Hard rockers Halestorm approach life on the road like athletes. Arejay Hale, the 35-year-old who has played drums in the band fronted by his sister Lzzy for the past 25 years, says it's essential for longevity in the rock 'n' roll business.
Lzzy regularly posts healthy recipes to the band's blog and explains how she avoids alcohol and caffeine to maintain her singing (and screaming voice). Arejay shares, "for me I'm just focused on stretching and mobility. I'm trying to stay in shape, trying to exercise daily, trying to eat healthy, trying to not make bad decisions -- trying not to drink too much -- and all those things. ... That definitely helped a lot to maintain on the road.
"Towards the end of the last album cycle, my body just had a lot of miles on it, and my joints were just starting to hurt. And every time I'd go up on stage, in the back of my mind, I was like, 'Oh God, if I do this or that, it's going to hurt,'" Arejay says. "Now I do my preventative maintenance, cold therapy and ice baths. I basically just try to be in the mindset of an athlete."
Halestorm is known for touring constantly. Right now the band is on tour in North America until October, then they are heading overseas in November for a tour that ends in February in Japan.
"We're on the road, like 10 months out of the year," Arejay says of the band that has always been a family affair. In their early days, their father played bass and drove the van while their mother acted as tour manager.
He adds that when guitarist Joe Hottinger and bassist Josh Smith joined the band in 2003, "the two of them lived [with us] in my parents' house in Pennsylvania before our first album came out. The four of us would just sit in my parents' basement -- we built a little makeshift studio out of some gear that we had and would just sit down there [and] write together."
That's a dynamic that hasn't changed. "Even during covid, we were still writing together even though we were writing remotely," Arejay says. During the pandemic, he put together a home studio. "I was really excited to wake up every morning and just focus on writing music, focus on working on my voice, becoming a better singer, becoming a better writer, becoming a better producer of music and sound and stuff like that," he says. In addition to working on some comedy writing for a podcast and songs for Halestorm, he started writing music with fellow drummer Taylor Carroll of Lit on a new project titled Kemikal Fire.
While it seems like Arejay and the band have time for little else, there's more. Lzzy was named Gibson's first female brand ambassador in 2021. She introduced her signature Explorerbird guitar, a cardinal red, lightning-shaped electric with black and gold accents, in May. A graphic novel inspired by Halestorm's music, titled "Hyde Manor," will be released this fall.
Arejay says seeing himself and his bandmates as the characters in a fictional story is "a total mind trip to see you as a person as a caricature where they kind of exaggerate your personality traits. But then based in this fantasy world, it is really, really cool."