Todd Michael Hall (Riot V) Interview

It’s Wednesday, June 2, 2021. After a year of Zoom interviews, today is the day the now infamous video call app decides to go caput. Riot V singer Todd Michael Hall and I can see each other, but no audio. We scramble to the chatroom to figure out a solution. A few minutes and a computer change later, I have him over the phone to talk about his brand new solo album, Sonic Healing, as well as the life and times of being the singer for the greatest American metal band of all time, Riot V. The following is the complete, uncut transcript of this conversation.

Greetings Todd and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing this afternoon?

Todd Michael Hall: Hey I’m doing good. Nice to hook up with you. I’m sorry your computer wasn’t working that well for you.

I have to apologize. In a year of doing Zoom interviews, that’s the first time that’s happened.

TMH: No big deal. I figured you had it down by now! Come on!

*laughs* I did have it down. Then Zoom went down! I got this notification: “Your microphone is not working.” “Why?” I tried to check and see, but oh well. Worse comes to worse, you improvise like this.

TMH: Yeah every now and then you get funny things where…for me, I record. Sometimes if I turn on my MIDI box that I use to record, it can alter which microphone it’s referencing and stuff like that. There’s little things like that which can throw it off. All of a sudden it’s not working and I’m like, “What is going on?” Or sometimes you have to set the default that the microphone is the computer and not your telephone or whatever you have. Who knows?

Yeah. Changing subjects drastically, I’d like to congratulate you on your excellent new album, Sonic Healing.

TMH: Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m really excited about it. I’m glad to hear you like it.

When did the ideas for this album first start to come together?

TMH: I wanted to make this kind of album a few years ago, but I need a partnership to make something like this happen. When I write by myself, it tends to sound a little more acoustic. I write with an acoustic, so it tends to come out a little more singer/songwriter or pop or whatever. After being on The Voice, things opened up for me a little bit. Being on there really solidified in my mind, “Yes, I would really like to do that kind of album.” I had done seven heavy metal albums in a row and was looking to do something that I would consider old school rock. I just wanted to get back to my old school roots with that stuff. 

I had been talking to Joe O’Brien with Rat Pak Records. I talked to him a few years ago, in 2018, about maybe doing a solo album, but at the time he was thinking heavy metal and my motivation wasn’t too particularly high at the moment. But after I was on The Voice, I called him up and said, “Hey man, I think maybe we should do something.” He’s like, “Alright!” I asked if he could hook me up with somebody and he’s the one who hooked me up with Kurdt Vanderhoof from Metal Church. It was the partnership I needed to make it happen. We really blossomed from there.

I do hear some heavy metal on this record, but by and large, even the metal aspects seem more 70s, old school, and hard rock based.

TMH: Yeah, for sure. When I think of heavy metal, I tend to think of a lot of double bass *imitates double bass drums*, that sort of thing, which is cool, but that’s what I do in Riot. We tend to be what I would call power metal. For this, I just wanted to have a little more space in the drums, a little more left to right sway as opposed to just your up and down headbanging. Really what I was thinking about was when I was pretty young, in my pre-teen years and even my early teen years, it was just a glorious time for that kind of rock. It was just all over the radio and had a positive energy. It brought that kind of energy to a lot of people. That was an important part of it for me too. I just wanted to bring a lot of positive energy and bring back some of the excitement I felt as a youngster listening to this kind of music. 

Was this album written and recorded during the course of the pandemic?

TMH: Yeah it really was. It was really written just at the start of it. Joe and I got hooked up just before the pandemic started to take off. He was finishing up some personal things he had to do and I remember him calling me up. For starters, I let him listen to a whole bunch of song ideas I had. Then he called me back and said, “Well, you’ve got some great stuff, but why don’t we do this? For me, I like to get in a mode and start writing and let a bunch of stuff pour out. Then we’ll see what we have and go from there. We can always turn around and go back to some of your ideas.” I remember him calling me up and saying, “I’m ready to start now.” It wasn’t barely a week later he sent me 5 songs. Then everyday he would load me up a new song. Over the course of 21 days, he wrote 18 songs. During that same time period, I was listening to all the songs and writing lyrics and vocal melodies for them. Basically, in another week on top of that, I had written lyrics and vocal melodies for 15 or 16 of those songs. By the end of April last year, everything was written and then by the end of May it was all recorded. By the end of June, maybe going into July, we had the mix finalized, but it just took a long time to get the album out because it was just hard with all the COVID things to try and get videos made and photos made and all that kind of stuff. It’s definitely a pandemic album, but I resisted the urge to be negative *laughs*. 

