LZZY HALE Will Use Coronavirus Downtime To Fine-Tune Songs For Next HALESTORM Album

During an April 2 appearance on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation", HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band's follow-up to 2018's "Vicious" album.

"We were actually supposed to get together with Nick Raskulinecz and start some pre-[production when the coronavirus crisis began]," she said. "So that isn't necessarily gonna be happening anytime soon. But I'm more or less using it to my advantage. Because now all I have to do is top whatever I've been writing and make sure I have enough content for when this actually all starts happening again that we can raise that bar [as we did] with 'Vicious'."

According to Lzzy, the coronavirus pandemic has had an impact on the lyrical themes covered in the new HALESTORM songs.

"The weirdest thing is how now the subject matter has kind of changed," she said. "With writing lyrics, there's a bunch of different things that I think I was really excited about or into a couple of weeks ago, and now, I don't know — lyrics mean something different now. Even songs that we already have. Like we were doing this Twitch performance yesterday to raise money for this relief fund for medical people and also trying to raise money for maybe eventually getting a vaccine… We performed two songs — one of our songs was 'The Silence' off of 'Vicious' and the other one was 'Here's To Us'. And it's amazing how as I was singing these lyrics, all of a sudden, it just means something completely different than what it was a couple of weeks ago. And so I'm approaching that with almost this — excitement, yes, but also I feel like I'm just observing the world in a different way. So I might actually end up — even the songs that I thought that were worthy of the record a couple of weeks ago, I might just have to trash those for now and just start again."

"It's so strange because you don't have that physical, 'Hey, I'm hanging out at a party with my friends and drinking some wine,' those subjects aren't really there right now," Hale added. "You're thinking more inward and also more, I guess, mass population and world. So I think in a lot of ways, whatever these new songs are happening right now, those are the two categories — it's either extremely personal or absolutely 'one for the world.' So it's kind of nuts. [Laughs]"

Asked if any of the new HALESTORM songs have already been recorded, Lzzy said: "It's just demo mode, completely. And the good thing about some of the gear that I've collected [at home in Nashville] over the past couple of years, is that except for drums, anything that I record at home via guitar, piano, vocal, if that is actually the keeper take, we can use that. That actually happened a lot on 'Vicious', while we were making that. Because I was making these demos at home with this gear, then we would get in the studio a couple of weeks later, after the excitement from the song kind of died, and then Nick, being the guy with the ears, he's, like, 'Hey, man, you have these inflections in your demos that are just not there right now. You're thinking too much.' So we would either have to kind of backtrack and have me kind of study my demo or he'd be, like, 'Hey, we'll just put that on there. We'll use [the demo version].'"

Back in January, Hale told Bionic Buzz that HALESTORM has been "writing" and "demoing" new material. She also revealed that the band has "two EPs coming out," although she didn't offer any information about whether they will contain fresh music or reworked versions of other artists' songs. "Whether or not they are fully covers or whether they're something even more ridiculous, I cannot say," she said.

This past December, guitarist Joe Hottinger told Guitar Bonedo that the band has finished recording a new EP, although he did not want to divulge details about the disc.

Hottinger explained: "There'll be more information on that coming up. It's just getting mixed now, and it sounds awesome. It's something we've never really done before. Everyone's expecting a cover EP, but... we're about to shake it up a little. Technically, it is a cover EP. [Laughs] You'll find out. It's cool."

Lzzy added: "It's nothing like what you think. We can't really talk about it."

The two new EPs will be the band's first since the band's third covers EP, "ReAniMate 3.0: The CoVeRs eP", which came out in January 2017.