"Emo Orchestra," featuring guest performers Hawthorne Heights, will perform at the Orpheum Theatre on Wednesday, Nov. 1, as part of its inaugural tour.
The show features venerable emo band Hawthorne Heights performing a smattering of its own material along with classics from The Used, Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance and AFI.
Hawthorne Heights bassist Matt Ridenour recently spoke with KMUW about the tour.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about how this concept came together and how Hawthorne Heights got involved. Were you in on the ground floor?
["Emo Orchestra" founder Ben Mench-Thurlow] is our booking agent and has been for over a decade at this point. Him and Kristen, his wife, thought of the idea of putting this music with an orchestra. I know that we did a rehearsal day in January, so it’s been a long time in the making. If I’m guessing I would say a year-and-a-half. We did that rehearsal day in January just to see if the concept worked. Then we did a show at the Taft Theater [in Cincinnati], which is where the first show of this tour was. We played with the Dayton Philharmonic, and it turns out, it was a thing.
It was really cool to see them sit down and rip some sheet music of our songs. They’d never heard this before, and they played perfectly. We’re about five weeks into the tour now, and I can tell you that it’s getting better every day. It’s like a living organism. We’re still changing things to make the show even better.
At first the idea might sound a little peculiar to people, but it makes sense because emo is this dynamic, highly emotional music and that’s what we want from orchestral music as well.
Exactly. It’s a good marriage. Our music has some of that, but a lot of [that comes through] the vocals, the lyrics. Obviously, with orchestral music, symphonic music, their emotion is conveyed through music, no vocals, except for opera. So, the idea of marrying the two works really, really well. Everybody’s coming out of curiosity because this is the first time [this has ever been done]. [Vocalist] J.T. [Woodruff] goes out into the venue at the end of the night every night and can confirm that everyone leaves blown away.
How did you go about selecting the material that would comprise the show?
We asked people what songs they wanted to hear. We were pretty sure we knew the answer. The genre’s been around for decades now at this point, so we were pretty sure we knew the songs that people would pick. I think we started with a list of about 30 songs that were on the table and then we had to fit them into the tunings we play in. We play a certain tuning for J.T.’s vocals. He’s probably got the hardest job in the whole thing. It’s pretty tough to sing in the range of 12 other vocalists. We had to move things toward how we do them just to make them possible to sing. Those things kind of decided the setlist for us.
There’s a different kind of precision that comes with a rock band than with an orchestra. What’s that learning curve been like?
We’re on a click track because we have video screens behind us that are very cool. Those go in tandem with what we do and then obviously the orchestra has to be on time as well. The band has a click track, and the conductor Evan [Rogers] has a click track as well. But it’s funny because we’ve had to tighten up. We’re a rock band and in a live show you can kind of get away with messing up some things here and there and everybody’s having fun and you’re having fun.
On the orchestra side? There’s a lot of people who play classical music where everything is dialed to a T. There are things that if they messed up you and I would never know, but they know. They kind of had to loosen it up a little bit. It’s been funny because a lot of them are classically trained to play classical music only and [they’re] trying to do a classical composer justice and we’re trying The Used justice. It’s pretty funny, the two things that have to happen to make it work.
You’re playing classic songs by other bands in this show. What has that been like to get some of that music under your fingers?
It has been very cool. Most of these songs I’ve heard hundreds of times. You sing along. You don’t really think about them. You know how they go; you know how the chorus goes. But once we were going in to learn them you figure out, “Oh! I see what they did there. They cut the verse in half the second time.” You find out those little nuances and, at the end of the day, they’re all great songs with these little tricks that they all do. It was really fun to dive in and learn those tricks.
We do a Story of the Year song in the show, and we’ve toured with them so many times. I’ve watched them live so many times, but there were things in that song that I never noticed until I had actually had to figure it out. It gives you a new perspective on a song that you’ve listened to forever.
When you come to this show, these are songs that, as a fan, you’ve probably heard hundreds of times and you’re going to come to the show and hear them in a completely new way. It’s kind of [how we experienced it in learning the material]. It’s very familiar but new and fresh for us as well as the fans.
The band has been around for over 20 years and we as fans get older as well. I think this is a really cool concept because it shows the maturity of the fans as well as the musicians.
It does. We call this show our apology letter for making people stand on the concrete for 20 years at the [Vans] Warped Tour. Now you get a show where you’re in a padded chair. You get air conditioning. It’s this thing that we’ve all connected to in parking lots and now we’re all in a theater, we’re all showing respect for the music in a different way where the goal is to hear the music in a brand-new way. It seems, like you said, more mature.
Everything works so well, and I’ll give that to Evan. He was the arranger on all these songs. He came up in this scene and really understands it. I remember early on having a conversation with him. The goal could have been to have an orchestra to be everywhere and constantly doing the vocal part or something like that. But there’s times when they’re not playing in the first verse. That’s so that they can play in the chorus, which just makes it hit harder. That’s how we’ve always written music as a band. He’s the perfect person for this.
You started off probably playing basement shows or VFW halls, and now you’re in some of the more refined spaces for music.
I will always love those VFW hall shows. I’ll always love that. It kind of felt like there were no rules and you could do whatever you wanted. It’s fun to get out here and try to do these songs justice. It’s very cool to take this music into a setting it’s never been into before. For some people, this may be their first time ever seeing an orchestra or ever going to a theater; maybe they didn’t even know there was one in their town. Back in the day, most people didn’t know there were local, underground shows either. When you found out, you really felt like you’d found out about something special. I feel like that has that same feel but in a totally different way. It still feels like you’re discovering something, that you’re in on the ground floor of something. It has that same feel that all our bands had when we were coming up in the early 2000s, for sure.
