After more than 20 years in the music industry, Dayton rock band Hawthorne Heights is still showing audiences why "Ohio Is For Lovers."
The emo band, which rose to prominence in the early 2000s, brought its Ohio Is For Lovers Festival
to Huber Heights' Rose Music Center on Sept. 5. The one-day event also featured Silverstein, Saves the Day, Arm's Length, Hit the Lights, The Dopamines and A While After.Hawthorne Heights launched the Is For Lovers Festival in 2022, per the event's website. The event took place in three cities during its inaugural year: Wichita, Kansas; Denver and Cincinnati. Named after the band's iconic song, the festival is now returning to the band's home state.
Ahead of the 2026 Edition, Hawthorne Heights lead singer and founding
member JT Woodruff spoke with The Enquirer about the inspiration behind the band's biggest hit, his decades-long career, the Is For Lovers Festival, his favorite Cincinnati memories and his love of Skyline Chili.
These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: The Ohio Is For Lovers festival has become more than just a concert. What does it mean to you to have built something that's turned into an annual gathering for the emo scene?
Woodruff: We have a great time with it every single year. We have a great time performing in Ohio. Anytime you can hear "Ohio Is For Lovers" in Ohio, it's a special experience.
Last year, we took off because we were basically gone all summer doing other people's festivals. So we were excited to have it back on a different venue in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio, at a place called The Rose that we've watched so many iconic artists perform.
We're just really excited to be at home doing it this year.
Q: The lineup mixes bands that helped define the era with newer acts. How important is it to you to kind of bridge these generations of emo and pop-punk fans?
Woodruff: When you become a veteran artist, somebody who's been around the block, I think it's on you to help steward other generations who are coming up and just provide them with as many opportunities as you can.
We need new people taking the ball and keeping emo as relevant as ever. That comes in newer bands, it comes in older bands and it comes everywhere in between. To keep that spirit alive, it takes people of all ages.
Q: The word emo meant something very different when you first emerged than it does today. How has your relationship with that label changed? How do you define emo?
Woodruff: We came up at a great time period. It was 2003. Emo as a term was not really a thing related to what we were doing yet.
For us, when we got called emo, it was like, "We don't care what you call us as long as you're including us in what you're talking about."
We love all those bands that they were comparing us to, whether it be Sunny Day Real Estate or the Get Up Kids or even further down the line, bands like, I Hate Myself and Rites of Spring and Jawbreaker. Even though it doesn't feel like there are a lot of similarities to them, if you mention Hawthorne Heights, but those are all the bands that helped raise us, that helped change and cultivate our sound.
Then a little bit further down the line, I would say Saves the Day is very important to that for us. That's why they were on the bill.
But emo wasn't a thing back then when it was like, "Dude, we should start an emo band." It was more natural and more organic than that. And, really, what [emo] meant to us was being introspective with your lyrics and talking about your own personal struggles and your own personal pain and your feelings of yearning and stuff like that, instead of fighting external forces.
Q: What made you start the Is For Lovers Festival in Ohio?
Woodruff: We got an opportunity with some promoters in town, and we just took the ball and ran with it. Upon talking to our booking agent and our personal team and then the team in Cincinnati, it was like, "I think that we could do this and I think that this could be awesome."
It really takes the pressure off when you have people that believe in you and a whole city and state behind you. I think one of the reasons that it works and it's successful is because it's all rooted in having a great time, and there being no pressure and nothing really stuffy and uppity about it.
Q: Dayton has produced an incredible number of influential bands. What is it about the city that fosters that kind of creativity?
Woodruff: Dayton, Ohio, has a really great music scene that changes.
There's a lot of great stuff that has been happening here since like the '70s. I think that culturally, music has always been here. Then you flash forward a little bit, and it becomes our turn.
Then you start to see bands, local bands, that we've influenced that are like, "Why not us then? It happened to a band that was in our town. Why could it not be us?"
What a special thing that is for a small town like Dayton. It's completely unexpected and that's where the beauty lies. It's not like New York or L.A. or Nashville. People go [there] to start a music career. This is fully homegrown, organic.
The best part of this, is that we can provide hope for other artists and other musicians in this area because they have a blueprint of where it happened. The record industry came to us. We didn't have to go to it.
For me, providing those hopes and dreams to a kid in their bedroom playing guitar, that's pretty special. Not that you can't go to L.A., but maybe you don't have to.
Q: When you are touring across the country or internationally, what are the things that make you miss home?
