When Lzzy Hale speaks about the records of her youth, her recollections are steeped in the memories of an experience or story as vivid as the music contained within those cherished discs. So it's no surprise that Hale — rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the hard-rock band Halestorm — regaled us with numerous tales about her formative years when we asked her to name the top 10 records that shaped her as a songwriter, singer and guitarist.
“These albums are like snapshots of memories from my youth,” says Hale, whose electric guitar of choice is her signature Gibson Explorer. “Talking about them brings it all back to me. It’s like how you can be walking along and a certain smell makes you stop in your tracks. Suddenly, you’re lost in this beautiful nostalgia. You remember how you felt when you were a teenager, the kind of person you were back then. That’s such an important time in your life, and the music you listen to has such a profound impact on you.”
Sometimes when she’s onstage, a similar thought crosses Hale’s mind. “I’ll look out at the crowd and see all these young faces,” she says, “and I’ll think, ‘Are they going to remember this moment 20 years from now?’ I’d like to think so. I can see them singing our songs back to us, and in that instant the song isn’t ours anymore — it’s theirs. That’s one of the magical things about music: If it gets inside you, it’s yours, and nothing can take that away.”
Black Sabbath – Heaven and Hell (1980)
“First off, what an album cover! You’ve got the angels sitting around on their smoke break. It doesn’t get any better than that. My parents had a rather reckless abandon approach toward child rearing in that they generally let me listen to whatever I wanted. Even so, for a girl growing up in Pennsylvania, there was something a little dangerous about this record. It sounded dark and mysterious. It was my introduction to Black Sabbath, and oddly, it featured Ronnie James Dio. It wasn’t till later than I got into Ozzy.
“I had never heard Dio sing before, and man, did he blow me away. The whole album put me on this rollercoaster ride. Even though the things he was singing about were pretty far out — he was into dragons and swords and epic battles — he sang with such fervor and feeling. You believed him. That’s something I always tried to adhere to in my own work: Whatever I’m singing about, I have to believe it.”
Alice Cooper – Love It to Death (1971)
“This is the record that made me realize I was weird. I first heard it around 1996 or so, right before my brother and I started Halestorm. My friends were listening to Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey, which I wasn’t into at all. I was listening to classic rock from my parents’ generation. They gave me a few records, like, ‘Listen to this. This is real rock.’ One of the records they gave me was Alice Cooper's Love It to Death, and it hooked me right away.
“I remember going to a sleep-over at a friend’s house. Everybody brought their favorite CDs, so after a few hours of listening to pop stuff, somebody said, ‘Hey, we never heard any of Liz’s records.’ I put Love It to Death on the boombox, and I don’t think we got through the first chorus; they looked at me as if I had aliens coming out of my head. Then it was like, ‘Okay, let’s go back to Tara’s music.’
“The next morning, my dad asked me how the sleep-over went, and I said, ‘I don’t know, Dad. They didn’t like my music. They think I’m weird.’ He said that was a good thing. He said, ‘You listen to Alice Cooper not because it’s popular and the other kids listen to it. You listen to Alice Cooper because you love it, and that’s amazing.’ After that, I decided to do my own thing. I wasn’t going to be a follower. Honestly, I don’t think I would have written songs like ‘Freak Like Me,’ ‘Strange Girl’ or ‘I Am the Fire’ had I not gotten the confidence from Alice Cooper.”
Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)
“I was a little late to Jeff Buckley — he had already passed away when I first heard him. I was introducing my guitar player, Joe [Hottinger], and my bass player, Josh [Smith], to Dio and stuff like that, and they were in introducing me to the Smashing Pumpkins and Jeff Buckley. The second I heard Grace, it opened up a new world for me.
“Vocally, Jeff Buckley was an anomaly — nobody ever sounded like him or ever will. But his songwriting and poetry were so unique that I didn’t even want to know what the songs were about, because I knew what they meant to me the first time I heard them.
“Right around the time I started listening to Jeff Buckley, I met the love of my life and the greatest love I’ve ever had in this world. We nerded out to Jeff Buckley — Grace was our bonding music. It’s just one of those things where I can listen to this album and be taken back to this almost naïve version of love, that first time when you understand what it means to you.”
Sevendust – Home (1999)
“A neighborhood friend of mine game me this record, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I think it was one of the first modern metal records that had a female guesting on it — that’s Skin from Skunk Anansie singing on the song ‘Licking Cream.’ I used to sing that chorus a capella for random sound guys when we had to check my mics. It was in my range and was easy for me to do.
“After becoming such a Sevendust fan, my band and I went to see them at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster. We saw their tour bus, and we were so brazen — we actually knocked on the door. The lead singer, Lajon, opened the door and invited us in, which was totally crazy. We hung out for a while, and I wound up giving them our EP demo that we’d just recorded. We said our goodbyes and went in the club to watch the show. And then the most incredible thing happened: Suddenly, we heard our song ‘It’s Not You’ playing over the PA. The band threw our EP on! We couldn’t believe it. What great guys, you know? I mean, who does that?”
