There is committed, and then there is flying across the Atlantic for a single festival set and turning straight around. That was Halestorm drummer Arejay Hale’s Download. “This is a one-off for me and my bass player Josh. We flew in to do the one show and we’re flying back,” he tells us on a rare sunny Download afternoon. Lzzy and Joe were staying on for acoustic dates, but for Arejay and Josh it was a flying visit. “We’ve got all that pent up rage ready to go, and the jet lag goes right out the window. We’re just going to leave it all on the stage.”
That same instinct is what they chased on their latest album Everest. Recorded live? “Depends on your definition of live,” Arejay laughs. They didn’t track it all in one go, but they leaned hard into spontaneity. Their producer Dave loves the feel of the first couple of takes, when a band is still figuring a song out, improvising, a little unsure. For a band that admits to perfectionism, that was uncomfortable. “We’re a little OCD about our playing. We want a really solid take, because it’s forever, it’s in the recording.” So they learned to trust Dave and engineer Greg Gordon to know better. “I’d record another take and go, there, now it’s smoothed out. And Dave would go, nah man, the last one was the one. I’d say, really? It felt a little sloppy. And that’s exactly what they wanted.”
The result, Arejay reckons, is the closest Halestorm have come to bottling their live energy. “Our live shows are very imperfect. No click, no tracks. Very raw and honest, mistakes and all. That’s given character to our sound.” His producer’s real gift, he says, was not letting the band overthink. As we put it to him, finding those magic moments is the whole job, in any line of work. He agreed. “It’s not supposed to be polished.”
Ask him to picture Everest as a room and the metaphor lands beautifully. Past a quick joke about a faint smell of death, which he waved off, what he describes is somewhere properly lived in. “You know those houses where wealthy people have rooms they never go into? The dining room all set, the foyer with the drapes and the throw pillows, perfectly made up. Then you walk into the kitchen and the family room, with the toys and the dog toys and the games and the TV, and that’s where everyone wants to hang out. The fun room.” That, he decides, is Halestorm. The fun room everybody ends up in.
On the track ‘Fallen Stars’, an early demo they kept circling back to, his approach was more craft than confession. “I’m a fallen star that can only fall so far from you. I liked the theme, and then it was, where can we go from there?” Joe had the opening riff, which the band nicknamed reverse jaws, and they tracked the whole song without vocals before playing with melodies off the cuff. He has a theory about it. Plenty of writers dig deep into lore, he says, naming Sleep Token as masters of that, but a lot of the best songs come from a simpler instinct. “What descriptive words can we use to make this sound interesting and cool? Sometimes the wording just feels right with the song.” That, he says, is how he approached much of the record, following the feeling of the music.
Asked to sum the band up as weather, an object and an emoji, the weather was never in doubt. “A storm, obviously. A hailstorm, duh.” The emoji is a tie between the sideways face crying with laughter and the dizzy one with the crooked mouth. “It’s a lot of laughter, but a lot of delirium too, from the travel and the time. It wears on you. But we love it.” The object took a darker detour, a passing nod to the Egyptian hook once used to pull a brain out through the nose, before he landed somewhere far more wholesome. “The one object in my house I absolutely love is the instant apple slicer. My wife is addicted to apples and almond butter, and it’s made my life so easy. A game changing invention.”
As for when the full band returns to the UK, he threw his hands up. “I’m always the last to know” His best guess is next year, with more dates coming over, though nothing is booked and everything is subject to change. “Keep an eye out.” For now, there was a stage to play, and a flight home to catch.
