The self-titled Burn Halo debut, a hard rock album released in 2009, was quite the departure for frontman James Hart, who cut his teeth with the hardcore-leaning Eighteen Visions. Burn Halo album number two, “Up from the Ashes,” released earlier this year, is heavier, darker—more metal—and closer to Hart’s roots. The band toured relentlessly on the first album and has been doing the same in the months since the release of “Up from the Ashes.” Hart recently called in—literally from the road—to discuss the new album and more with Live Metal’s Greg Maki.
LIVE METAL: You’ve been out on tour most of the summer. Where are you today? Where are you heading?
JAMES HART: Panama City Beach, Florida.
How has the tour been going so far?
It’s been good. It’s good to start doing touring on the heavier side of the rock spectrum. I think that that’s kind of like our niche. I think the fans of the heavier music, they generally come out and support regardless of how popular the band is at radio at the time. They’re just real supportive fans, and they’re generally about the music and not necessarily just about the one song they can hear in constant rotation, which is the type of fan base we want to build. So it’s good for us.
Touring today, it’s got to be tough with the way things are. How does it compare to several years ago?
I guess the main thing for us is tour support. The labels just aren’t giving that stuff out anymore. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can help here and there. I’ve definitely been involved with taking way too much tour support, an unnecessary amount, an unnecessary rate. It kind of digs a hole for the band to climb out of financially with the label. It causes a little bit of friction between band and label. You don’t necessarily have that kind of support, even if it’s a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there if you need it and it’s a feasible amount to pay it back. That’s probably the main thing.
So with that in mind, I think bands in general have to start touring smarter. Bands that were selling hundreds of thousands of records three, four, five years ago, doing the whole bus tour for two, three, four years—they’re having to downscale. They’re having to go back into doing the van and hotel thing, and starting to tour smarter. I think that’s the focus of a lot of bands today—what can we do financially to make touring worthwhile because the revenue is just not what it was five, six years ago, even three or four years ago.
It’s becoming a real do-it-yourself kind of thing, too. Are you involved with booking and things like that?
We are to a certain extent. We try to, as a band, stay involved with every aspect of what we’re doing, almost like we’re micro-managing the management and the label and booking and stuff like that. We just want to make sure that we’re out there and things are getting done and are meeting our specific requirements and needs as a band.
Switching gears, the new album came out this summer, “Up from the Ashes.” Obviously, it’s the second Burn Halo album, but the first with the full band behind you. So it must have been a lot different making it. Can you kind of talk about the process of working with the other guys?
Yeah, it was great. It’s something that we wanted to do once we finally had four of the five members really, really in place, which was the summer of 2009. We had discussed making an album together, and then we got (drummer) Dillon (Ray) on board in March of 2010. I felt comfortable with everybody being able to play on the record, and I can’t say the same with some of the guys we had playing with us early on. We were gonna have to probably have one guy track all the guitars, and then maybe have a guy come in and play drums. That’s just not something we wanted.
We wanted everybody to be able to play and perform on the record, everybody to take part in the writing process. We really wanted this to be a proper band effort so that people can connect with not just the band as a whole but with the band members individually. If you have a kid that’s out there playing drums, he hears the record and he loves the drum tone on it, he loves the style, the attack, the way that the drums are being played, and he finds out that some session guy played it, he’s not gonna be that big of a fan maybe of Dillon as he would if he knew that Dillon wrote all the drums and played on the record. We really want to try to feature us individually, as well as collectively as a band. I think it’s important with connecting with the fans.
The album, to me, sounds darker and heavier, maybe more metal than the first album. Is that fair to say?
We were kind of stuck in this weird area of writing. When we first started writing, it was more geared toward what you would’ve heard on the first album, which isn’t a bad thing. We found ourselves forcefully trying to write those songs, and we found ourselves forcefully saying, “This part’s too metal” or “We can’t have double-bass” or “That part’s too heavy.” I think we kind of finally realized that we need to be ourselves. This is different now. It’s not just me and some other guy writing the record. It’s me and four other guys, and we all have our own personal and individual influences musically and different things that we can bring to the table, and why hold things back? We just decided that it would be in the best interests of the band and the record and ourselves creatively to just let go and just be ourselves and kind of create our own identity musically.
I found it interesting that as the songs came together in more of a collaborative way that the lyrics seem more personal. What inspired you to go that route?
I think on the first record, the writing process in general—not just musically but lyrically, as well—was just totally something different than what I was accustomed to doing. I wanted to step outside the box and make that record that I made. I wanted to do those things that I did, and I actually learned a lot about writing music from making that album, which was a huge help to this album even though musically and lyrically it’s a bit different.
Traditionally, in the past, with Eighteen Visions albums that I made, a lot of lyrics were darker. They were maybe a little bit more abstract or maybe a little bit more poetic. I like some of the early stuff that I had written with Eighteen Visions, but I think the main problem with some of those lyrics was they didn’t connect and they weren’t direct enough. So I wanted to take this album and write the lyrics and make them dark and emotional and personal, really try to connect with the listener and kind of took my experience writing the lyrics on the last album and blending them with the darker side of the way that I’ve been accustomed to writing in the past.
One of the songs, “I Won’t Back Down,” has kind of a hardcore feel in the verses. Is that something that maybe because it’s the second Burn Halo album, you felt a little more comfortable going to something that’s more like something you had done in the past?
