Higher ground

Hawthorne Heights’ new CD debuts in the Top Five

By Alan Sculley

Philly EDGE Correspondent

In J.T. Woodruff’s view, pressure is a word he doesn’t let into his vocabulary. “We never really worry about pressure because we just kind of do what we do and we have fun,” Woodruff, lead singer and guitarist in the rock band Hawthorne Heights said. “You can’t really sit back and worry about what somebody’s going to say or worry about anything like that when it comes to writing songs.”

Woodruff has certainly had his opportunities to worry.

Two years ago, when Hawthorne Heights was writing and recording the band’s debut CD, The Silence In Black And White, Woodruff was facing the prospect that this batch of songs might serve as his last shot at a career in music. He had been in a series of bands, and at age 25 he knew he couldn’t continue living the way he was for much longer. “The lyrics on that (first) album are pretty dark because I was pretty unhappy at that point,” Woodruff said. “Some of those songs were written before we were signed, before there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. So it’s like ‘All right, dude, I’m working at a gas station and I’m delivering pizzas and going to community college. Where can you tell me there’s a light at the end of the tunnel when you’re doing that all day and all night?’”

In approaching If Only You Were Lonely, the just released second Hawthorne Heights CD, Woodruff could very easily have felt an entirely different kind of pressure. The Silence In Black And White became one of rock’s quieter success stories of 2004/2005, gradually building momentum until it topped 500,000 copies sold and made Hawthorne Heights a leading newcomer on the rock scene. In the weeks leading up to the release of If Only You Were Lonely, the band’s label, Victory Records, made no secret of how it viewed the project. The label openly predicted If Only You Were Lonely would sell 200,000 copies in its first week of release (Feb. 28- Mar. 7) and debut at No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s Hot 200 album chart. If Woodruff and his bandmates had their hearts set on attaining those first-week numbers, he didn’t show it in this interview.

“Just from a band standpoint, we don’t have any expectations,” he said. “We never thought we would ever make the Billboard chart in our lives let alone think about debuting in the top five or anything like that. Honestly we will be happy if we will be the number one rock record that week. We can’t really compete with, like, hip-hop or country or R&B because those (fans) aren’t the same kids.” As it turned out, the CD debuted this past week at No. 3, with hip-hop artist Ne-Yo’s In My Own Words claiming the top spot. If Only You Were Lonely did, however, outsell all other rock CDs by moving 114,000 copies in its first week of release.

No matter how the numbers get crunched, the high-profile arrival of the new CD emphatically shows just how far Hawthorne Heights has come in a fairly short career. The band is set to play two sold-out dates with radio-darlings Fall Out Boy and All-American Rejects at the Tweeter Center in Camden this weekend, March 18 and 19.

The Dayton, Ohio band formed in 2001 under the name A Day In The Life, and switched its moniker to Hawthorne Heights a couple of years later after a series of personnel changes had left Woodruff as the group’s lone original member. Woodruff, who was the singer in A Day In The Life, began to also play guitar in the newly formed Hawthorne Heights lineup. With guitarists Casey Calvert and Micah Carli already in the lineup, this gave the group something unusual for a modern-day rock band – a three-guitar attack. Bassist Matt Ridenour and drummer (and Princeton, NJ native) Eron Bucciarelli round out the band’s musical roster. Hawthorne Heights’ sound clicked so well that by November 2003, a mailing of demos to some two dozen labels had earned Hawthorne Heights a contract with Chicago-based indie label Victory Records.

Expectations for The Silence In Black And White were rather modest, although at the time it racked up the best first-week sales total for a debut album by any Victory artist – a whopping 3,800 copies. Obviously, that total paled as The Silence In Black And White built lasting momentum and eventually topped 500,000 copies sold, earning Hawthorne Heights a gold record. The success came despite the fact that the CD didn’t have a hit single or get major exposure from MTV – although Hawthorne Heights did build a strong presence on social and music Web site MySpace.com. Still, Woodruff attributed the success of the first CD to old-fashioned hard work.

