published
RAISING HAYL 
Over the past few years, a lot has been written about them, but not much had been said. Now they finally have a chance to talk about where they came from, the tribulations that almost destroyed them and their own goals—not what the media thinks. In other words, if you think you have PARAMORE figured out, you better think again.
Rice-A-Roni may historically be “the San Francisco Treat,” but judging by the crowd currently outside the city’s historic Warfield Theater, the delicacy of choice seems to be crack cocaine. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to bother the line of kids sitting on the sidewalk contently surfing on their Sidekicks, a stark contradiction to the sea of homeless people who shuffle past them muttering incoherently. The crowd gathered here to see Paramore perform seem oblivious (maybe more accurately, unperturbed) by the not-so-clandestine drug transactions happening all around them, or the fact that despite otherwise Paramore’s wholesome image, tonight’s venue is directly adjacent to a strip club.
In a few hours, a mustached crew member in the catering area of the venue will inappropriately inform Paramore’s members that the sidewalk outside is the only place in the world where you can get “crack and AIDS at the same time,” causing the band to giggle uncomfortably—and momentarily overshadowing bassist Jeremy’s Davis’ disappointment in forgetting to add Oreo’s to the band’s rider—but right now the scene is no joke. Case in point, the concierge at the Hotel Metropolis tells me to take a cab to the venue for safety reasons, despite the fact that I can literally see the Starting Line’s tour bus from the hotel’s entrance. (A few weeks later, Tony Thaxton from Motion City Soundtrack will inform me that it’s a popular San Francisco pastime for touring bands to watch drug dealers pull crack rocks out of their mouths to sell to the strung-out masses.)
“Hayley Williams is one of my biggest heroes,” explains 15-year-old Emily, who, like many of the girls in the audience tonight, is sporting the same multi-color eye makeup Paramore’s 19-year-old frontwoman is rocking in their desert-themed video “Crushcrushcrush.” Em’s been unapologetically sitting in the thick of this den of sin since six this morning—a full 12 hours before the doors open—causing one to speculate that if her parents knew what she was upto right now, she would legitimately be grounded until she was Williams’ age. “She’s stunning and she’s got great style and she’s not like every other girl who’s kind of slutty,” Emily continues, perking up when asked what qualities she specifically admires in the frontwoman. “She’s definitely someone to look up to.”
It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by the crowds, both male and female, at nearly every show on the band’s headlining tour, and it’s easy to see why. However, along with this type of influence comes a an amount of stress and scrutiny usually reserved for child actors, which combined to nearly tear band apart last summer. Adolescence may never be a cakewalk, but doing it under a media microscope makes it even more difficult. In other words, “Pressure” isn’t just the name of one of Paramore’s songs—for these kids, it’s a way of life.
In order to truly understand the chain of events that have unfolded over the past year, one needs to go back to a classroom in Franklin, Tennessee, where Paramore were born back in 2002. “I started going to private school, and one day this little fat kid comes up to me and he’s like, ‘What’s up? I’m in a band with my brother!’ and that was the whole turning point,” Williams recounts from the front lounge of the band’s tour bus the next morning in Ventura, California, her voice taking on a cartoonish inflection when she imitates her first conversation with the then pre-pubescent drummer Zac Farro. At the time, Williams had recently moved from to Franklin from Meridian, Mississippi, with her recently divorced mother, and after a failed attempt at public school, she found herself at a private school alongside the Farro brothers.
At this point, Zac and his older brother Josh were practicing together after school, while Williams was in a traveling funk cover act called the Factory Band with bassist Jeremy Davis. Paramore didn’t come together until Williams started separately jamming with the brothers as well and discovered they needed a bassist to complete their line-up. “I didn’t know the Farros yet; they met me at a Starbucks,” Davis recounts with a laugh about his first interaction with the brothers. “Zac just came up and ran in my car. I remember thinking ‘this is not going to work because this kid is way too young,’ but that first day of practice was amazing. I knew we were onto something.” From there, the band enlisted Williams’ next door neighbor Jason Bynum on guitar and the band started writing the songs that would eventually become their 2005 Fueled By Ramen debut, All We Know Is Falling.
