Hannah Ewens met with Hayley Williams to talk about Everything Is Emo, her first radio show for BBC Sounds, for Rolling Stone UK. The interview arrives with some new photos of Williams taken by Zac Farro. Click HERE to access the article or scrool down to read some extracts.
“Definitely more than once said we were not emo in interviews. We also were like, we’re not pop punk. In interviews, I think we just didn’t want to be anything specific. Because we always wanted to be able to transcend whatever that was. When we started playing Warped Tour, in the back of my mind, I was like, I want to be the best band on this tour and then I want to graduate and then I want to be able to take on whatever next world that we’re going to take on. But obviously we came out, and [emo] is just the world we fit into. And a lot of it we resented at the time, but now I’m like, whatever, just call us whatever you want, we’re just gonna do what we want to do anyways.
Emo made punk music more accessible, and then it became more and more popular to the point bands like us were on MTV, and now we’re playing on the radio, and now you’ve got this generation’s version of that all over the place.”
“When Zac [Farro] re-joined the band after being away for like six or seven years, we played a local show in Nashville that was kind of a surprise. And we told him, ‘you pick some songs that you really have missed playing because this is your first show back in a long time’. And he was like, ‘I really want to play ‘Decode’, I always loved playing drums on that because I just get to beat the drums up’. Both of those songs we wrote at soundcheck during one of the Riot tours. They really, to me, mean so much to our story as a band – they came at this awful time when we weren’t getting along and I think of that more than I think of like, ‘Oh, what was it like to go to the [Twilight] premiere?’ We were really lucky that as much as our lives kind of were falling apart personally, we were getting to do all these crazy amazing things that people dream their whole life of doing. I love that they’re in a movie – they’re not on a Paramore album but they have a home. It reminds me of like when I bought the Batman Forever soundtrack as a kid, and it had Seal and all these other artists on it, and it was very dramatic and dark. Like, we’re on one of those soundtracks. That’s ridiculous. That’s so stupid. And I love it. So, I had to include it.”
