From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Reaching new Heights

With its debut album, Warped Tour band Hawthorne Heights has declared a victory for Victory Records.

by Colleen Dougher

August 3 2005

The members of Hawthorne Heights are happy. A few years ago, while working for convenience stores and pizzerias, they felt lucky enough just to be going to the Warped Tour. Now, they're playing it.

"Our album came out a year ago," drummer Eron Bucciarelli says of the band's Victory Records debut, The Silence in Black and White, "and we're on the main stage of the Warped Tour. That's a huge highlight. Seeing our faces on MTV and Fuse is pretty exciting, too."

The band is enjoying the tour despite performing in temperatures as high as 114 degrees. It was so hot during a tour stop in St. Louis that guitarist Casey Calvert threw up onstage. In San Antonio, audience members passed out from the heat.

With its heavy guitars and schizophrenic, screaming vocals, Hawthorne Heights has been generating heat on the emo and punk-rock scenes since it signed to Victory in 2003. Formed two years earlier by singer-guitarist JT Woodruff in Dayton, Ohio, as a band called A Day in the Life, Hawthorne Heights boasts a three-guitar attack that has drawn favorable comparisons to emo heroes and labelmates Taking Back Sunday. In fact, Hawthorne Heights broke Taking Back Sunday's first-week sales record for a Victory band in June 2004 when The Silence in Black and White sold 3,800 copies. While that number may seem abysmal compared with, say, the first-week sales of Coldplay's new album, Hawthorne Heights' debut has since sold nearly 350,000 copies, an impressive number for an indie band.

Yet Bucciarelli says Victory didn't immediately recognize his band's commercial potential. After sending demos to some 25 independent record companies, the drummer had begun to laser in on Victory, whose roster also includes Silverstein and A Perfect Murder. A month after contacting the label, Bucciarelli received what he describes as "a generic letter saying, 'Hey, we received your demo. If you don't hear back from us, don't take it personally.' Try again later, basically."

He received a similar missive a month later. Feeling frustrated, he e-mailed Victory President Tony Brummel. "I basically said, 'What's going on? Either you guys screwed up and sent the same letter twice, or you kept our demo around because you liked what you heard. And hopefully you liked what you heard. Here's what we've been up to since then.' He e-mailed us back the next day, and he said, 'I love you guys. When can you come up and do a showcase?' We were like, 'Wow, is this for real?' "

Within a week, Hawthorne Heights played for Brummel in Chicago. The next day, Victory offered the band a deal. The group's members immediately quit their jobs. "We knew what Victory could do, and we figured the only way we could really make this work was if we dedicate all of our time to the band," Bucciarelli says. "So we did that and it paid off."

He remembers being taken aback upon learning The Silence in Black and White had become the fastest-selling debut in Victory history. The week of the album's release, Hawthorne Heights was on tour with Silverstein. "I called the guy who did our album layout, and he scared me at first," Bucciarelli recalls. "He's like, 'You guys didn't hear your numbers yet?' We were like, 'No. Are we dropped? Did we not sell any records or something?' Then, he's like, 'No, you guys are the biggest debut release in Victory history.' "

Since then, the band has only gotten bigger. In February, Hawthorne Heights joined Sugarcult at a Washington, D.C., press conference to kick off the fifth-annual Take Action Tour to raise money and awareness for teen-suicide-prevention programs. A month later, the band graced the cover of Alternative Press' "100 Bands You Need To Know" issue. Soon after, the group shot its first video.

Shane C. Drake, who has made videos for Fall Out Boy and Armor for Sleep, directed the performance-based clip for "Ohio Is for Lovers." The shoot, completed during a down day on the band's tour, took place in an old house on a movie lot north of Los Angeles. Playing along to their own music as it was being blasted from huge speakers was initially a challenge for the band members. They eventually got the hang of it but disturbed a sleeping inhabitant of the house in the process. "There was a bat in the house, and halfway through the day, it woke up because of all the music," Bucciarelli recalls. "It just started flying around, and we had to chase the thing out of the house before we could continue filming. It was pretty funny."

Despite having racked up many tour dates over the past few years, the band has few tales of excess to relate. "We're kind of lame," Bucciarelli admits. "We're not the kind of people who go out and party every night. We're more apt to go to a hotel and get online and just e-mail people and stuff."

Early on, the band's members vowed to continue answering fan e-mails if they made it big, a daunting task now that they're receiving hundreds a day. "It's pretty crazy," Bucciarelli says. "But we still look through them and read them and respond to a few. It's nearly impossible to respond to all of them."

Some fans write about how much they relate to "Ohio Is for Lovers" because they left someone behind in that state. "Others explain how another of our songs affected their life and stuff," Bucciarelli says. "That's pretty cool, to think something we created affected somebody's life."

Hawthorne Heights will perform Saturday at the Warped Tour. See details.