In other words, contrary to what messageboard mongers on sites like absolutepunk.net as well as haters who storm the band’s own Livejournal community may theorize, Paramore weren’t constructed by a Svengaill, they aren’t primped by a stylist every morning and, most importantly, Paramore weren’t built around Williams—an accusation that’s so prevalent that it’s prompted them to sell a shirt that reads PARAMORE IS A BAND, a slightly more direct statement than No Doubt’s video for “Don’t Speak” a decade prior.
“Think about it: [Why] would a label put us together if I was 11 years old and weighed, like, 400 lbs? They wouldn’t be like, ‘Let’s get that guy!”” says Zac from the band’s tour bus later that evening. That said, despite the band’s unhealthy eating habits (today’s rider additions include Cocoa Pebbles and Mountain Dew with the phrase “nectar of the gods” crudely scribbled next to it), the younger Farro has shed most of his baby fat as of late. Oh, and it also doesn’t hurt that like the rest of the band, he’s clad exclusively in G-Star and Diesel clothing that probably costs more than most of their fans’ entire wardrobes.
“We’re actually all into fashion,” Josh explains when asked about the band’s seemingly rapid transformation over the past year from wearing T-shirts and jeans to dressing like full-fledged rockstars. “Before our first headlining tour we were like, ‘Let’s make it look like we’re professional here, because kids are paying ten or fifteen dollars per ticket to see us play,” he continues, the top portion of his asymmetrical haircut falling just above his left eye. “We just wanted to step it up and since then we’re just trying to find out who we are image-wise, you know?”
Besides, these days punk purists seem to have moved on—and although they’re currently in an uproar over the fact that the band are covering Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Faces In Disguise” live (despite the fact Paramore namedrop the band in nearly every interview), Paramore have learned to take this type of criticism in stride. “The first time [users on] absolutepunk.net wrote ‘Hayley is a solo artist and all their songs are written for them,’ we got so mad,” Josh explains. (To be fair, there are far more posts concerning users trying to ‘nail’ Williams, a sentiment that probably equally irritates her ultra-protective bandmates.) “Hayley’s dad was on tour with us [when we were reading the site] and he was like [adopts exaggerated Southern accent] ‘Y’all just need to cut it out and relax, people are gonna say shit.’ He was telling us just to get over it and he was right.”
While we’re on the subject of Williams’ father, it should be noted that from driving the band’s van to home schooling and visiting them out on the road, Hayley’s parents have arguably helped Paramore more than anyone to get to the point they’re at today. However, that doesn’t mean their divorce six years ago doesn’t still haunt Paramore’s frontwoman.
“I remember actually walking out the door with my mom that night and standing in between my parents and screaming, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she reminisces, adding that songs like “Emergency” from the band’s first album were inspired by her parents’ disintegrating relationship. “I still go through phases where I get kind of depressed about it and I’m like, ‘Man, what if it really worked out?’ But I think I’ve come to the realization that it’s better for my parents to just be friends and sometimes love doesn’t work out for a greater reason,” she continues, adding that if it weren’t for her parents’ split she wouldn’t be blessed with her two younger half-sisters.
Besides, these days Williams’ domestic life seems fine—and when her strikingly youthful-looking mother flies out to visit with her during the band’s few hours of post-show downtime the next evening in Anaheim, they both seem to be visibly beaming. “I think a lot of the reason [my parents] weren’t getting along was my stepdad was just kind of controlling. Very controlling,” Williams explains, although it is a little difficult to take her seriously while she is wearing the cardboard Hello Kitty crown a fan gave her earlier in the day. “But when music started to get real for us, my parents sat down and were like, ‘We’re going to make this work to help Hayley and make the band’s life easier.’ They were in front seats of the van for the first year, and if they were fighting that would have been hell.”