What were the challenges faced with recording an album remotely as opposed to in the studio?

TMH: I’m pretty used to it. When I first started, when I was younger, obviously everything was in the studio. But when I got started back up with Burning Starr, I remember flying out to meet Joey DeMaio from Manowar. I recorded a little bit in their studio because he was the one producing the album. Back in 2004 when I did that, I remember Joey telling me, “Hey, you should go buy this M box and go buy Pro Tools for your computer and try to record. You can record stuff at home because at least you can do demos and rough-ins and stuff like that. You can see what you come up with as far as the sound, but we’ll record everything here.” That whole first album I did with Jack (Starr) I did in their studio. But then, because I had bought that equipment and was using microphones, I just started recording more at home. 

For vocals, it’s kind of easier to capture. When you’re recording drums, you can do that at home, but you gotta be pretty good at it. Whereas vocals, it’s a no-brainer. You put a microphone in front of you and capture it. You want a little sound deadening material around the microphone, but have a good microphone. Use a compressor when putting the signal in. It’s really not hard. Basically, I’ve been recording vocals at home ever since the second Burning Starr album. I’ve got 8 or 9 albums that I’ve recorded that way. I do all my recording at what I would call my own home studio. The way I record with Riot and other bands, we tend to work remotely because people are all over the country nowadays, so it’s just more of a normal thing. It wasn’t that way when I first recorded in 1988. It was all in the studio. Even my recordings from 1990 and 1994. Actually, the first time I recorded was in ‘86, I think. That was somebody’s home studio, but it was still kind of a studio. 

Sonic Healing draws heavily from the well of 70s hard rock. Growing up, who were your favorite bands and singers?

TMH: There was a lot because they were just all over the radio. As a youngster, I wasn’t always out buying the albums because they were on the radio and my older brother had albums too. Back then, the album that stuck out to me was Queen’s News of the World. I remember REO Speedwagon and Styx. With Styx, it was Paradise Theatre and that other one that had “Mr. Roboto” on it (Kilroy Was Here). My brother Jon was big into Ted Nugent. He had some great singers like Derek St. Holmes on some of those albums. You listen to the radio and obviously there’s Triumph and Boston and a little bit of Rush mixed in there. There were just a lot of those types of singers. Jefferson Starship. There were just so many bands around at the time. I think back then…Kansas even. Oh my lord. There’s so many good singers. It’s really hard to say. 

When I got more into the 80s, when I was about 15 years old, I really started to hone in on the heavy metal side of things. The market seemed to be evolving that way. Those are the people that really fascinated me. I remember seeing Geoff Tate from Queensrÿche open up for KISS in 1984 on The Warning Tour and just being blown away. I was heavily influenced by him back in the day. I remember Eric Adams from Manowar. He was a real favorite of mine. It just depends. My first rock influences, because obviously I had non rock influences, were people like that. Led Zeppelin was all over the radio too. Those kinds of bands were my influences back in the day. When I think of those bands, I think of singers with big ranges. Some sang clean. Some sang not so clean, but just big, huge ranges and can sing all over the place and maybe a smattering of harmonies here and there. Those are the kinds of things I think about. I have a really clean voice, so that’s what tends to stick with me. It’s nicer to sing along with stuff where I feel I can sound a little bit what it’s like. I love AC/DC, but it’s really hard for me to sing along because I don’t sound like that at all *laughs*. 

You’ve gotta have sharded glass vocals to sing that!

TMH: I mean, Bon Scott, the original guy, I used to do a cover of “Girls Got Rhythm”. I can pull that off a little bit, but man that Brian Johnson stuff. Wow. “Back in Black”…I don’t even know how he sings like that. 

Neither do I. It’s funny you mention the pairing of Nugent and St. Holmes, because I get a lot of that vibe between you and Vanderhoof on this record.

TMH: Kurt’s a few years older than me, so he’s definitely got that old school rock influence in him. I think for him, when he picks up a guitar and just starts noodling around practicing, the types of riffs that he wrote for this project are just naturally what flows out of him. That’s what he said. Even though I had song ideas, everything we did for this was new. He wrote and gave me music. I wrote vocals for it, lyrics and vocal melodies. He was definitely the inspiration and driving the tempo. At this stage in the game, I feel my voice is my voice. I’m not really trying to sound like anyone in particular. That’s what I naturally sound like. I have a certain range that my voice tends to gravitate to. I can sing pretty darn low too, but I don’t know. For me, with rock n’ roll, there tends to be a little more energy when I sing a little higher, but mostly I was not as high as what I would do with Riot. It seems a lot of the Riot singing is higher, but I don’t know. It’s tough for me because sometimes I’ll listen to something or I’ll play something for somebody and I don’t think it’s that high, but they’re like, “Oh no, that’s high!” *laughs* It’s hard for me to always tell. It’s kind of like when I go rock climbing. You sometimes have a lot more strength in your fingers than you realize, so you’ll show somebody “Well just do this!” and they’ll say “I can’t do that!” “Oh sorry.” *laughs*.

