New Single from The Hails Will Leave You “Breathless”
Photo by Steph Estrada
The five piece band The Hails just released their latest single “Breathless” on February 16th, 2023. “Breathless” is a culmination of the lyrical and instrumental growth of The Hails over the years, as it has been performed live since they were in college. Coming to its conclusive form in 2023, “Breathless” embodies their cheeky lyricism and energized musicality that takes over a live crowd and enlivens any room.
Made up of Robbie Kingsley, Franco Solari, Dylan McCue, Andre Escobar and Zach Levy, The Hails originated at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Their different backgrounds in music and shared experiences in college creates a universally youthful feel to their sound. The band also released their single “Exonerate” last October, prefacing a stripped version that came out in December. This marked one of the band’s first releases in over a year. Now this April, The Hails will be joining The Happy Fits on tour. With a couple of new singles and an album in the works, The Hails are anticipating a thrilling year ahead of them.
In a conversation with Unpublished, Robbie, Dylan, and Zach from The Hails discussed their newest singles, current inspirations and excitement for tour.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I read that The Hails formed at the University of Florida. Are you all originally from Florida?
[ROBBIE]: I was born in North Carolina, but I moved to Florida when I was 11. So, basically raised in Florida.
[DYLAN]: We've all spent a lot of time in Florida, spent our formative years.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How would you describe the music scene there growing up?
[ROBBIE]: It's really supportive. It kind of has no stakes, you can do whatever you want. Everybody just likes going to shows and your friends are just happy that live entertainment is even happening. So, they come out and support.
[DYLAN]: I feel like with the whole college town element of it; people that have a musical background, when they go to a college town, it becomes a priority to form a band because it's like "I'm in college and what else should I spend my time doing in college except trying to form a band." Amongst the musicians that are in Gainesville, there's a lot of focus around getting involved. So, I think the college element really helps the music scene there. There's a lot of other cool bands that we played with.
[ZACH]: Robbie was definitely not looking to make a band when I first met him.
[DYLAN]: But, it's funny because three of us grew up in Miami, which is a big city. But the music scene in Miami, I don't think it was anywhere near as diverse and as active as it was in Gainesville, which is a smaller, less populated college town. There seemed to be a lot more excitement around joining a band and seeing bands in Gainesville than in Miami. At least at the time that I was in high school. When I got to college, it was refreshing. It was nice.
[ZACH]: When we were in high school, it was a lot of ska bands and metal bands playing around Miami.
[DYLAN]: A lot of hardcore. It wasn't much of an indie rock scene.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you describe your sound for someone who hasn’t heard your music before?
[DYLAN]: Ever evolving. I think there's definitely a basis in indie. It's a tricky question because we all have different musical backgrounds. I think for the most part it's safe to say that me and Robbie and to a lesser extent, Andre, are really into the sort of indie 2000s. Growing up, we were all really into bands like The Strokes and Interpol. I'm really into Radiohead. There's always a recognition of that type of music. I think all of us really keep an open mind and are always trying to find ways to change things up and reinvent ourselves.
[ROBBIE]: I think at the root of it, we always really connect with a well written pop song. If it's like a 60s Kinks song, if it's just awesome, it's awesome. If it's a Britney Spears song from the mid 2000s, it's awesome, you know? And then even if you think of a 90s UK garage artist, if it has that hook there and it has awesome harmonies, I think we all have an ear to let that resonate within us. And then we try to throw that into our own guitar-based, but pop-focused sound.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You guys have a new single titled “Breathless.” What’s the inspiration or story behind this song?
[DYLAN]: So it's one of our older songs. It's a very old song, a song that's been in our live repertoire for quite a while, like five years. I started writing it when I was a junior in college. It started with the chorus. I remember coming to rehearsal one day with the bones of the song – the melodies for the verse, the chorus and the chord progression. I had the words for the hook, "she still leaves me breathless." Then Robbie filled in a lot of the verse lyrics. And then together, we sort of flushed out the complete structure of the song. I think recently I've gotten better about being more intentional about lyrics. But at the time, I wasn't much of a lyric writer, I was way more of a melody writer. And whenever I did write lyrics, it was always very stream of consciousness. Whatever comes off the dome, whatever I think of first. When I was trying to write melodies, the "she takes all my money" line came and then the "she still leaves me breathless" line came. After the fact, I was like, "Oh, that kind of works as a hook. I feel like that makes sense thematically." And then Robbie took that and built everything else in.
