It’s no secret that in the estimation of emo-rockers Hawthorne Heights, their home state of Ohio is for lovers. However, after a couple years with more rest taken in back seats than bedrooms, it may be fair to assume they could pen a clever claim for residents in each of the continental 48. The band, which recently released their second full-length record “If Only You Were Lonely,” is back on the road facing new challenges in familiar states but rocking all the same. Drummer Eron Bucciarelli took time to discuss the current tour with FM radio’s favorite “dancing dancers,” the band’s ascension to arena stages and the punk roots of emo-rock.

Dante Sacomani: How is the tour with Fall Out Boy going?

Eron Bucciarelli: It’s going great, we play in arenas every night. We’ve never done that before, so it’s been a whole new experience for us.

DS: When you released “The Silence in Black and White,” the emo genre was a lot smaller and there were fewer bands involved. Now, with the scene being so big, did you feel any pressure to sound a little more original?

EB: I think when you try to do something original you end up shooting yourself in the foot. Most the time you end up sounding like another band and alienating your original fans that you initially had. With this album, what we tried to do was just do what we did on our first album but just do it better. We tried to look at the things that we liked about our first album and continue to do that on this album and then take the things we didn’t like about the last album and improve on them or take them out completely. We just wanted to be a better version of ourselves.

DS: What were some of those things that you didn’t like that you ended up changing?

EB: The most obvious thing is the screaming. It’s not in every song on this album and I don’t think we planned to have it on every song on the last album, but our producer was more or less an engineer and wasn’t really listening to our songs with a critical ear and saying, “you know, I don’t know if that part fits there.” It’s not to say we completely removed it, it definitely has its part on this album.

DS: When the album actually came there was a bulletin posted on your MySpace site that said something along the lines of “buy our album and support us to help save rock music” – where was that coming in from?

EB: That was a letter sent out by our label to try and hype people up. It wasn’t really our message. We don’t want to bear the burden of saving rock music or anything like that. I don’t think what we’re doing is so monumental that it’s going to make people buy more rock albums or anything. But, obviously, the top of the charts are completely dominated by country and hip-hop these days. It’s not something we really focus on – or care about, for that matter. We personally don’t really care about our chart position and whatnot, it’s definitely cool – “all right, we’re No. 3, great, awesome’ – but that letter made us out to only care about being No. 1 and that’s not really who we are. Our first album, when it debuted, sold 3,500 copies in its first week. We’re just happy that the new one sold more than that. [The fact that] people were even talking about the possibility of us even being No. 1 is a huge accomplishment.

DS: That says a lot about the popularity of this kind of music. However, don’t you think the trend for any new style of music is to get popular and then burn out on itself? Do you see that happening to this kind of music?

EB: I think it’s inevitably going to happen. I don’t know how soon that will happen. I don’t think this kind of music is necessarily going to be like a flash-in-the-pan type thing that hair metal was or grunge was. I kind of see this music, or the influence of this music, sort of remaining in the mainstream for some time. What this music is – for the most part – is punk, and punk has been around for 30 years now in some form or another. Obviously, it has changed and adapted quite a bit since the days of the New York Dolls or whoever. I think there’s so many people on our level who are doing this kind of thing and also who are starting bands now. Those bands that are starting off now are going to grow and grow and eventually – three or four years from now — be in our position. I think if you have that sort of underground scene feeding what we’re doing now, we have the potential of staying popular for a little while now. But don’t quote me on that.

DS: Since you mentioned you think this is a form of punk-rock, what is your response to the criticism that punk-rock has no place in the mainstream and that emo is just adolescents whining?

EB: Even from its start [punk has] been pretty popular, you know? New York Dolls were a pretty big band back in the day, so were the MC5 and any of those early, early bands. The Sex Pistols – huge back then; the Ramones were a platinum band. These are all people cite as the originators of punk. So for somebody to say it has no place in mainstream, it’s always sort of been there. I think you have these people who sort of idolize the concept of punk and say it shouldn’t be in the mainstream. But the truth of the matter is, it’s always been there in some form or another, whether it be the Ramones or Green Day or Blink 182 or Nirvana. I see grunge as sort of an extension of punk-rock, sort of in the same way that emo is. A lot of the bands in this genre are sort of taking the punk-rock that we grew up with and changing it around and making it something different.