The guys wrote all the riffs. That was a song where we were having a little bit of trouble finding a verse that fit. The meat of the song had been written. The chorus, the pre-chorus, the bridge—everything had pretty much been written, and we were having a little bit of trouble finding a nice verse. I was at the house working on some melodies in the afternoon. I came back to the rehearsal space at night, and they had worked something out. They were like, “You’re not gonna like this, but we’re gonna play it for you anyways. You’re gonna think it’s too heavy or too metal or something.” They played it, and I was like, “Dude, I love it. I think it’s great.”
I think that when they started doing stuff like that, it helped really bring out my roots as a singer and writer. I can say that with this album, I’ve accomplished, I think, just about everything that I’ve ever wanted to accomplish as a singer and a writer. I don’t know that there’s much more vocally that I could really, really do, I think. So with that in mind, I would love to do the next record and even attack further into my roots and where I came from, and maybe even build more on that stuff. I’m totally comfortable, and I feel very, very accomplished as a singer that I can bring just about anything to the table that I want to bring, and why not just emphasize on 100 percent of that and make the next record even more along the lines of maybe something I’ve done in the past but just a lot better.
On the other end of the spectrum from that song is probably my favorite on the album and one that I’ve seen getting a lot of reaction in reviews and online. That’s “Threw It All Away.” Can you talk a little bit about that song and the inspiration?
We were on tour, and (guitarist) Joey (Roxx) had just been kind of messing around on acoustic guitar for about a week, and he had great chord progressions and he built leads around those chord progressions. We really, really liked it, and I thought it was great. When we had some downtime after we were done touring, he came down to my place and I helped kind of arrange that song. We put a couple more parts together, and it ended up being, at first, like a seven-minute song. It was kind of like old-school Metallica. We ended up trimming down some parts, cutting some things in half.
Musically, sonically, it’s such a great song that even if the vocals disappear, the music kind of carries itself from start to finish. There’s a lot of drama, a lot of emotion just in the music alone. Lyrically, I wanted to write a song that I felt could connect to the music. The song is about basically trying to find yourself and realizing that you’ve gone through life making mistake after mistake after mistake and it’s leading you down a very dark path to the point where you’re throwing everything good away in your life, and it’s about trying to make that change before it’s too late and before you hit rock bottom.
I read that the title track, “Up from the Ashes,” goes back a couple years. Was it left over from the first album?
I wouldn’t actually call it a leftover because that song is, by far, good enough to be on that album. I had written that song with a guy by the name of Dave Bassett. He did the last Shinedown record. I went through some label issues with the last album and trying to find a home for it. I had met with a couple of A&R guys, and they were like, “Yeah, maybe try writing another song.” One of them set up a writing session with Dave for me, and we wrote “Up from the Ashes.”
We planned to put it on the last album, but we couldn’t find another home for the album and we decided to put it out on our own through our management, and we just didn’t have, financially, the budget to go and get a recording that was gonna be just as quality and keep the same kind of continuity between songs and have it sonically sound the same. It just wasn’t gonna make sense. So it was a song that I held on to.
I had actually been approached by another band about them using the song, but I knew three years ago when I made it that this song was still gonna be able to stand up against whatever it was that we were gonna be writing and that it would be a great album track. It’s still a very, very strong song on the album, and it’s got a lot of energy when we play it live. People really connect to it.
Did you always intend to make it the title track of the second album?
No, not at all. That was just sheer coincidence. We had been going through some titles, just kind of throwing around some ideas. It just kind of made the most sense—just some things that we had been through as a band, the member changes, the things that we had come across on tour, the hardships that a band can endure from trying to grind it out on the road like we have. We just felt like this was a fresh start for us, that we had been a band that was just kind of trying to find its way and we rebuilt ourselves with this new album and created our own identity and our own image.
What are your favorite songs to play live, from either album?
All the songs that we play that I enjoy singing the most are definitely the songs on the new album. They hold the most intensity. I can connect, as well, with the other guys onstage playing those songs because they wrote and recorded (them), and I think their connection to the songs in a live setting is much greater than the songs from the first album. I think that we all kind of feel each other’s energy on the new tracks.
I really love playing the aggressive stuff—“Dakota,” “I Won’t Back Down.” “Tear It Down’s” a lot of fun. And then probably my favorite song right now to play is “Threw It All Away.” I just love vocally what I’m able to do on that song. It’s just a lot of fun. I have a real strong connection, and I feel that’s the song right in the middle of our set where we really, really start to win people over. It’s a good feeling knowing you’re winning them over with this epic, dramatic song. I don’t really want to call it a ballad—I don’t feel that it fully is—but it’s great really winning people over and capturing them with a song like that.
This fall, you’re going on tour with The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. Do you know those guys? Are you looking forward to that tour?
Yeah, we’re definitely looking forward to it. We did some stuff together back in 2006 when I was in Eighteen Visions. They were really, really cool dudes and a great band, and they brought a lot to the shows. It’s cool because growing up—they’re a little bit younger than me—they were all super, diehard Eighteen Visions fans growing up in Florida, and I guess they would always come out to our shows. That’s a really cool feeling. We’re just excited to have a solid tour and some solid dates and a band that we feel like we can go along pretty well with and capture their audience and basically be booked up until the end of the year.
LINKS:
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