I've dealt my entire career with sexist and condescending people.
I feel like, as a girl, I would have reacted or maybe been more depressed about some of the things that would have happened in my life if I didn't have music.
It'd be great to have more categories in the rock and metal category - but I don't want that job, picking where everybody is supposed to go.
There is something in my brain that said if I get Halestorm to a point where people are actually listening to what I have to say, I might as well put out positivity and be that empowering figure that I would have wanted in a rock star.
I wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist.
I play mostly Gibsons. In fact, they have just given me a signature guitar.
What people don't normally know about us is the hustle is very real, and it's sorely driven a lot by how we consider ourselves. We don't pay a whole lot of attention to any type of judgment that we might get from outside people. I think that comes from growing up onstage.
My new year's resolution is to stop making five-year plans. I stress over where I'm going to be in five years so often.
I think it's less stressful to just make decisions as you go, because plans never work out, but you never run out of dreams. You have an eternal bucket list where you keep crossing things off, and keep adding things to the bottom.
It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I'm always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.
I'm always trying to evolve my sound. I love the simplicity of my setup. I play Gibson guitars and Marshall amps. So it's kind of like the standard rock sound.
As far as people, I've always loved Tony Iommi's sound, just the grittiness that was in that era of metal where it wasn't too fuzzy, and you could still hear the guitar and the fingers, but it still had this chunky, meat-and-potatoes sound to it.
I grew up with my dad's music, so my introduction to rock was Alice Cooper and Cinderella and Dio and Black Sabbath, so I was listening to a lot of dude bands - Guns N' Roses and Metallica, all that stuff.
You can pick out the scariest dude on the tour and, guaranteed, he's probably a smush - I just find that so incredibly attractive.
The good thing about most of the girls that I've met on the road is that, regardless of whether they're cute or not, man - they can bring it onstage, which is inspiring not just for young girls and young people in general but for myself because then it makes me want to step it up.
Cinderella obviously got caught up in the hair metal scene, but they were such a blues band. And such a good live band.
Once I started to make the transition to guitar - because I was playing keyboards when we started the band - I was trying to figure out riffs I could play without really having a lot of knowledge. And my dad ended up showing me Black Sabbath's 'Heaven and Hell,' because he knew I loved Dio.
I have learned that you can't be high-maintenance on the road. I've groomed myself to not be high-maintenance. You have to maintain and be a girl and not become a dude.
I am holding on to every shred of femininity that I can with heels and dresses.
I have always been 'small town.' I was born outside of Philadelphia, so we lived on a 20-acre farm and then spent two years in a log cabin on the Appalachian Trail. We lived outside of York in Red Lion, which is an amazing town. It's perpetually 1982 in that town.
