Wired into teens’ emotions

ON select dates of Hawthorne Heights’ upcoming tour with punk pinups Fall Out Boy, singer-guitarist JT Woodruff will call a few fans to join him by the microphone. These fans will be chosen from thousands who wrote to the quintet’s online community, thisiswhoweare.org, confessed how they mistreated a boyfriend, girlfriend or best friend and wanted to make an arena-sized apology. Woodruff will introduce them before launching into “Saying Sorry,” their breezy single with the chorus, “Seeing you cry makes me feel like saying sorry.”

Such theatrics would make it easy to sneer at the Dayton, Ohio-bred band for tugging at the most obvious of heartstrings. Turn up your nose if you will -- Hawthorne Heights has sold nearly 800,000 copies of its 2004 debut, “The Silence in Black and White,” on independent Victory Records. The band’s follow-up, “If Only You Were Lonely,” released Tuesday, is expected to sell 200,000 copies in its first week, likely making it the best-selling rock album, and possibly overall album, in the U.S.

Yet until recently, Hawthorne Heights was an anonymous Midwestern Everyband. Signed from an unsolicited demo (recorded between classes and convenience-store shifts) sent to Victory in 2003, the band quietly used a 300-show-per-year tour schedule and online communities such as MySpace to earn a massive audience that forced MTV and Rolling Stone to take notice. They epitomize a music economy in which anyone with a computer can hear hip new bands or become one themselves.

But why Hawthorne Heights? And why now?

“They may be a perfect storm of all the elements,” said Andy Greenwald, author of the nonfiction book “Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo” and the new novel “Miss Misery.” “They’re cute, moody boys who look exactly like the cute, moody boys all over the country. They tour like crazy, they have that mix of loud and soft, and Victory worked them like crazy to exactly the right people.”

FOR all its success, Hawthorne Heights’ music isn’t immediately commanding. “If Only You Were Lonely” is snappy and energetic, but lacks the hooks expected of a nearly platinum rock band. Their three guitarists layer crunchy distortion and jangling arpeggios, but unlike former label mates and screamo pioneers Thursday, Victory’s first breakout band, there’s no threat of violence. Yet the band scored a radio hit with “Ohio Is for Lovers,” and “Saying Sorry” is likely next.

“Hawthorne Heights write music and lyrics that intimately touch many different types of people,” Victory Records founder Tony Rummel said via e-mail. “They perform with a down-home honesty that is so lacking in our cutthroat society. [They’re] a band that you can call your own.”

Victory succeeded by dialing into young audiences’ attraction to emo bands that speak to them as equals. Rummel’s promotional strategies (stay on tour, update your website often) sold the group. But Hawthorne Heights’ music works because it reaffirms everything a person feels at 17. Woodruff talks to you like a best friend telling secrets.

“I tried to be a lot more personal with the lyrics,” Woodruff said. “Some of them are definitely about heartbreak and girls, but a lot of them are about my father and his battles with alcoholism. That’s how I like to listen to bands. I would like to know that the singer was actually going through that.”

The band’s sense of tragedy is sincere. Close friend John Holohan, drummer for Bayside, died in a 2005 van accident while the bands were touring together. But the universality of the songs -- high melodrama and general heartbreak -- resonates with punks and football captains alike.

“I don’t know if people are ‘Hawthorne Heights’ fans,” Greenwald said. “I think they’re fans of what Hawthorne Heights represented last year when that song broke.”

Indeed, teenage emotions are, to say the least, a volatile market. As their fans grow up and graduate, Hawthorne Heights must evolve, or its fans will hop online and find someone new. My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy signed major-label deals and went multi-platinum by distancing themselves through elaborate goth aesthetics or wry humor and stadium-shaking choruses. Hawthorne Heights is an experiment in a band thriving with fans in total control of the relationship. But for now, Woodruff knows he’s reaching his audience. “One of the great things about music is that you can really help other people through rough times,” Woodruff said. “If that makes us overemotional, then I guess that’s what we are. If they want us to say sorry, we’ll say sorry for them.”