Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale Picks Neil Young As Her Guitar Hero

Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale and Joe Hottinger recently attended Premier Guitar’s YouTube channel and talked about their guitar heroes. Hale put forward an unusual name for a ‘guitar hero’ and stated her reasons to choose Neil Young.

Halestorm is pretty a new rock and roll band formed in 1997, and their inspirations come from earlier musicians of the rock genre. Formed by Lzzy Hale and her brother Arejay Hale, Halestorm became one of the most prominent rock bands, especially Lzzy’s representation of women in the industry. She had recently become the ambassador of Gibson Guitars, becoming the first female rocker to be so.

While many rockstars openly discuss their heroes in the industry, they mainly name Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, and other prominent names that developed their careers with the instrument. However, in a recent interview, Lzzy Hale gave an unusual name associated with the guitar. She stated that Neil Young is her guitar hero.

According to her, Hale’s guitar hero Neil Young uniquely plays the instrument. He plays one note repeatedly, which makes it sound like it was not thought about that much. This technique also makes the guitar sound like a conversation, and that one note speaks to the listener. She also said that something this simple is difficult to obtain and embrace, and Young does so well.

Here is what Hale said about Neil Young:

“I guess an odd one that is actually one of my guitar heroes, again, doesn’t really get talked about as a guitar hero is Neil Young. Because it takes balls to just play one note over and over again as his solo. There are so many guitar players out there that just fill up a lot of space.”

Her bandmate Joe Hottinger added:

“I feel like Neil is talking. He’s out there, having a conversation; that’s why that one note is saying things to you.”

Hale replied:

“It’s in real-time; it’s not necessarily sound like it was overthought or ‘I’ve been working on this for months.’ It sounds like he’s just been doing that in the moments. Maybe that’s how he recorded things. But it’s just to decide to do that and to actually poke your brain in that way. I think that there’s a lot of overplaying and overthinking that goes on. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to be that simple sometimes. So, I admire him for that.”

You can watch the interview below.