“You can’t please everyone. There’s always going to be someone disappointed, so you might as well make yourself happy and Be You.”
“If, through my own personal journey, I can inspire someone else to self-love, that would be the biggest accomplishment.”
“What I really realized is that by being myself, regardless of what that means, you become a better role model.”
“It’s important for people to realize that music is gender-less. We are proving that every single day. On this tour, there are more women than men in the audience, and it’s beautiful to see these girls own these hard-rock moments.”
“There’s a misconception that, as you have success with a band for a long time, things get easier, and that’s not necessarily true. It’s harder to keep connecting with that fire that got you started in the first place when you’re amongst all the politics in the business, and just having a little bit of that looming pressure.”
“When we began to tour, no one expected me to be a part of the band, so I used that as a tool, and would start the set off-stage or in the audience, as a surprise, because no one expected this little girl to get up and rock the way I do.”
“I wore Chuck Taylors for a couple shows, and the second show I wore the Chuck Taylors, that was the one and only time I fell onstage. I haven’t really bit it onstage in high heels yet. It will happen. It’s not about if, it’s about when.”
“You’re so used to being on the road and having a schedule that the insanity seeps in when you’re sitting at home and there’s nothing going on that day.”
“Once I started to make the transition to guitar – because I was playing keyboards when we started the band – I was trying to figure out riffs I could play without really having a lot of knowledge. And my dad ended up showing me Black Sabbath’s ‘Heaven and Hell,’ because he knew I loved Dio.”
“Something that I don’t normally tell, and it’s not necessarily because I wanna keep it from anybody – I just don’t think about it – but one thing about me that not a whole lot of people know and that never really gets brought up is that I actually don’t have a driver’s license. I’ve never taken a driver’s test.”
“I think there’s this primal need to go to a show when you’re a rock fan. And it’s about that camaraderie and about that intangible feeling that we all get.”
“I’ve been in the songwriting circuit as well. I’ve been in a couple writing camps where there are seven top writers or whatever, and they’re writing songs for a young girl or a young guy that are coming up, and they’re kind of nuts.”
“My new year’s resolution is to stop making five-year plans. I stress over where I’m going to be in five years so often.”
“I think it’s less stressful to just make decisions as you go, because plans never work out, but you never run out of dreams. You have an eternal bucket list where you keep crossing things off, and keep adding things to the bottom.”
“We don’t dip our toe into religion or politics, because you can’t win.”
“I didn’t know that women go through a vocal change, which is called ‘thickening’. Basically, it’s like when your body gets ready for childbirth, and so it just grows in a weird way. When I figured that out, I was frustrated with it.”
“It’d be great to have more categories in the rock and metal category – but I don’t want that job, picking where everybody is supposed to go.”
“I am holding on to every shred of femininity that I can with heels and dresses.”
“I grew up in a household that never talked about limitations.”
“I’ve dealt my entire career with sexist and condescending people.”
“I had, like, a keytar. I was always attracted to the guitar, but I never really thought that I could be good at it because I was trained on piano, so it was kind of a jump.”
“I dare anybody to display a more amazing body of work than Tom Petty.”
“I feel like, as a girl, I would have reacted or maybe been more depressed about some of the things that would have happened in my life if I didn’t have music.”
“There is something in my brain that said if I get Halestorm to a point where people are actually listening to what I have to say, I might as well put out positivity and be that empowering figure that I would have wanted in a rock star.”
“In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.”
“I wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist.”
“I got this cheap guitar, and then I fell in love with it and basically put down the keyboard.”
“I play mostly Gibsons. In fact, they have just given me a signature guitar.”
“I keep changing my stuff. I used to play through a Marshall JCM800, and then I also had a Randy Rhoads signature amp. So before I was playing EVH, I was playing an ODB pedal. I still have my Dunlop Jerry Cantrell wah pedal because I love that.”
“There’s always an element of truth to what I write because that’s why I write.”
“We’re so humbled and lucky to be in a position where we’ve been a four-piece for over 15 years. We’re signed to a major label. We’re on our fourth record on a major label. We’ve won a Grammy. We’ve toured the world.”
“What people don’t normally know about us is the hustle is very real, and it’s sorely driven a lot by how we consider ourselves. We don’t pay a whole lot of attention to any type of judgment that we might get from outside people. I think that comes from growing up onstage.”
“I remember that when people started listening to what I had to say, I had a choice to set up a veil, even if it meant being something that I’m not. Ultimately, that’s not the decision I made. I owned more of everything I am, which was a little nerve-racking.”
“I can count on less than five fingers the things I can do well, so I’m just going to stick to those. It’s crazy; it’s literally all I’ve ever wanted to do in life is sing and play and get out there and rock.”
“I ended up starting guitar because I didn’t want to just be the lead singer.”
“It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I’m always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.”
“I’m always trying to evolve my sound. I love the simplicity of my setup. I play Gibson guitars and Marshall amps. So it’s kind of like the standard rock sound.”
“As far as people, I’ve always loved Tony Iommi’s sound, just the grittiness that was in that era of metal where it wasn’t too fuzzy, and you could still hear the guitar and the fingers, but it still had this chunky, meat-and-potatoes sound to it.”
“I grew up with my dad’s music, so my introduction to rock was Alice Cooper and Cinderella and Dio and Black Sabbath, so I was listening to a lot of dude bands – Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, all that stuff.”
“You can pick out the scariest dude on the tour and, guaranteed, he’s probably a smush – I just find that so incredibly attractive.”
“I think that’s a big part of what I love about the boys in the band, too, and what I find attractive in men in general is, really, the ability to not take everything so seriously because it is rock n’ roll after all; it’s a freakin’ circus. We’re not accountants here.”