A few years ago, you appeared on The Voice. What was that experience like and do you think it helped in bringing in new fans for this album?

TMH: It was just a little over a year ago, although I started filming and working with them in 2019. June here will be two years since I did my walk-in audition in Chicago. I had a great time. I think it did (bring in new fans). What’s interesting about The Voice is you get some really intense attention there for a little while, but it doesn’t make you a household name on its own. A lot of the attention you get is Voice apparatus attention. You get that because you’re with them at that moment. It’s hard to drag a lot of those people with you, but I definitely think there’s some fans there. I have an Instagram account. I don’t have a million people, but I think there’s about 7,500 followers now. I only had 500 or 1,000 when I started. It definitely boosted those numbers. Some of the people that direct message or interact will mention, “I loved you on The Voice.” There’s definitely a bit of that, but the core people that are supporting me and buying my album are also fans of Riot and some of the stuff I’ve been doing with Reverence and Burning Starr too. It was a great experience, definitely worthwhile. If anything, it helped me. It didn’t hurt me, that’s for sure *laughs*.

Are there any plans for solo shows in the future?

TMH: I’d really love to. It’s just gonna come down to whether there’s enough demand for it or whether I can hook up with the right situation. I know Kurdt is pretty excited about the music. We’d really love to present it live. We recorded it and produced it in a way that it’s not overdone with layers of this and that. It would come across live and translate well live. It’s just a matter of finding the right situation and getting the opportunity, but I’d like to.

You’ve been singing for Riot, a band who’s had many classic singers, for nearly a decade now. Between Guy Speranza, Rhett Forrester, and Tony Moore, whose material do you most enjoy singing and why?

TMH: There’s Mike DiMeo in there too. We tend to be the power metal era, so we don’t really do so much Mike DiMeo and we don’t do so much Rhett Forrester. We do the most of the Tony Moore era, but since Fire Down Under was a big album, we do a fair amount of Guy Speranza too. It’s tough for me to decide which one of those two I like better. I like them for different reasons. I love the old school Riot because it’s got a bit of a different feel to it musically. It mixes in really well with the power metal stuff. To me, it’s hard to have the whole night to be nothing but *imitates double bass drums*. It helps create some ebb and flow in the music. The Rhett Forrester stuff does that too and so does the Mike DiMeo stuff, but we don’t play so much of that. When it comes to Rhett Forrester, he had more of a growly thing to his voice which I think is cool, but I don’t think my voice…people tell me that I sound good doing his stuff. I’ve had them compliment me on it before, but when I hear it I go, “Okay, well I don’t have much of that.” I do my best. I try to make the songs sound as much like the originals as I can. I really enjoy the old school Riot because I love the style of music, but I also love the stuff Tony Moore does. He did a great job on his albums. The soaring melodies on top of the heavy music is pretty addictive. There’s just a lot of great melodies, *sings* “We drank ‘till the sunrise. Rode away singin’ Johnny’s back again.” They’re just such great melodies to sing. How couldn’t you enjoy it?

One hundred and ten percent. I’ve told so many people about Riot over the years. I tell them Thundersteel is one of my top 10 favorite albums ever recorded and they’re like, “Really?” “Yeah, listen to it and you’ll find out.”

TMH: It is an amazing album. The funny thing with Riot is here in the US, the biggest seller was Fire Down Under. For a lot of people, that’s Riot to them. What’s interesting is when you go overseas, that’s where Thundersteel is arguably the bigger album. Now if you go by Spotify and how many listens you get, the biggest song is “Swords and Tequila”, but the second biggest song is “Thundersteel”. According to the numbers I saw a year or two ago, it was “Swords and Tequila” by a long shot, but “Thundersteel” was pretty big too. I don’t know. Maybe Spotiy tends to be a little more US based, but the Thundersteel album is a great, great album. When we did the 30th anniversary of it for our Japan DVD, we played the entire album front to back. It’s just chock full of great songs, that’s for sure. When we had to learn the whole album, I think we only had to learn three more songs because we regularly play six out of the nine *laughs*. There wasn’t a whole lot of extra learning we had to do for that one.

What are some of your favorite shows you’ve played with Riot thus far?

