HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS' JT WOODRUFF On Upcoming 'If Only You Were Lonely' 20th-Anniversary Tour: We Wanted To 'Give The Fans What They Want'

Rock band HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS recently announced that it will celebrate its acclaimed album "If Only You Were Lonely" in 2026 with a special 20th-anniversary tour. Featuring special guests LETLIVE. and CREEPER, the trek first leg kicks off on March 5 in Lexington, with stops to follow in Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin and more.

Asked in a new interview with Jackie Cular of the In The Key Of Change podcast why "If Only You Were Lonely" is so important for him and his bandmates to celebrate, HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS frontman JT Woodruff said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think that HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS has always been a fan-first band. That's just who we are. We're from the Midwest. We very rarely do things for ourselves, probably to a fault. So our compromise this time around is, 20 years is special. If you can last 20 years doing anything in the world, no matter your job, it's gonna come with some sort of emotional attachment to it. So, this time around we thought, let's play the album in full, give the fans what they want, what they're asking for, and then we'll also do a career-spanning set directly after it that will give us maybe what we want — some things that we haven't got to play in a long time, or some things that we never got to, because 20 years is a crazy amount of time as a songwriter. We wrote 'The Silence In Black And White' when we were kids. That's not the best we would ever do, I promise you. No matter what fans think, and it's the first thing they ever heard, and we love it and we'll play it until we're gone, but we also have to try and work a little bit of new material in there and then a little bit of stuff that we thought maybe never had a chance."

He continued: "Now that we're in kind of the digital era, anything has a chance. Anybody can get on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever and be, like, 'You know what? I'm gonna check some more of these songs out.' So we just think it's proper to do that as well. Your fans have been kind of hearing you do, I guess, the same thing over and over to a degree. Whether you're playing a festival set or supporting some other band, you get a tight 30, maybe a tight 40. This is the time where we get to make all the rules and everything, and we're just trying to expose our hardcore fans to songs that we haven't played in a long time, and then also the casual listener who maybe wants 'Ohio Is For Lovers', 'Saying Sorry', things like that. They're always gonna get that too. So 20 years in, we're just kind of culminating the entire thing."

Asked what was influencing HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS' songwriting at the time of "If Only You Were Lonely"'s release, Woodruff said: "That's a great question. Our band started in 2003, and there wasn't really a lot of this stuff happening yet. Now we can look back and you have the world of the Internet and you can be, like, 'What was happening in 2003?', and some sort of A.I. will give you that answer. We didn't have any of those tools or anything like that.

"Our first record, 'The Silence In Black And White', we were just writing things that we thought were cool at the time," he explained. "We had a lot of different influences, and that album probably sounds like that when you break it down — there's heavy stuff, there's soft stuff, there's poppy stuff, there's fast stuff, slow stuff. 'If Only You Were Lonely', we were learning to hone that in, so it didn't sound so manic, so all over the place, so up and down rollercoastery, which was kind of us as people. At the same time, we're coming into adulthood. There are no rules, so we need to make some rules for ourselves. And your first album is always a tough one to capture. Your second album is really when you gotta figure out, can you do this or not? Are you built for this? Is this something that you can, I guess, train your brain to think in a linear fashion? And this is the time that we actually felt like we were becoming a band.

"We have always been a band that listens to a lot of different things," Woodruff continued. "We're music consumers, music fans. We listen to heavy bands. We were listening to stuff like POISON THE WELL at that time period. 'The Opposite Of December' was a massive record for us, and we sound nothing like that. But that's heavy music creeping in. And then we also listen to stuff like THE CURE and THE REPLACEMENTS and THE SMITHS, stuff that doesn't sound anything like what we're doing, but we grew up in the late '80s, early '90s, so it's always been there for us. And then you have this stuff that we listened to during our childhood, which is really just GREEN DAY and NIRVANA, all the big bands, WEEZER, stuff like that. So you have all of that stuff coming together and then us trying to figure out how we do that and live in the independent music scene at the same time. We're hearing TAKING BACK SUNDAY, we're hearing THURSDAY, THE USED, all of this stuff that is all kind of what we do, but in an entirely different universe at the same time. So we've always thought of ourselves having as much in common with those type of bands and THE SMASHING PUMPKINS. And that's kind of where 'I Feel If Only You Are Lonely' lies. It lies somewhere in 'Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness' and then also with STORY OF THE YEAR and THE USED and with TBS and THURSDAY and all these other bands, 'cause we happened to listen to this stuff in real time just like fans are. We heard THE USED for the first time in, whatever year that came out, 2002 maybe. It just blows your mind. You grow up listening to BLINK-182 and then you hear THE USED and your world changes. And we were a weird band at that time period; we had three guitar players and we were all writing the songs together. So it's very weird. Now, you see one songwriter on there and maybe bands are going in with a different guy that's not even in the band helping them craft songs and stuff. We're just five scatterbrained dudes trying to throw every influence that we can, and this is how it comes out in HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS. I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's wrong; it's just our process and how it is. But, yeah, a lot of dark stuff, a lot of happy stuff. And that's kind of, I think, why our band straddles the line a lot of times. We always joke that back then we sounded really heavy because there wasn't a lot of screaming yet. And then you flash forward now and it's, like, are we the Disney emo band? Are we the ones who didn't scream quite enough? But back then, the cheerleader would hear us for the first time and we were almost like hardcore with training wheels. It was, like, 'Whoa. That has screaming; I've never heard that before.' And you flash forward, and it's very common now, which is a great thing. But back then there wasn't a whole lot of us and the Internet wasn't as prevalent as it is now. So you didn't really have the discovery that we have now. We didn't hear of SENSES FAIL until SENSES FAIL started to get some heat. We didn't hear of bands like that. We didn't hear of SILVERSTEIN until six months before we toured with them. It was just a totally different world. Now I would love to have that information, but it did kind of make it really pure, because you really weren't trying to sound like anything. You were just trying to sing and scream and be chaotic — just young people creating young music. That's all we were."

Ahead of the upcoming anniversary tour, HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS will be on the road this fall for a number of headline dates in addition to supporting CHIODOS on the "All's Well That Ends Well" tour this November and December. Fans can also catch the band on the E.N.D. Cruise in January, and at Sonic Temple festival and U.K.'s Slam Dunk festival in May.

HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS, formed in Dayton, Ohio in 2001 , built their reputation on emotionally raw songwriting, blending the urgency of post-hardcore with the melodic sensibilities of early 2000s emo and punk. Frontman JT Woodruff's lyrics often explore themes of distance, identity, and perseverance, drawing on both personal experiences and the band's deep roots in the alternative music scene.

Throughout their long and storied career, HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS have overcome obstacles at every turn — but these challenges often came from external forces, from unscrupulous record labels and shifting musical trends to unimaginable personal tragedy that threatened to derail them.

Despite the odds, the quartet — JT Woodruff (vocals, guitar),Mark McMillon (guitar, backing vocals),and Matt Ridenour (bass, backing vocals) — has persevered. They've earned two gold albums (2004's "The Silence In Black And White" and 2006's "If Only You Were Lonely"),written some of the genre's most enduring anthems ("Ohio Is For Lovers", "Saying Sorry"),and remained a relentless touring force nearly two decades after their formation.