty life is, it's still life. We're still alive. We're still here, and life isn't supposed to be easy. If it was supposed to be easy, we would all be living in Pleasantville, and we don't."

Musically, "The Hate EP" isn't exactly bouncy summer escapism, but it's well in the tradition of the four previous full-length CDs from Hawthorne Heights. Songs such as "Divided" "Hate" and "Oceans" mix aggressive riffing, soft-to-loud dynamics and a good deal of melody, while on the whole, the band employs more of the screaming - or unclean - vocals (courtesy Carli) that had faded from the band's songs with Calvert's death.

"A couple of these are kind of heavier songs, more akin to our older material and a little bit heavier than that," Woodruff said. "Some of them were just influences of kind of growing up and listening to music in what I consider the heyday of my lifetime, which was the early '90s, like when Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, like all these bands (were starting). I'm not saying our record sounds grunge because it totally does not. But there's like some raw energy and some feedback."

The rough and ready sound of the new material will be well suited to the group's fall tour, which numbers some 60 shows. The tour finds Hawthorne Heights playing clubs that are smaller than the venues the group has usually played - case in point: tonight's show at Pirate's Cove. Woodruff said the band is looking forward to the intimacy of clubs on this tour.

"There's just something about a small, tiny area, where all of the kids are nice and close knit," he said. "Everybody's friends. Everybody's singing along. You can hear everything. I don't know, that energy that you can get in such a small place, it's really tough to match."