Mz. Hyde

Album: The Strange Case Of... (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song was seen as the focal point of Halestorm's The Strange Case Of... album. When the band were writing songs for the new record, they had ballads, like "Beautiful With You," and heavy songs like "You Call Me a Bitch Like It's a Bad Thing," but nothing to truly tie them together. This song, which addresses Halestorm singer Lzzy Hale's Jekyll/Hyde personality wound up serving as the thematic glue that binded the record together. "It was one of the later songs we wrote," Hale told Yahoo! Music: "At one point, we were looking at a good chunk of 17 to 50 songs that were all over the place. The guys in the band were saying, 'Well, how can we put all these songs onto this record? We love them all, but there's no common theme.' So I came to them with this idea about this Mz. Hyde character. It was actually a personal thing because it was a character I invented that helped me come out of my shell when I was a kid. Growing up, I was a very shy and introverted, so I more or less had to invent Mz. Hyde in order to be the rock star I wanted to be onstage."

    "For years, I've been writing about these two sides of myself, and I wanted to capture that in a song.," Hele continued. "So I brought this to the guys, and all three of them looked at me at the same time and said, 'Oh my God, that's it! Lzzy, you are Mz. Hyde! Once we put this song on the record, everything else makes sense because we have the soft side of you and then the harder side of you. That works because you're like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing!' And I was like, 'Well, okay, I'm glad we were able to work that out, basically at my expense.'"
  • Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde was written by the Scottish novelist in three days in his Bournemouth villa . Wracked by coughing fits caused by tuberculosis and drinking himself into stupors to try to counteract this, Stevenson had a nightmare about a man being pressed into a cabinet where he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. This gave him the basic outline of the plot, which he based on William Brodie a respected businessman and Edinburgh town councillor by day and a leader of a gang of robbers by night.

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