 “If I had to put my finger on it, I think our record label and our band worked equally hard together,” he said. “We played 300 shows last year. They (Victory) have always been willing to put advertising dollars into us and they’ve always believed in our record, and they keep pushing it no matter what. Like if we stay on the road, they’re going to keep pushing our record. And also, we have remained the same people that we were before we got signed. Like, we still go out to the merch table. We still hang out and try to meet our fans because that’s really important to us because they are the ones buying the record. “The reasons we can have these shows and that the shows are successful is because people are buying the tickets and buying our record,” Woodruff said. “So why wouldn’t you want to hang out with them? You kind of think of them like friends.”

Woodruff also pointed to a few subtle shifts on If Only You Were Lonely that show growth in the band. “We wanted to concentrate it (the screaming parts) more and, like, have it at the really intense parts instead of just coming here and there,” he said. “I think we opened up a little bit more (stylistically), as far as there’s a piano-based song ("Decembers") on the album. There’s some songs that don’t have any screaming at all. There are some songs that are a lot heavier than the last album. (But mostly) I think we just kind of wanted to stick to our guns and just do it better.”

Boy is back

If ever an artist seemed comfortable with the life that goes with being in a popular band, it would be guitarist Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy.

His group was the subject of considerable hype before the release last spring of From Under The Cork Tree, the band’s major label debut. The CD has lived up to expectations, selling well over one million copies, while generating two hit singles, “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Dance, Dance.” Fall Out Boy has just begun its first tour as an arena headliner, and Stump seems to be taking the change from playing clubs and theaters – not to mention band’s fast rise to prominence -- in stride.

“It will be weird because it will be a change of scenery, but we’re doing the exact same thing,” he said of the move up to arenas. “We’re a fairly loose band. We don’t like to really plan stuff out.” Stump also seems perfectly at ease with the expectations that come with major popularity. Already singer/guitarist Stump and his songwriting partner in the band, guitarist Pete Wentz, have a new CD pretty much written and theoretically could be in the studio recording by summer. Stump seems mystified, even a little irritated, at how other bands can be daunted by the prospect of following up a hit record.

“It’s kind of like bands make it seem like it’s this chore to do the things that you wanted to do at some point anyway,” he said. “Very obviously you wanted to put out a record at some point and you wanted to write songs and you wanted to tour. And it become this ‘Oh man, we have tour again. We have to do another record.’ I don’t know, you get these records from rock bands every five or six years if you’re lucky, and we’re just excited to do it.”

Preparations for the next CD have gone far enough, in fact, that the group has discussed having Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds produce at least some tracks for the CD. That choice is bound to raise some eyebrows. Edmonds has made his reputation as a producer – and as a successful songwriter and recording artist – on the R&B scene. Fall Out Boy, by contrast, is a guitar-pop rock band through and through. Stump, though, sees Edmonds, who has not yet signed on for the project, as a perfectly compatible producer for Fall Out Boy.

“I met with him a couple of times. He’s a real awesome guy,” said Stump, who noted he admires Edmonds’ abilities to produce singers and arrange and write songs. “He can do it and is aware of rock, and that’s the thing a lot of people underestimate him for.” Stump was reluctant to reveal many details about how the new songs compare to Fall Out Boy’s past material. But he said they won’t represent a drastic departure.

To coincide with the arena tour this spring, an expanded version of From Under The Cork Tree is being released with three unreleased songs and remixes of “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Dance, Dance.” Stump defended the validity of doing the new version of the CD.

“We had some songs that we thought were really good, but didn’t fit on the record as part of the album,” Stump said. “So there was some extra stuff that we thought we wanted to get out at some point.”

 “A lot of people will point out that yeah, you’re just trying to sell more records and blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And it’s like this. ‘If you don’t want it, don’t buy it.’ I don’t care really. We just wanted to get those songs out, and if you want to download those songs, go for it.”

-Alan Sculley