[ROBBIE]: This is thinking back like five years, but with the music knowledge that I had at the time, I wanted to kind of do a poetic thing. Sort of like Alex Turner-inspired, Submarine era, even maybe some of the stuff The Arctic Monkeys did on Suck It and See where it has that 60s, jangly pop kind of vibe to it. So the verses kind of interweave with the guitars. So, it gives you all this room to play with different words and phrases. I think I have loads of notes of just phrases that could fit in those pockets, but didn't necessarily sound good. So, I had a lot of different lyrics. I remember I don't even think I finished the second verse until maybe a year after we started the song. This song really took a year to write, three years to record, and five years for us to even think about putting it out. It's just one of those songs where it took a long time because I think we were trying to be so intricate with it because we knew we had something that we all five really liked.
[ZACH]: Yeah, it was hard to get the dynamic right in that raw energy that we wanted people to feel when they listened to the song.
[ROBBIE]: Yeah, that was the flip side of it. We started playing it live right when we had all the lyrics. I was probably singing wrong lyrics to it like back in the day. Once we figured it out that people wanted to hear this, we grew to like it more. We kept just chipping away. Every chance we got, we would just chip away at the song.
[DYLAN]: There are some people who have been hearing it for a long time. Like anybody who went to school in Gainesville with us has been hearing it since like 2017, 2018. Sometimes, we'll play shows and we'll say "Hey, this is a new song called "'Breathless.'” And then we'll always get some people who are like, "that's not a new song. I've heard this song before." Kind of interesting.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you guys have a favorite lyric from the song?
[ROBBIE]: Dylan wrote the chorus stuff. I remember hearing the idea and just resonating with "she takes all my money." To me, that's just inherently funny. So, it's got that cheekiness to it that I always like a song to have. So the opening line has a The Dark Side of the Moon reference, where it's like, "walk around a friendly conversation on the moon." I wasn't even trying to be like, "oh, let's do a Pink Floyd thing." I think I just liked that visual. What would a friendly conversation on the dark side of the moon be like? Imagine you're holding hands with someone, just walking along that space. Again, it kind of feels cheeky and random. But in the recording process, Matt, our producer, did a similar guitar swell that you also hear on The Dark Side of the Moon, the record. So it kind of plays into itself.
[DYLAN]: It's a little nod. That one moment of the song. A little slide guitar part. It's very similar to the one in "Breathe" by Pink Floyd.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You guys also just released a stripped-down version of your song “Exonerate.” What influenced your decision to release a stripped-down version of this song?
[ROBBIE]: We were just jamming one day. We have a studio in Little Haiti in Miami. Obviously as an artist, you have to make videos and stuff and figure out ways to promote your stuff. We were gonna just shoot a very basic video of us just mimicking the song. But, then Franco started playing around with a reharmonization and I was like, "Oh, let me just sing over that and see how it sounds." It was all very spur of the moment. He did the whole version, reharmonized it and then Dylan added his stuff in. And the video was like the third take. We did three full takes of the song and that was the third one. The recording is what you see on the video, so nothing changed.
[DYLAN]: It was very spur of the moment. There was no plan of "hey, let's figure out an arrangement for a stripped version of "Exonerate.'" Franco started playing his version on the keyboard of a softer version, a softer "Exonerate.” Then Robbie started singing over it and then we worked out the arrangement for the song. Franco had just started playing those chords. I think at first we had no intention of making it a real thing. Then as it developed, we were like "oh, this sounds pretty nice." Then we recorded it and we were like, "Oh, well now that it's recorded, we can release it." Which we did, a couple of months later.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You all just announced a spring tour run with The Happy Fits. Is there a city that you guys are excited to perform in?
[DYLAN]: Nashville and Atlanta. Our first ever tour was right before COVID hit and we had to cut it short. We had gone up to Boston. We were supposed to play Nashville after that and Atlanta. Those are the two cities that I think all of us were looking forward to the most from that tour. We had to cut the tour short before we got to those places because of COVID, when it was just starting to hit March 2020. So, we were particularly bummed about missing those shows. Now, it's nice to have another chance.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How was your New Year’s Eve show? Any fun memories you would like to share?
[ROBBIE]: Yeah, I took a beach shower because there was no time to actually get to a real shower. But it was cool. It was this venue called the Miami Beach Bandshell and literally right on the beach. It was amazing. They shot off fireworks and did like a countdown for New Year's and their set. And we went to a party after and it was a fun time.
[DYLAN]: It was a fun New Year’s.
