We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Hail Your Highness . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Hail Your Highness below.
Hi Hail Your Highness , thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
We released a new single just over a week ago called “Imagine The Cure.” It’s a song and a project that started in 2019 right before Covid that we had big plans for, but the pandemic forced us to change our entire trajectory. It’s the first single that we recorded the majority of from our home studio that we re-vamped during the pandemic so we could continue to work. We lost the project files 3 times for this song and we had to start from scratch each time which honestly ended up being a blessing in disguise because each time we lost the song and had to re-write it, it got better and better. The name “Imagine The Cure” came to us before the pandemic so the irony of it all to be released 4 years later in 2023 has been wild. It’s our poppiest song to date in the heaviest tuning (Drop B) that we’ve ever played in because I (Jessie) had a guy tell me years ago that essentially you couldn’t write a more poppy/melodic song in drop B tuning because in his opinion no one had ever successfully pulled it off. So this is kind of a middle finger to that haha! But on the flip side, the lyrics really became a beacon of light for us through probably the darkest period of our lives as a band, sisters, and individually. It’s almost like our past selves were writing to our future selves to read and have a full circle moment of truly not giving up when everything around feels like it’s crumbling.
Hail Your Highness , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Hail Your Highness started many years ago when Niki and I were teenagers. We’re sisters and played music growing up in the church as pre-teens, so music really shaped our lives. We started our first band when we were 15 and 12 and what would end up becoming Hail Your Highness when we were 18 and 15. As much as we were subjected to Christian music growing up, the vast majority of it never really served us and we felt like we were forcing ourselves to conform into a mold we did not fit into. We heavily deconstructed our religious upbringing and that can be heard throughout our music, especially in recent years. The band itself has been through many different iterations and members, but Niki and I have always been at the core of the band and when things shifted and we couldn’t quite find new members that fit in with our vision and work ethic, a dear friend of ours suggested we try out being a 2 piece back in 2012 and in 2016 we fully committed to that and have never looked back.
Our music has always had a sound that has been hard to define for us and many in the industry. It sounds pretentious and every band thinks their sound is groundbreaking and different, but ours really is something unique and set apart from what’s in our scene and the mainstream. Back in 2018 we released a single called “Duality” that was debuted by KERRANG! and they coined our genre as “dream rock” and that instantly resonated with us and we’ve used it to describe our music ever since. It’s a perfect representation of our sound, still a bit of an ambiguous label, but it at least gives us an intriguing starting point to make when people ask us what genre of music we play.
Everything we do is DIY, we’re hands on all the time since we don’t have a huge budget and everything is self-funded project to project, so we’ve taught ourselves everything we know. From writing, producing, and recording our own music with the help of our incredible engineer and dear friend Brian “Bone” Thorburn at Threshold Studios, to filming, directing, and editing our own music video like we did for “Imagine The Cure,” and creating all our own artwork, our band is truly a one stop shop. We created our own production company from it called SHEFREAK Studio and we hope to offer our creative services to more bands and artists outside of our own to help bring their visions to life.
Our music truly is what makes us who we are. There have been many times, especially within the last 3 years and everything the world has been through, where we have been backed into a corner of letting this all go. But every time that happens, something pulls through to keep us going and to remind us why we create this tangible magic called music.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Perfectionism is something that was instilled in us from a young age. We were raised to be hyper vigilant children, reading the room, reading people’s emotions, so we’re very sensitive to that. Both being empaths on some spectrum makes being in a live music environment very difficult and overwhelming at times and it has gotten in the way of us performing optimally. We’ve both had to reevaluate how we approach playing music, especially in a live setting, and learning to laugh off the mistakes and not take that aspect so seriously. There’s never going to be a perfect set. You come extremely close sometimes and you crave that feeling and when you don’t live up to that over and over, the perfectionism can terrorize you and take the joy right out of everything. It’s been a battle to break that mindset and realize that when people come to see you play live, they’re just happy you’re there playing the songs they love regardless of if you miss a note or mess up 2 seconds of the song. We would agonize over the smallest mistakes that no one would know we made but us and end of ruining an entire run of shows for ourselves. We’re still learning to have grace for ourselves, but I think we’re so much better than we were when it comes to breaking our perfectionist mindset.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Live music is such a fickle business and the pandemic made things even more difficult for bands like us who make a living on the road. We lost a lot of venues during the multiple lockdowns and now that people are more accustomed to staying home more than ever, it’s so difficult to get people out to shows especially for smaller regional bands. There is something so incredibly special about live music that can’t be captured via a livestream or even listening to the record at home. Music is truly a community driven entity that should be experienced with other like minded individuals coming together as a whole. Live music on the independent and regional scale needs support now more than ever so there’s space for bands to create music and people to come to experience it. Go to local shows. Some of the greatest bands out there are the ones doing everything DIY on the indie side of the spectrum. Those are the bands who need social media attention, support, and bodies coming to shows. Buy tickets in advance, help sell out smaller venues, share with your friends and don’t gatekeep the smaller bands that you love. Sharing and word of mouth is huge in our industry and listeners really need to step up and be apart of the backbone that supports independent music. Buy merch, join Patreon communities, every little thing makes such a huge difference in keeping this side of the music industry flourishing so bands have a reason to keep making music and inspire the next generation of artists.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://linktr.ee/hyhband
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hyhband
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hailyourhighness
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hyhband
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/EpiLPS
- Other: Bandcamp: https://hailyourhighness.bandcamp.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5cM45gIG7B33RkLpxX5niU?si=RbaB7tVJTPOH_bsmwtgH1Q Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hailyourhighness
Image Credits
Live Photos by Kennedy Cottrell