HOW TO GO
What: Hawthorne Heights
Where: Southgate House, 111 E. 6th St., in Newport, Ky.
When: March 18, 8:30 p.m.
Cost: $10 (advance) and $12 (day of show)
More Info: 859-431-2201 or www.southgatehouse.com.
The Dayton-bred, post-hardcore screamo band, Hawthorne Heights, is in the midst of a dual-themed touring cycle.
One is the 10-year celebration of the band’s debut album, “The Silence in Black and White,” which is what made these hometown boys famous. The second, which will be on display at Southgate House in Newport, Ky., this weekend, is called “Stripped Down to the Bone.” This show is named for their 2012 acoustic EP, and will consist of acoustic versions of fan favorites, rare songs, and shared storytelling between band members and the audience. The purpose of the tour, according to vocalist JT Woodruff, is to mark a major milestone before coming back home to continue working on new material.
“There has definitely been a lot of nostalgia,” he said. “Not just memories of ourselves growing up but watching our fans grow up, hearing their stories at meet-and-greets. When you meet couples who met listening to us and are now married, or someone who says they wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for one of our songs, it’s pretty powerful. That’s the thing that makes you want to continue being in a band, no matter what’s happening in the music industry.”
A casual look at the band’s website indicates there will be Dayton stop for the band on this tour.
“There aren’t a lot of all-ages venues in Dayton anymore,” he said. “We still have a decent following of younger fans, so we don’t like to play places that are 18 or 21 and up. So unless we can convince someone locally to do it, it’s a matter of going down the road to Cincinnati or Columbus.”
Once Hawthorne Heights comes off the road later this spring, they’ll have two projects to finish, the third installment of an EP trilogy that began with 2011’s “Hate” and 2012’s “Hope,” and their sixth full-length album. Woodruff said the band doesn’t have a clear vision of the new album yet, but it most likely won’t be like their previous full-length release, the “Brave New World”-like concept album, “Zero.”
“It’ll sound like us no matter how we approach it,” he said. “There’ll be a certain amount of aggression, an emotional side, a pop element. We’re working on which direction we want to go now, but it won’t be so grand (as “Zero”), just more in tune with coming up with a great collection of songs.”
Like many veteran bands, Woodruff has come to terms with writing music he likes without worrying about whether he’ll retain every fan.
“Some people won’t like anything that sounds newer than the first thing you did,” he said. “While some will like anything we do, even if we put out a country album. You can only focus on writing songs you want to write the way you want to write them, to be okay with it as long as we don’t hate it and are willing to play and support it every night.”
Woodruff also rejects the prevailing view that rock music has declined.
“Nothing has declined, the only thing that’s changed is how people access music,” he said. “We still have a great fan base who come to our shows and support us on social networks, and we’re still gaining new fans. I don’t even pay attention to whether we’re selling albums or not, which up until the early 2000s was all that mattered. It was hard to see other bands break up because they weren’t meeting sales quotas.
“Yet people listen to music all the time without having a physical copy or even a digital copy of the music. They don’t have to own anything. The only trick now is how to get people to pay attention to a song your wrote when people are going to have every song available at the touch of their phones for the rest of their lives.”
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