Heart – The Road Home (1995)
“I knew Heart’s hits from the radio, but I hadn’t heard the band live until my mom got me this CD from a used record store. The version of ‘Crazy on You’ is probably 90 percent a capella — there’s a bit of organ swell in the background and a bit or strings — but it takes on a whole new dimension from the studio version. It's no longer this sexually charged rocker; now it’s about this young woman's struggle to be seen and acknowledged, and it’s fantastic.
“The vocal prowess of Ann Wilson — I mean, come on. It’s like she left blood on the stage the night they recorded this. Hearing her totally changed my mind about female vocalists. I was like, ‘Wow, girls can actually sing like this. And I’m a girl, too!’ It made the bridge to my dream of doing something awesome with what I had seem a little bit shorter.
“I got to meet Ann a few times, and I told her, The Road Home changed my life.’ She laughed and said, ‘The label wanted us to do it. We had no budget, and we had so many technical problems. We hated the whole night.’ Which blew my mind, because if Heart hadn’t put this record out, I don’t know what kind of singer I would be.”
Tool – Lateralus (2001)
“My little bro Arejay was getting really good on the drums. He had learned Tool’s song ‘Schism’ from the radio, so I thought that I should get him the whole album for his birthday. We just devoured it. I ended up getting really into it myself. Listening to their music was just like watching a horror film.
“I had a shitty waitress job, and I got us tickets to see Tool at Hershey Park. I was so stoked. Then Arejay did something to piss off our parents, so they wouldn’t allow him to go. I thought, Okay, this could be an opportunity to ask somebody out on a date, which I did. I asked this guy Nate, and he said yes. I was like, Sweet! We didn’t have great seats, but it didn’t matter — the show was amazing. I was singing every world. Halfway through, I looked at my date and saw that he had fallen asleep — total deal-breaker for me.
“So in a weird way, Tool’s Lateralus was a life-changer. My brother still teases me about it: ‘I wouldn’t have fallen asleep.’”
Michael W. Smith – Change Your World (1992)
“For about 10 years, I went through a deep Christian phase, and I really got into Michael W. Smith’s Change Your World. He was pretty dreamy, so that could have a lot to do with it. He was something like the Christian Bruce Springsteen — a kind of sexy Christian Bruce. I had a mad crush on this guy at school, and I would sing him songs from this album. It was a really important record to me in that way.
“My parents took us to see Michael at the Creation Festival — it’s like a contemporary Christian version of Lollapalooza or Coachella. We camped out and watched the show. I zeroed in on Michael with binoculars. I was just going through all those early sexy feelings. I hadn’t heard this album in a long, long time, but I got a little stoned and put it on recently. I didn’t make it all the way through, because it sounded pretty cheesy. My brother and I talked about seeing Christian bands like the Newsboys and DC Talk back in the day. DC Talk were doing the same tricks as Mötley Crüe — they had a rotating, upside-down drum kit. That was wild.”
Hanson – Middle of Nowhere (1997)
“We had just started the band. We were trying to get good gigs and have people notice us. Finally, we got on the front page of our local paper, and we were like, ‘Yes! We can actually do this.’ Then we saw Hanson on Saturday Night Live. Here was this band close to our age, and they’re playing ‘MMMBop,’ a song that makes no sense at all. ‘How in the world are they doing this? They’re playing SNL and we’re playing a bowling alley.’
“I got curious, though. I bought their DVD and the album Middle of Nowhere. We sat down and studied what Hanson were doing. We were like, ‘Okay, we need more harmonies. We need a drum breakdown’ — stuff like that. We weren’t trying to be Hanson; it was more like we were trying to crack the code: ‘What do they have that we don’t?’ It’s funny now — I still haven’t met Hanson, but if I did, I would tell them, ‘You were part of our curriculum.’”
Van Halen – Women and Children First (1980)
“The best Van Halen record — period. I love all their records, but this one is dangerous and vicious. It’s as if the band said, ‘We’re going in the studio and doing our thing, whether you like it or not. We really don’t care.’ There’s this element of ‘this is kind of wrong’ that I find so alluring. It’s dirty and weird. That opening to ‘Everybody Wants Some’ is chilling.
“’Romeo Delight’ is another one that blows me away. What a blitzing song! Like everything else on the record, it dances on the line of fun and evil. I’m really surprised that more people don’t cite this record as being one of Van Halen’s finest moments. My parents’ song is ‘Panama,’ if you can wrap your head around that. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I gotta go with the cuts on Women and Children First. It sounds like something aliens would have recorded.”
Stevie Nicks – Bella Donna (1981)
“I think of this album as a gift for ‘future me,’ because the guys in my band are always telling me to do a solo album so they can have some time off. Here was Stevie Nicks, without Fleetwood Mac, absolutely defining herself. This is her fingerprint. She put herself under the microscope and really showed everybody what she was made of.
“The record is a grower, not a shower. The songs mean something different to me each time I listen to them. Actually, for a long time I wasn’t ready to listen to this album because I just wanted to listen to Fleetwood Mac. But as I got older, I started to listen to it, and it kind of forced me to ask myself some questions like, ‘Who am I without my band?’ That’s really something, when an album can provoke those kinds of thoughts. Believe me, very proud of the shadow I loom over Halestorm, but it's neat to take a beat and think, ‘If this were just me and I didn't have my support system around me, I think I'd still be all right. I’d find my way.’ Bella Donna is kind of a guide for me.”
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