What is the songwriting process like with Hawthorne Heights?
We pretty much have a democratic process. Everybody brings in ideas. The initial ideas might start with Matt or Casey. We’ll play around with it. It’s a really, really rough idea. Sometimes just a chorus, sometimes just a verse or a pre-chorus. We’ll all work on the part, and we’ll just build it into an actual song structure. Once we have a song structure in place, we might add in different melodies. Then we’ll say, “All right Casey, what are you going to play?” “Micah, what are you going to play?” We have three different guitar players. We try to have them all doing different things. We start building and overlapping melodies onto the song. Once the whole song structure is in place, then JT writes the lyrics. How was it to work with David Bendeth? He has such a huge knowledge of songwriting, and it was nice to bounce ideas off of him. He’s not your typical emo producer. He has a lot of ideas that helped us expand our sound, so we’re not just your typical emo band or have your emo soun