Woodruff: That's tough because one of the reasons that I still live in Dayton is because I get to see all those other beautiful places. Then I get to come back to a place that is very calming to me.
There's no stress. There's no nervous energy.
When it gets a little too calm, that's when I got to hop on an airplane, or get [on] a tour bus, or hop in a car and drive 10 hours south.
When I'm out there and I want to come home, it's always because of my friends and my family, and also the ability to eat Skyline Chili by myself and just sit and relax and walk in the park. It's just really comfortable here.
Q: So, you're a fan of Skyline Chili?
Woodruff: A huge fan. We're all huge fans.
Skyline Chili and Cincinnati chili is usually a love-or-hate thing because it's so polarizing. ... [But] for me, it's awesome. It's totally unique.
If we're going to a show at Bogart's or something like that, we're going to Skyline afterwards. It's just one of those fun things for us.
A couple of our guys live in Nashville now, a couple of us still live around the Bay Area, but when we meet up for rehearsals and stuff like that and we're all back in town, we're definitely going to Skyline Chili.
Once you get a handle on it, it becomes very comforting.
Q: What's your go-to Skyline order?
Woodruff: If I'm here for months at a time. [If] we're not on tour, we're not traveling a lot, and we're like home for a couple of months, that's a standard order. That's just a three-way.
But if I haven't been here for a while, we've been gone for months. I'll add a cheese coney with that so I can get the whole experience.
Q: Do you have any fond memories of the Cincinnati area?
Woodruff: Oh, absolutely. Bogarts is our Mecca.
When we were going to shows as late teens, early 20s, every band that we loved was playing at Bogarts. We were there once a week ... I met my wife for the second time at Bogart's at a Saves the Day show.
That place is my heaven. It's going to always be incredible.
It really is a great music venue, run by great people. There's just such a legacy there. It's very rare that you can perform at the place where you grew up going to shows that inspired you to be in a band.
It's always going to be very close to our heart.
Q: With you living in Dayton and having spent significant time in Cincinnati, how would you rank the three Cs: Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati?
Woodruff: Good question. Cincinnati is unequivocally number one.
The reason that I say that is because you have a lot of great things just in the downtown area. ... You can feel very metropolitan and you can also feel very neighborhoody, which I think is awesome.
I'm really familiar with it. I can get around. I never feel lost. I feel like I can park anywhere and walk down to the stadium when I go to a Bengals game.
It just feels really awesome.
Then I'm going to go Cleveland. Cleveland Rocks, it's official, but it's big. ... But [I] love the city, love the people. ... There's tons of culture in Cleveland, and it's a big part of Ohio Rock'n'Roll.
Then Columbus, and the only reason that I'll rate Columbus third is because the traffic is awful. No matter what you're doing, it's always bad. The university being built into the downtown, I don't really love that.
I grew up in West Virginia. I didn't grow up in Ohio, loving Ohio State. So, that majesty doesn't transfer to me.
Q: Can you tell me more about what inspired your hit song "Ohio Is For Lovers," especially as someone who's originally from West Virginia, what led you to write that?
Woodruff: I moved to Ohio in 2000. I met my wife in 2001.
I was chasing her for a little bit and then we got together and we never looked back. But, like all 20-something year relationships, there's bumps in the road.
One of those bumps was me going and recording our first album, being gone for the first time and just working in the studio for 12 hours a day. Not really having time to like call home.
That was my first time really balancing my relationship with my burgeoning career. That was the first time it felt like she thought that I was choosing music over her, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
So, that tension went on to create "Ohio Is For Lovers," which is awesome. It's great that you can go from taking a simple argument at three in the morning [to] writing lyrics that will change your life.
Q: Now "Ohio Is For Lovers" has become one of your most popular songs over the years. What do you think keeps people connecting with it? Do you ever grow tired of playing it or do you have an appreciation for what it means to people?
Woodruff: I think the special connection and relationship that we have with our fans is really the thing that gets us through the darkest times in our lives. The stress, the panic, the despair, the negativity, all of those things that come with being an artist and trying to create something.
When your fans sing those songs back to you, it makes you realize we're in this together.
Q: What part of Hawthorne Heights' legacy are you most proud of?
Woodruff: Longevity. The fact that we have been here since 2003, so we're going on our 23rd year of being in a band.
I'm proud that Hawthorne Heights has always been able to maintain a friendly and positive nature through what is a really tough industry. Longevity and the relationship with our fans and just trying to be careful stewards of the emo genre and underground DIY music, in general, that's what I'm happy about.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Hawthorne Heights singer praises Bogart's: 'This place is my heaven'
