Lzzy Hale is looking back on the gratitude she and her Halestorm bandmates felt winning their first Grammy Award.
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A decade ago, Halestorm took home the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance for their 2012 single, “Love Bites (So Do I).” The track was featured on their platinum-certified album, The Strange Case Of… During a Q&A session at the 2023 Women’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Nashville, Hale recalled how the band was playing a gig in Madison, Wisconsin, when guitarist Joe Hottinger got a text informing him they had just been nominated for a Grammy. He then rushed across the stage to tell Hale the news, who was seated at the piano about to play.
“I must have had a look on my face like somebody just died or something because everyone’s like, ‘What happened, what emergency?’ and I turned to the audience and I’m like, ‘I think we just got nominated for a Grammy’ and the crowd erupted,” she recalls of the special moment. “It was really amazing.”
The night of the Grammys, the band was seated in the audience, anxiously awaiting to hear the results of their category. They were sitting next to fellow nominees, Lamb of God, and upon hearing members of the group sigh after the winner was announced, Halestorm was left confused about who the winner was.
“Instead of saying Halestorm they say ‘Love Bites…’ and I’m like, ‘Oh that’s not us,'” she explains. “So there’s a collective silence and then we’re like, ‘Wait, that’s our song!’ It was really incredible.”
Hale also says that she used to joke with her mother about one day hypothetically winning a Grammy, but never believing it would actually happen, which made the win even more meaningful.
“There’s a difference between believing that you are capable of achieving great things and then those things actually happening,” Hale expresses. “We were perfectly fine never winning a Grammy, we weren’t expecting to. We are a lowly rock band that just likes to have fun.
“It was really beautiful and it was an amazing personal accomplishment for the four of us because we were like, ‘OK, maybe it was a crazy idea to continue with this rock and roll thing, but we weren’t stupid. We’re doing something right.'”
The Grammy Award also connected the band back to its roots. Hale revealed that she still keeps the award next to the little plastic trophy Halestorm got for winning third place at the 1997 Schuylkill County Fair. It also reminds her of why she’s motivated to be onstage and fulfill the dreams her younger self didn’t believe were possible.
“It is right next to the Grammy because that is just as important,” she professes. “It’s about you getting onstage and proving yourself to people every night and having fun doing what you love, transforming into that person that you always wanted to be, and for me, that’s what going onstage is. I get to be my best self.”
The 2023 Grammy Awards will air live on CBS on Sunday, February 5.
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