Hayley Williams has been in a band since she was 13, and on some days, she’s entirely focused on what it might mean if that were no longer the case.
Paramore, which she has fronted since the early 2000s, is one of the defining rock acts of the last two decades, a Grammy-winning pop-punk band with six albums, beloved hits and high-profile fans like Taylor Swift.
But it has also been a chaotic run, with bandmate turnover, stylistic pivots and the nagging sense that some creative endeavors were only available outside the band’s borders. Only now, after 20 years with Atlantic Records — a major label deal that Williams signed as a solo performer at 15 — is the group fully independent.
And so Williams, 36, has been beginning to chip away at what the world outside Paramore sounds like. She just released “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party,” her third solo album in five years, and her most confident. Its rollout was lightly chaotic: 17 disparate songs initially uploaded to her personal website, then to streaming services as singles, and only later aggregated into album form. (A physical release will follow Nov. 7.)
“There was so much I hadn’t really ever processed,” Williams said on Popcast, The Times’s music show. “It just was like I was going to puke everywhere. And putting it out the way that we did was basically just trying to share that experience.”
Williams’s solo music is more adventurous and diverse than Paramore’s, and its scale purposefully smaller, allowing her a cloistered and protected space to experiment with alternate versions of her art — and by extension, herself.
“This has been a year of me having to choose myself,” she said. “To not have to apologize for doing something that feels OK for me, or to take care of myself before I take care of everyone else in the room. I spent my whole life protecting Paramore like we were the Lost Boys and I was [expletive] Wendy, you know? And I’m just like, I’ve got to take care of me.”
These are edited excerpts from the Popcast interview, which can be watched or listened to in full below.
JOE COSCARELLI You come from the early aughts, mall-punk Warped Tour set, which in retrospect has been called out for not only misogynist lyrics but also men who were maybe behaving inappropriately with fans and colleagues. Having grown up as one of few women in the scene, what were your moments of awakening along the way?
HAYLEY WILLIAMS It was “Misery Business” for me. I paid a lot of attention to what was happening on the internet because I was 17, 18. I started to see some blog posts that were written by, I would assume, feminist groups at colleges and stuff. These were girls or people my age that were talking about just what it meant to be a young woman, not only in the scene, but just in the world at that time. This is post- “Mean Girls,” and I do think there were more cultural conversations around what we now call like a “pick-me” and internalized misogyny. So I started really reflecting on that.
And funny enough, it was at a time where I had sort of gotten into a relationship that was just so unhealthy. I’ve always been really careful about how I talk about it because I grew up in that world. There was definitely a lot of abuse and people that shouldn’t have got away with stuff. But I know what my experience was and I wasn’t old enough to have it — to be in that relationship. My prefrontal cortex had another six, seven years to go. So I think that, unknowingly, I was learning from that. And at the same time I was seeing this discourse online about me using the word “whore” in a song and me going after a girl that we went to junior high with.
COSCARELLI It must have been intense because that’s also your breakout single.
WILLIAMS It’s like, why we’re here, strangely.
JON CARAMANICA When you were getting the initial pushback online, did you immediately understand that it was, in essence, correct?
WILLIAMS I think I was convicted and I felt the weight of that conviction and was like, “Yeah, I got a lot to learn.” I just felt really humbled by it.
That was my initial eye-opening moment — the aha moment that I had with myself. Like, oh my God, I have one girlfriend from school that I still talk to. I’m surrounded by guys all the time. I’m not seeing a clear picture most of the time, and now I’m seeing this discourse. I just felt embarrassment, and I felt like, I know better than this now. It took us years before I knew how to really talk about it.
COSCARELLI “After Laughter,” from 2017, was this moment of freedom and growing up for you guys. The next Paramore album, “This Is Why,” was the first to have the same lineup as the one before it, with Taylor York and Zac Farro.
WILLIAMS What are we? What even is Paramore?
It is good to get humbled by your own chaos at times. I’m a child of divorce that’s just never stopped going through a divorce. I’ve had literal divorces in my life, and then I’ve had all these friendship breakups, and I definitely felt like I was always the scapegoat or made out to be the villain. I’ve had plenty of time to pout about that and shake my fist and try to find my center of balance again. I think I can access anger about it, and I can also access another part of me now that’s more grown up, that’s like, “Who doesn’t have these stories with their friends?”
COSCARELLI Is that why it took you so long to make a solo album, that resistance to being singled out? And what changed in 2019, 2020 that allowed you to make that leap?
WILLIAMS I was a huge fan of what Zac was doing with his first solo project, HalfNoise. He had gone away for like seven years from the band and really found himself. I believe he found himself in his 20s in a way that Taylor and I still haven’t.
COSCARELLI Because you didn’t get off the ride.
WILLIAMS Arrested development is a thing. I just thought, “He’s doing it and it’s not a big deal.” It’s feeding the band, if anything. My divorce had been finalized and I really got to process it, and a lot of that stuff needed to come out.
