HALESTORM's LZZY HALE Says Nashville's 'Musicianship' Influenced 'Into The Wild Life'

Shaw TV recently conducted an interview with HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether there are any plans for a third covers EP to follow 2011's "ReAniMate" and 2013's "ReAniMate 2.0":

Lzzy: "There's always plans for those things. We've been using them, actually, to experiment with where we're gonna go next on records. It didn't start out that way, but the first one that we did, we experimented with a few different tempos of songs. Like, for instance, there's 'Slave To The Grind' [SKID ROW] and 'Out Ta Get Me' [GUNS N' ROSES], and we had never really experimented with that type of rockiness before. And we all turned to each other, like, 'We need something that sounds like that.' Out of that came 'Love Bites'. And then we did ['Gold Dust Woman' from] FLEETWOOD MAC on this last one, and out of that came 'New Modern Love' for this record. So it's kind of a safe way to be, like, 'Okay, let's cover a song that's already proven, but really try to discover something new about ourselves and what we enjoy.' Experiment with different genres — just to throw something weird into the mix and challenge ourselves."

On recording HALESTORM's third album, "Into The Wild Life", in Nashville:

Lzzy: "What we love about that town is that it really has become so much more diverse than just the country [scene]. Yes, there's a huge country [scene] — that's their m.o. — but just the vibe in general is that, really no matter what genre it is, can you kill it in a bar at 4 a.m.? Can you sing some Janis Joplin and bring the house down? That's what they judge you on. It's not necessarily, what magazine cover have you been on lately? So just the whole live feel and the fact that there's so many great musicians, it really kind of made us step up our game. Because we were going out and seeing live music every single night of the week, and then we'd go in in the morning and play music. And it's, like, you just look at this guy that's, like, just some dude that probably works at Home Depot, and he can shred on guitar. And we're, like, 'We need to practice.' So in that aspect, the musicianship definitely influenced us."

"Into The Wild Life" debuted at No. 5 on The Billboard 200 album chart, selling 56,000 copies in its first week of release — more than double the first week haul of the band's previous effort, 2012's Grammy-winning "The Strange Case Of…"