Hayley Williams is the cover girl of the summer music issue of the Fader Magazine. All the amazing photographs have been taken by Jason Nocito. Click HERE to see the photos and click “read more” to have a look on the story written by Alex Frank and watch a video with a lot of more photos, including new shots of Zac and Taylor.
When I first meet Hayley Williams, she hits me with a hug and just about the biggest smile you could ever hope for. We’re at a ramen place in her hometown of Nashville, gabbing about the corn fritter appetizers between us, sipping tea, with Hayley propping her two feet, encased in glittering low-top Vans, on the chair next to her.
She treats almost everyone with this easy familiarity, it turns out. Later that afternoon, we crisscross the city in her car, a robin’s egg blue Fiat littered with half-empty water bottles, stopping at places she loves. A nose-ringed, floppy-haired guy at a juice bar gets the warmest of hellos; a man with long dreads who works at her friend’s boutique receives a beaming greeting and a hefty shake. Walk through any door with her, and you can’t be sure whether Hayley has known the people she finds inside her entire life or whether she’s meeting them for the very first time.
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Hayley even privately quit the band for a brief period in the summer of 2015, feeling exhausted and thinking she had nothing left to say or sing. “I just was done,” she says. “I thought, There’s gotta be something else that I’m good at in my life. Maybe it’s time for me to go find that.” But after she left, Taylor York — her principal songwriting partner and, with Justin Meldal-Johnson, the co-producer of After Laughter — started sending her unfinished tracks just to see what would happen. He has a history with depression, too.
“We both had doubts, and we had unity in that,” Taylor says. “I told her she didn’t have to do stuff. But I just kept writing, and then there was this time that she got it again.” Hayley started riffing off of his instrumentals and ended up writing a melody and lyrics for “Forgiveness,” the first song of what would become After Laughter. They continued to create in this way, with Taylor sending her basic ideas and Hayley letting loose on top of them. And the songs kept coming.
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At the homeschool program, she met brothers Zac and Josh Farro, who, though they were about 11 and 14 respectively, had already recorded some songs. She was thrilled, and they welcomed her right in. “Growing up listening to pop and R&B music, and then being thrown into their world, where I’m listening to Elliott Smith and Radiohead and Deftones, I was like, ‘What do I do with this? I’ve never tried to write music like this,’” she remembers. “[But] Zac started playing a drum beat, and all of a sudden it became this song called ‘Conspiracy’ that’s on our first record. I just literally sat with the mic and quietly sang the words that I wrote.”
The band, which included a couple of other boys, was formed and began playing shows at places like church youth group events, but Hayley was also writing and recording her own demos and shopping them around to labels. Avril Lavigne had recently broken through, whetting the industry’s appetite for punky alternatives to Britney and Christina. “I don’t think I would’ve been signed if Avril hadn’t happened,” she says. “All of a sudden I was in New York playing to LA Reid.” A number of labels wanted her, but only Atlantic told her she could stick with the band instead of going solo. There was a catch: they would offer Hayley a separate contract through Atlantic, but the other bandmembers would only get a deal through one of their rock subsidiaries, Fueled By Ramen.
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Today, Paramore is perhaps in its strongest position ever, not just because they survived the pop punk era and transitioned into a full-fledged grownup band, but because the whole world seems to have come around to the feverish attitude that Paramore pioneered. Everyone from country artists to rappers are dabbling in pop punk — the 22-year-old country artist Tucker Beathard recently told Pitchfork that it wasn’t Brad Paisley who inspired him to become an artist, it was seeing Paramore on his 14th birthday. The breakout rapper and fellow pink hair enthusiast Lil Uzi Vert recently recorded a video of himself singing along and smiling to “Ain’t It Fun,” then created one of the year’s biggest hits by merging mall-rock with hip-hop on “XO TOUR Llif3.” “Paramore expanded my taste in music,” says Uzi. “They were the cool kids on the block growing up. They’re fucking awesome and that’s why I still rock out to them.” Angst is back.
And now there’s After Laughter, a new Paramore album when the idea of Paramore has never made more sense. It is the most consistently excellent album in the band’s discography. The lyrics are as deeply felt as they’ve always been, and the airier, lighter instrumentation suits Hayley’s strengths as a singer — she’s never sounded so clear and comfortable, even when singing about pain. So how did it feel to release it? On the day the album came out, Hayley was overcome with sadness. It wasn’t quite as bad as it had been in the darkest days when she couldn’t get out of bed and didn’t want to write music, and by the end of the night, she was feeling OK again — her and the guys put on the album and had a singalong. But earlier, particularly at a fan meet-and-greet for about 300 diehards, she had been struggling. “It was a heavy day because we were letting go of this thing that we felt kept us alive,” she says. “And I do think it kept me alive.”
Visit thefader.com to read the full story, interview with Hayley. Alex Frank met Paramore on 3rd of June. You can Buy the Hayley Williams issue of The FADER, and order a poster of the cover.