I’m also a fan of bands like Talking Heads or Radiohead — all the members have their own projects. I was just interested in that life, because I still don’t really know how this all shakes out. We’re just gonna keep getting older and I want to be an artist until I die. That’s going to look a thousand ways. So this was kind of the first way that I got to try it out. And those first two albums, now when I look back at it, I’m like, “Man, I still was so cautious.”
CARAMANICA I wonder what the open reception to those albums felt like, especially after being so firmly insistent in the earliest years: “It’s not me, it’s us.”
WILLIAMS I don’t typically like to do the thing that people expect or want me to do. I think that’s probably not always a great thing about me. So I did feel a bit defeatist about finally giving into this thing that I had been resisting, like, my whole life. It was really scary. I think the one thing that sort of got me through that was the fact that we had been around for so long at that point. There was some level of understanding of the context of where I come from.
This project, and the way that people are talking to me about it, I get to feel like a whole person. I don’t have to have this caveat, like, “Well, I’m in this band.” I trust that people know that.
CARAMANICA It seems like the artist you want to be is one that can reference the Bloodhound Gang (“Discovery Channel”) and then two songs later have a song about the South’s legacy of racial tensions (“True Believer”).
WILLIAMS While I was deconstructing my faith and my religious upbringing from around age 19, I really didn’t realize how much of Paramore for me was a religious experience, a God pillar in my life. Paramore is the backdrop to every conversation. So songs like “Discovery Channel” are really me kind of like roaming the halls of whatever that structure is and just trying to take it apart more.
“True Believer” — I’m never not ready to scream at the top of my lungs about racial issues. I don’t know why that became the thing that gets me the most angry. I think because it’s so intersectional that it overlaps with everything from climate change to L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ issues.
I reference this neighborhood in Franklin, really close to where I grew up called Hard Bargain that this formerly enslaved man bought from his former enslaver. It’s still there, predominantly Black families, and it’s protected now. But of course, Franklin and Nashville are being gentrified all the time.
The reason I was writing about Nashville a lot is that we came home from tour and I thought, “Well, I’m gonna go to L.A. — get me outta here. Trump just got elected again and I don’t wanna be in a red state.”
COSCARELLI There’s a line on the title track, “Ego Death,” where you say, “I’ll be the biggest star / in this racist country singer’s bar.” Do you want to name names?
WILLIAMS I’m always talking about Morgan Wallen. I don’t care.
COSCARELLI I think that relates directly to Paramore and your fan base. There’s been a lot written over the years about its diversity, and Paramore’s Black fans in particular.
WILLIAMS I feel that, too, now more than I did growing up. It definitely shifted around the self-titled record. We started saying yes to a lot more. We were playing “The Voice.” I think a lot more people got introduced to our band during that time — people that maybe weren’t welcome in the scene that we grew up in.
Songs like “Ain’t It Fun,” when Taylor and I were writing that, we were playing these synth parts and going, “It’s like Stevie Wonder, you know?” I’ll never forget watching “Stop Making Sense” while we were recording “After Laughter” and the camera panning across the crowd, seeing how diverse it was. I just got really teary. And obviously there’s some of the best Black musicians onstage with them and they’re all working together. It just felt like this celebration of humanity. And I was like, “That’s what I want to feel like.”
CARAMANICA Is the scale of the music on the new solo record designed explicitly to avoid the chance of a big hit like Paramore’s “Still Into You” happening?
WILLIAMS This is my chance to emulate the music and the artists that made me want to do this in the first place, none of which were big artists. It’s one of my favorite bands of all time, but I don’t really listen to Paramore — I just love what Paramore is about. I think if a song blew up, who’s gonna complain about that? Writers want that moment more than anything.
CARAMANICA You don’t feel like it would pull you in a direction you don’t want to go right now?
WILLIAMS No, because I’m not impressed by it.
CARAMANICA You’ve been there, you’ve been in those rooms. You’ve gone onstage with Taylor Swift opening on the Eras Tour.
WILLIAMS Yeah, and honestly, I loved that. We got asked to be on the biggest tour in music history. I’m never gonna see photos of myself dressed as Freddie Mercury at Wembley and not be psyched that we did that.
That was like the honor of our [expletive] life and career, but there’s nothing like a Paramore show. All day long, I’d rather be at a Paramore show with the people that have grown up with us. It feels like family.
I’m so honored to get to do it and I’m also very relieved to get to try something new and flex different muscles. You gotta deconstruct this system that you were a part of on multiple levels, gotta tear down Paramore the same way I had to tear down my evangelical upbringing. I have to do it for me to grow up because I don’t wanna be stuck in a traumatized 18-year-old’s headspace for the rest of my life.
I’m 36, it’s not cute anymore, you know?
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
The post Does Hayley Williams Want to Escape Paramore’s Shadow? It Depends. appeared first on New York Times.
