DENVER – For Follow No One lead singer Rich Hall, every day he’s able to draw breath is a gift from God after waking up in a St. Louis hospital near dead from an alcohol-induced esophageal aneurysm. He gradually forced himself through a grueling year of physical and mental therapy “just to be a functional human being.” But that time in recovery made him reorient his life around the two things that mattered most to him: his family and his music.
The result of that journey is Follow No One, a band he formed with guitar virtuoso Pedro Murino Almeida, and their debut album “Fate,” a soaring, operatic hard rock concept album that tells the story of Hall’s descent into the darkest moments of his life and his ultimate redemption.
“It was a lot of hard work to get where I am,” Hall says. “If I can do it anybody can.”
The songs on “Fate” have a sound reminiscent of Rainbow, Faith No More, and Styx at their most epic and theatrical, but transcending them all and forming a unique style that is all Follow No One.
As a whole, the album follows a narrative journey through Hall’s life, complete with spoken-word scenes between songs to draw the listener along the plot. At times it plays like a hard rock musical theatre album, a comparison that Hall, a former child stage actor, welcomes.
“I started out in musical theatre when I was about nine years old. The first thing I did was play Tom Sawyer in a musical and I fell in love with entertainment. I got some pretty good tutelage from all those people and I definitely bring a Broadway sound out in my voice but rock always dominates” Hall says.
Hall fell in love with hard rock as a teenager and formed his first band at 16. But after high school, he lost touch with music and enlisted in the army. After two tours in the Persian Gulf, he got out, married, had two kids, and got a corporate job in Manhattan. He thought he was living the high life until it all came crashing down.
His wife suddenly took the kids and left him. He was so depressed he was unable to work and began a downward spiral that ended with him waking up in that St. Louis hospital bed.
“Everything I was working for was gone. I freaked out, went on a pretty self-destructive path,” he says of those dark days. “I drank so much, my liver was shutting down. They wanted me to get a transplant, and I said, ‘no, you give a liver to someone who deserves it, who didn’t fuck theirs up.’”
With hindsight, Hall says the story of his life proved to be compelling source material for the album.
“I had to be willing to bear my soul for my audience but this whole process has been therapeutic for me,” he says. “It’s like I’m living it again for the first time. It takes a toll on you emotionally, but unless I did that, I couldn’t write the songs. At the end of the day, I’ve let a lot of the negative shit go because of this.”
While the album has songs that are great to jam to isolation or on playlists, like the soaring title track, “Fate” was designed to be listened to as a long-play album, and that’s how Follow No More wants its audience to hear it. They’re currently working on figuring out options to play it live and incorporate all the theatrical elements that make it such a spectacle.
“If I do this the way I wanna do this, the types of venues would have to be very specific, because I want it to sound as good live as it does on the album,” Hall says. “There’s a thirty-piece orchestra in the final song. A lot of that will require video and interaction with the audience.”
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