[ZACH]: There were definitely more people than I thought would be there. I didn't think many people would go to a show like this on New Year’s.
[DYLAN]: People in Miami, they want to go to the clubs. But, a lot of people decided to come see our silly little band.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you guys have any pre-show rituals?
[ROBBIE]: Not really, our biggest pre-show ritual is just trying to find everyone because we all just kind of split up.
[DYLAN]: Personally, I like to have at least one drink before I go on stage. I don't know if that's like a ritual, but I need to have like a beer or something before I go on stage. Otherwise, I'm a stiff scarecrow.
[ZACH]: Dylan, you gave a speech once.
[ROBBIE]: Dylan gave like a Braveheart inspired speech for a show in Tampa.
[DYLAN]: It was like a battle speech.
[UNPUBLISHED]: A battle speech, that’s awesome.
[DYLAN]: Yeah, maybe I should start doing that.
[ROBBIE]: It was fun but it was a little too intense. He got red in the face.
[ZACH]: His veins were popping out of his forehead.
[DYLAN]: It was like Braveheart. It was like we were going to war against the English. It was great.
[ROBBIE]: But it's never happened again. So maybe we'll have to make it a ritual.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What do you guys feel you’ve learned as a band since leaving college?
[DYLAN]: Personally, I think a lot of musicians have similar experiences. Like when COVID hit, I was sort of forced to be more independent with just how I make music. It forced me to learn more about music production. I definitely wrote a lot of music in that period. It was the first time in my life where I had because I just graduated college and then COVID hit. So, it was the first time in my life where there was nothing else to do except write music. So, you better go ahead and do that. But I feel like since then, even though it's still sometimes hard to come to a compromise musically because we all have different tastes and we all have different backgrounds, we've been able to respect each other as musicians more and more as time has gone on. We figured out how to compromise on things better over the last couple of years.
[ROBBIE]: I think what's been cool for me is that we've been able to focus on our art more as a package. I think in college, everyone says it's a discovery phase. So I think even that's true for starting a band. You have to figure out what you want your live show to be, what do you want your pictures to look like, what do you want your EP's or your albums to look like? I think now that we've been able to meet more people and have access to more resources, it's been cool to actually figure it out collaboratively and focus on what The Hails can be to all five of us.
[DYLAN]: Like what Robbie said, I think being able to work with more people outside of the musical sphere and being able to meet more photographers. That's in large part thanks to our managers, they've really put us in contact with a lot of cool people in the creative world who aren't in music but are great photographers and great visual artists. It's been really cool to work and interact with other creatives in that way in a friendly, safe setting.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What have you guys been listening to lately? What’s been inspiring you?
[ROBBIE]: It's funny I've been on a recent Creedence Clearwater Revival for some reason. I'm just really into that right now. For some reason, "Green River" popped up on Spotify the other day and I was like, "wow, this is amazing" and I forgot how much I listened to this in high school. Along with that, I started listening to The Doors again. I guess I'm on a 60s kick.
[DYLAN]: I'm on like a 60s and 70s country kick right now. I've been listening to a lot of classic country. Blaze Foley is one of my favorite artists, Townes Van Zandt, early Willie Nelson. And I've never really listened to country before; but, I just decided to start listening to some of that country stuff and a lot of it is really beautiful. It's familiar but beautiful at the same time. It hasn't necessarily influenced my writing very much at least yet. I've never had a country phase in my life. I was one of those people back in the day where I was like, "Yeah, I like all music except country." And recently I've been listening to a lot more old school country. I don't know if you can call it underground country, that sounds pretentious, but lesser known country from the olden days.
[ROBBIE]: I also found this song called "Two Hands" by this band called PACKS. I think they're out of Canada. I haven't looked them up that much but that song is amazing. Then I also found this Pixies song that I had no clue existed called "The Thing." It's on an EP called Velouria.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What can we expect from The Hails in 2023? What does the future look like? Perhaps an album?
[ROBBIE]: Definitely more singles. We got a couple coming after "Breathless" and then, yes, an album definitely.
[DYLAN]: And more shows this year. Ideally in as many different places around the country as possible.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Anything else you want to add on for readers to know?
[DYLAN]: I was gonna say like, vote but there are no little or no elections coming up. Stay hydrated, right? Keep drinking water even when it's not that sunny out, even when it's not that hot out. It makes a big difference.
[ROBBIE]: I drink too much coffee. So I'm always dehydrated.
[DYLAN]: Stream the goddamn Hails you sons of bitches.