TMH: They stick out in your memory for different reasons. One show that sticks out in my mind is the first that we did. The actual first show we did together was in Italy. It was at a club I had actually played with Burning Starr in Brescia, so I was kind of familiar with it. That was a really fun show. The second show was a festival show in Germany. I’m forgetting the name of the festival, but we headlined. It was a pretty decent crowd, 800 to 1,000 people. I remember we were just wondering, “Are people gonna accept us? Are they gonna be okay with this?” They were really good about it. They really ripped it up and enjoyed it and loved the show. It gave us a lot of confidence to keep going. 

Those stick out in my mind, but there’s others that stick out too. I remember playing Barcelona Rock Fest. By the way, the German show was at the Metal Assault Festival on February 8, 2014. But Barcelona Rock Fest was an amazing show. We went on after Judas Priest. They had two big stages next to each other. I remember Rob Halford’s over there singing his head off on the stage next to us while we’re finishing to set up. When they got done, we started five minutes later. It was 12:30 at night and there were 20,000 people there. It was an insanely big crowd. We mixed things up and opened with “Thundersteel”, just to try and get peoples’ attention. It seemed to work because we had a really huge crowd that stuck around and listened to us. Even Venom went on after us. Yeah, they stayed up late for that Rock Fest in Barcelona. 

We had some great shows in Germany. The Keep it True festival was a great show that we headlined, also the Bang Your Head festival that’s awesome. We’ve done that a couple times. Certainly the shows in Japan stick out too. Riot does really well in Japan. That’s probably the place where we have the biggest draw by ourselves. When we go play Club Citta, we can get about 1,000 people to show up just for us and we’re the only band on the bill. That’s a great place to play. What’s interesting about there is the people are all so nice and generous. Not that it’s not done professionally everywhere, but over there you feel like a rockstar. You’re brought to the gig in your shuttle van and you walk in and the stage is all set up. There’s all the food and catering and sushi in the back. There’s a pretty special feel there. The people sing along so loud. They’re just so passionate about it. 

Although I’d say Greece is a lot like that too. I’ve had some incredible shows in Greece. There’s a club we play in Thessaloniki called the Eightball Club. It’s an incredible experience because it’s packed with people. There’s a balcony that wraps around, so it’s not a real deep bar. You’re just looking out. At the edge of the stage, peoples’ heads are coming up to your knee. They’re right there and in your face. People are jumping up on stage and stage diving all night. The loudest singers are in Greece it seems. Sorry for the long answer, but lots of great shows. There’s more. I could go on. There’s lots of little memories that stick out like that.

I love to hear it. It’s better to hear that than, “Oh, there was this one show and it was alright.” 

TMH: Yeah, well for me, this isn’t a living. I make my living running a manufacturing company, so this is a passion project for me. I don’t want to belittle it. I get to travel all over the world, but I don’t make a living doing this. I’m so incredibly grateful because even though I don’t make a living doing it, it does pay for me to travel around the world and get a chance to do something that I really enjoy. Obviously it feels good when people are listening to your music and listening to your CD and playing you on the radio and doing interviews. All that feels good, but there’s definitely a big huge energy you get from playing live. We’ve had shows that have been incredible and there’s only been 50 to 100 people there, but when they pack in real tight and are going nuts, it feels great to get that feedback. For everybody in the band, it’s a passion project. We do it because we love it. We have to do it. It’s kind of weird how that works *laughs*.

Are there any upcoming recording or touring plans for Riot? I know you were just announced for the lineup of next year’s Hell’s Heroes which is absolutely insane!

TMH: That should be a crazy show. I was just made aware of that one last week. “Hey, it looks like we’re gonna be playing this show.” “Alright, cool!” We definitely have some recording to do. I have a lot of work to do. They’re getting the songs to me and I’m the last one. I have to do the vocals because we have 14 or 15 songs written and I’ve done demo vocals, but they’ve gotten some final music recorded. I think I only have the final music on three of those songs so far. Mike Flyntz and Nick Lee have some work to do on guitar, but they’re getting me stuff so the ball’s gonna be in my court. It’s gonna be up to me to find time to crank out all the vocals. There’s definitely a new Riot album in the works and we’re starting to book some shows. There’s even some talk of trying to book some long weekends in the US, but we’ll see. That’d be fun. We haven’t played many shows in the US in a few years now because we’ve been busy doing other things over in Europe and Japan. 

Sonic Healing is out now on Rat Pak Records. For more information on Todd Michael Hall, visit www.toddmichaelhall.com. For more information on Riot V, visit www.areyoureadytoriot.com.