“The good thing about most of the girls that I’ve met on the road is that, regardless of whether they’re cute or not, man – they can bring it onstage, which is inspiring not just for young girls and young people in general but for myself because then it makes me want to step it up.”
“Cinderella obviously got caught up in the hair metal scene, but they were such a blues band. And such a good live band.”
“What I love about Zeppelin is that you can listen to their entire catalog and kind of see where they were at in the moment.”
“I have learned that you can’t be high-maintenance on the road. I’ve groomed myself to not be high-maintenance. You have to maintain and be a girl and not become a dude.”
“I like to sew, and I am into bending metal and making industrial jewelry. I sew a lot of my own clothes and customize stuff.”
“I have always been ‘small town.’ I was born outside of Philadelphia, so we lived on a 20-acre farm and then spent two years in a log cabin on the Appalachian Trail. We lived outside of York in Red Lion, which is an amazing town. It’s perpetually 1982 in that town.”
“In my efforts to better my stamina and career, I find myself becoming more monk-like. And I’m not talking about the ‘holy, praying, create awesome Trappist beer’-type monk. I’m talking about the ‘go to bed early, no drinking, no talking, and no having any fun’-type monk.”
“One of the things that helps my vocal health immensely out on the road is stopping all my eating/drinking at least four hours before I go to bed. I actually set a timer after my last meal so I can’t cheat. This is to prevent acid reflux when I lay down in my bunk at night.”
“Here’s the breakdown: alcohol dehydrates you and stimulates acid reflux. Then, when you sing on dry, irritated vocal folds, your folds swell. When your folds swell, they cause hoarseness, which makes you feel like you have to push harder to get a sound out.”
“As musicians, we are quite literally singing for our supper. Don’t get me wrong, I love touring, but the reality is that our idols from the ’70s and ’80s never toured this hard. They’d do a record, have one big world tour, maybe two, then break to do another record.”
“I remember one tour with two male-fronted bands, and they had a fight over who could use the bathroom first. Then they just ended up having a beef with each other for the entire rest of the tour.”
“A lot of girls come to our shows, and a lot of them are freaking adorable and want to learn how to play guitar.”
“It doesn’t matter how you’re dressed onstage or what you say in your songs: that doesn’t give anybody the right to invade your personal space.”
“My musical tastes – I’m always searching for new things. I know a lot of people say they listen to everything, but I kind of do.”
“There’s always a spot, any time we make a new record, where I literally go back to Judas Priest and Motorhead because you have to. You have to go back and understand where this all started for you and keep reminding yourself of that.”
“I’m so honored that there are people, peers, that I’m inspired by and looked up to for years and actually want me to do my thing with them. It’s quite the honor, and it’s been wonderful to see everybody’s fan base kind of melting together.”
“Over the years, it’s funny: my guys will tell you and anyone that I have a problem not giving 100 percent. Because there are some nights where I probably shouldn’t actually say everything or do everything I think I should do.”
“My first Gibson was a ’91 Les Paul Custom tobacco burst. I still have it – it’s still amazing-sounding – but it took me a long time of saving up to get that guy!”
“I love using lots of different pedals in the studio because you have the time to experiment with sounds. But when you’re singing, fronting a rock band, and playing, you don’t really want to have to think about a lot of that stuff.”
“I go to a lot of metal shows when we’re home. I don’t know why, but it takes me back to when I was 17 and going to the local metal shows in Pennsylvania. I go right back to that mentality.”
“Deep down inside, I’m a cheeseball and still listen to Bryan Adams and all that stuff.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever do a record that’s just the same song over and over again because I’d like to think about it like it’s an album and a snapshot of everything that makes you who you are and where you’re at at that time in your life.”
“I made a lot of not-so-fashionable choices in my life. I see all of those photos that are on the Internet forever.”
“I go back to the rock n’ roll black leather jacket, red lips, smoky eyes. I like my high heels, maybe some leather pants or ripped jeans, things that have never really gone out of style. Again, it’s very reflective of who I am as a bandmate in our band.”
“I keep telling everybody that touring has now become my normal life and that normal life is like a very odd vacation.”
“I actually ended up going through a vocal change. It started about two years ago, and it’s only been recently that I found my balance again. Vocally, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. My lows were getting lower, and my highs were getting higher; everything felt weird.”
“Not to get mushy, but I realized after talking to my parents what absolute guts they must have had to let their teenage daughter be in a rock band, play in bars, do all of that.”
“I think that’s one of the beautiful things about this genre is that everyone who’s in it isn’t in it to make a million bucks and be popular, because that’s not always our M.O. Really, I think the last time that rock was truly in the mainstream was probably a point in time in the ’90s when there was a lot of alternative that was on the pop charts.”
“It’s funny: I’ve seen a lot of the rock attitude come into play in the rap world, where it’s like they’re angry, or there’s this defiance going on, and there’s a lot of danger, and it’s actually really encouraging; they’re opening the door for us to kind of move on in again.”
“It’s not like I have this philosophical answer as to why I love rock.”
“I’ve been talking a lot about how music chooses you because you can pinpoint when you had the epiphany that, ‘Wow, I really want to do this.’ But there’s no real rhyme or reason about choosing to be in this industry. It’s one of those things where there is no real guarantee; there is no real rulebook to follow.”
“For me, this band and the music that I write and this touring thing that I do and playing in front of people, singing, and making a lot of noise on guitar – all that was more important than a lot of other things.”
“Even now – I’m 35 – I’ve been in a relationship for 15 years with a guy, and we have two full incomes and no kids, and it’s hilarious. We’re children, perpetually, because of this rock and roll thing. But it’s still so fulfilling.”
“When you have a relationship with music, and it’s that deeply a part of your life, it’s so much more than a career choice for me. It’s an extension of who I am.”
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