Hawthorne Heights singer recounts 'dude, paint this place' days of 'shining star' Bogart's

Ohio is for Lovers returns to Riverbend Music Center for its second year Saturday.

The daylong fest, a brainchild of Dayton emo-rock moguls Hawthorne Heights, is jam-packed with nostalgia. Headliners Jimmy Eat World, Alkaline Trio and Underoath will take the stage, as well as regional acts that include local favorite Slutbomb.

I recently spoke with Hawthorne Heights frontman JT Woodruff about the band’s influences, its early days in Dayton and his hopes and aspirations for the future of the fledgling festival.

Do you have any stories of coming through town when you were first starting out as a band that I can share?

JT: Cincinnati was our home market when we were first starting off. The first big tour that we did we played Bogart's for the first time in our history. We watched all of our favorite bands there, whether it was New Found Glory or Saves the Day or The Anniversary, Alkaline Trio, all these bands. So we were really excited about it.

It was toward the end of the tour where we were playing all the Bogart’s-sized venues in every city – House of Blues and Fillmore, and stuff like that. When we got to Cincinnati, we were like, "Oh man, Bogart’s is actually not that special." Everything else was clean and new and corporate, and Bogart’s was our local place – before Live Nation owned it. It's like, "Dude, paint this place." It's still a wonderful venue and a shining star for Cincinnati.

Was there something in particular about the Dayton scene in the late '90s, early 2000s that pushed you to make the kind of music that you make?

JT: No, not particularly. Beforehand we were in a pop-punk band called A Day in the Life. It was along the lines of something that maybe New Found Glory meets Saves the Day was doing – no screaming, just aggressive guitars and poppy high vocals. We all like a lot of different styles of music. A couple people in our band also listened to heavy music and it came organically.

A couple of the bands in the scene started to pop. The Used came out, Story Of The Year, the first Taking Back Sunday record and Thursday. We were getting influenced in a way that was still melodic, but you were able to put those heavier moments in and it didn't sound weird anymore.

We actually invented our band in secret and got signed after playing one show. People were mad at us. We'd been that other band for a couple of years so it's not like we were brand new, but we pivoted and thought we'd spend the summer writing a new style of music to us, and it all started from there.

The Dayton scene is great. It's had so much history and obviously it's the home of The Breeders and Guided by Voices and Brainiac and a lot of stuff in the alternative indie world. And then through the early to mid-2000s after we came out, you also had The Devil Wears Prada, Miss May I and a couple other nationally known bands from this little tiny scene.

A Day in the Life is obviously a Beatles reference. How did The Beatles influence you to step away from the traditional contemporary rock sound?

JT: When you're in a band with four or five people it's really hard to agree on anything. But there are two bands that each member of our band absolutely loves: The Beatles and Jimmy Eat World.

How did you get Jimmy Eat World on Is For Lovers this year? Why do you think so many good bands are willing to sign on to the fest?

JT: We're still trying to figure that out. I'm still trying to figure out if this is like a genie in a bottle situation or like "The Twilight Zone" where it's all going to get whipped back around and haunt us or something. We worked specifically on Jimmy Eat World for about five months. It took a lot of patience. A band like that has offers from everywhere.

We explained how we have a local element, how we have a charity element and how we're trying to help provide a platform for diversity, in addition to how much we truly enjoy their band. We thought it’d be a great cornerstone to book our favorite band on a festival that we created from a song that was written in a basement in Troy, Ohio. That's as close to the "Field of Dreams" of emo that you can get.

You guys don't take top billing for Is For Lovers. That’s a humble move.

JT: We have so much fun playing the show. But we also want to be spectators, and it's tough to be a headliner and spectator. Really what we're trying to do is put on the best show for the fans. We consider it to be a timeless genre. It's lasted 20 years. If it was going to go away, it would be gone. We want to be careful stewards of a genre that we believe in.

It also gives us the flexibility to be able to walk around, meet the fans, ask them if they're having a good time, show them the dunk tank and the charities that are involved, and show them that this is more than just bands playing.

Last year at the fest, every band would play their hits and then do a medley of some covers they liked. Nobody was too high and mighty to go out and play what they wanted to play – like a backyard festival or a barbecue. It was a great vibe.

JT: Yeah, the vibe is to let all those walls that have been built up over the years melt away. You're guarded when you come into a festival situation, because you're immediately met with a series of rules. "You can't be here, you’ve got to be on stage here. These are your areas that you're not allowed to go in." We try to take as many of those rules away so we can hang out with our friends.

This is a chill zone. We try to create a space backstage where everybody feels invited. It doesn't matter if you're one of the local bands or one of the regional bands or the headliner. If you want to hang out in this area, it means you're approachable and that you're here to relax. And we feel that the set lists and the show are reflective of that – people are totally loose and having fun.

You've expanded from three cities to eight this year. If you could take the fest to any city, where would you take it?

JT: We've already been working on some of our favorite things so far, from traditional cities like Denver, Colorado, to non-traditional weird places. Our next directive is finding odd areas that are under-serviced that fans want to go to and they can treat it like a vacation. We saw that a lot in Outer Banks when we just did it and it was like, "Wow, I used to go there every summer as a kid. Now I can go there and watch my favorite bands."

We're starting to see doors open up. If it's me, I want to do it in Tokyo, Japan, one of my favorite cities in the world. I want to see how that culture would react to what we're providing. There's tons of fans there that love this style of music.

We've already been to Hawaii with it. We're running out of benchmarks. Every place is for lovers, if you want to go on vacation. So our hope is that we can cross some international waters next year and find some other places that are happy places filled with sadness.

Ohio Is For Lovers Festival

When: 1:30 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 9.

Where: Riverbend Music Center, 6295 Kellogg Ave., Anderson Township.

Tickets: $128.75.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: How Hawthorne Heights added Jimmy Eat World to Ohio Is For Lovers