The mighty Halestorm return to Australia in late 2019 alongside their good friends Black Stone Cherry. There is little doubt that Halestorm will be finally tuned by the time they get here given that this year has been a year of heavy touring for the Pennsylvanian outfit, they have already hit Australia for Download and are now doing the European festival circuit while also headlining shows.
In fact when HEAVY Mag catches up with the legendary Lizzy Hale she is in Luxembourg preparing for their headline show that night. “There is already a line outside,” says Hale checking outside as we chat to her on the phone. “We are in the middle of touring but it is this weird mixture of our headlining shows while we are on the European festival circuit, so we are doing these huge festivals, we’ve just down Download and now we are heading to Grasspop, but it has been fun to do both – you go from these huge festivals then to your headlining shows. It has been awesome I have been ticking some stuff off the bucket list.”
“It is absolutely maddening in the best way,” she says when I ask her what it is like to walk out onto those Festival stages with so many people there to see Halestorm. “You literally lose your mind a little bit. Just a few minutes before you called we heard from the Promoter of the Download Festival and apparently in the history of Download we had the biggest attendance for our second stage headlining site and I was also the first girl to headline that stage so I thought that was awesome.”
That leads me into asking about Australia and how excited Hale is about returning to our fair shores. “I love Australia,” she says laughing. “I want to come to Australia every opportunity that I get. And every chance that I get, and I might do this again seeing I will be there at the end of the year, but every chance for some time off that I get after Australia I end up staying for like a week or two. I just take some time for myself and every time I am there I am like ‘man, I could live here.’ So it has pretty much become my fantasy vacation place and I am always like ‘man, if I could get a place here I probably would.’”
“Not only is that exciting because I love Australia and love the people and I love the rock ‘n’ roll attitude that is still very much alive in Australia,” she says continuing. “But we get to do it with Black Stone Cherry and they are our brothers, man. We have known them for fifteen years or something like that, we have been gigging together so to come back with those guys and do this thing is going to be like a big family reunion. We haven’t seen each other for a few months, oh it might even be a year, we never get to see our friends because our friends are always touring. We actually have to tour together to be able to see each other. This will be an absolute blast and I will tell you what… if you have never caught John Fred Young and Arejay Hale in a room together look out because it is like when a tornado meets a hurricane. They are like us… our heart and soul is live music.”
You can listen to the full interview on Spotify.
