When we catch up with , she’s sitting in her closet. “I’m adulting and I don’t like it,” the vocalist and guitarist tells us, mid-way through house renovations and surrounded by leather jackets and stage outfits, although it’s an apt setting for us to look back on her life. Since founding the band with her brother, drummer Arejay, in 1997 aged just 13, she’s led Halestorm through a series of changes and leaps of faith that have turned Halestorm into one of the biggest bands in hard rock and Lzzy into an empowering modern icon.
This is her story. “To recreate our set for this last festival season in the UK and Europe, we went back to a couple of songs [on 2009 debut, ] just to kind of go back to basics. It’s crazy to see or to hear in real time how much we’ve grown, how different my voice sounds.
I couldn’t help myself analysing little tricks that I did with my voice and I’m like, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that now.’ Particular sounds on the record take you back to that moment. When I hear certain guitar bars, I’m like, ‘Oh, man, do you remember that carpet that was in the studio?’” “When we first started, we were playing with both pop punk bands and metal bands It was this weird, middle of the road, in between, and I always felt a little discouraged by that because I’m like, ‘Well, where’s our place? Where do we belong?’ Those things mattered to me in the beginning because I really wanted to figure it out.
I wanted to know who I was. A.