After spending more than a few hours with the members of Paramore, it’s obvious that they have a relationship that can only be described as co-dependent, a situation that logically stems from the fact that they’ve literally spent their entire adolescence around each other. In fact, while most touring bands can’t stand to be around each other when they don’t have to be, the members of Paramore lost when one of them isn’t around—a tendency that was put to the test when Davis quit the band right before they recorded All We Knowing Are Falling. Scared to tell the band members and plagued by debt, Davis waited until the last possible moment before informing them that he had a flight booked back to Tennessee that was leaving in an hour.
“I remember when I was on the flight, I was like, ‘I just made a big mistake,’” Davis explains post-show from a secluded spot alongside the interstate outside The Grove Of Anaheim. Davis’ premonition was confirmed when he came to the realization he’d given up his dream of playing music to sell knives door-to-door and flip dough at Domino’s Pizza—although he maintains he still has no regrets about his decision. “It was a big mistake, but I wouldn’t take it back because I learned how much I loved these guys and how much this whole thing means to me,” Davis says with the same type of marked maturity Williams displays when talking about her parents’ relationship. “Even when I was home, I learned some lessons that are pretty valuable in my life. So I think it all happened for a reason.”
The band found a replacement bassist for the Warped Tour that summer, but when that didn’t work out Davis rejoined the band just ten weeks after he had left. The stakes were even higher when Bynum’s replacement Hunter Lamb, left the band during the pre-production stage of their gold-selling sophomore release Riot! forcing Josh to play all the guitar parts on the disc. (Lamb didn’t respond to AP’s interview requests). “It’s hard to find someone as committed as the four of us because we’ve been in this since the very beginning,” Josh explains. “So whenever a fifth member comes in, that person is sort of on the outside, and can’t really get along with us. Not that we make it hard for him, [they always feel] left out.” In April, the band enlisted the 17-year-old Taylor York on rhythm guitar, who had actually been in a band with the Farro brothers before they’d even met Williams.
“I kind of came in at an awkward point where they had already established themselves, but it’s kind of nice for me to learn [about] touring and stuff without the pressure of the press and photos,” York explained from Paramore’s tour bus earlier that day, in the midst of a front lounge littered with gummy bears and Sour Patch Watermelons instead of bongs and beer bottles. “I’m just still learning how to get all this under my belt and feel comfortable onstage. Slowly but surely, I’m getting more accustomed to everything. I’m technically a hired gun, but they don’t make me feel that way at all.”
“If one day he joins the band, and starts doing all this stuff with us, he’s gonna miss these days where he can just sit stuff out,” Davis adds with a laugh. “Our schedule is overwhelming sometimes, but things are going great, so we have nothing to complain about.”
Calling Paramore’s schedule “overwhelming” may be the understatement of the year. After waking up around noon, the band typically explore whatever city they’re in with hardcore fans who they still keep in touch with (Josh often brings a video camera he got for his birthday to document this), do press and then have signings with both their fan club and the tour’s sponsor, Helio, all before the show starts. While in San Francisco, they have to drive an additional hour to Palo Alto to play an acoustic set for contest winners at a Helio store, where Hayley is inexplicably sporting fake spectacles from her Halloween costume earlier that week (she was Garth from Wayne’s World). York is reprimanded for using a Sprint phone in the blue-tinted, eerily corporate store, which is packed with Paramore fans who seem oblivious to the “devices” being marketed toward their valuable demographic; but the transgression is forgotten as soon as a radio rep gives the band his credit card to buy assorted desserts at the local Cheesecake Factory. (While none of the members of Paramore drink or do drugs, as you may have learned by now their love for junk food borders on obsessive.)
But the culmination of pressures from performing, coupled with the commitments to both fans and press came to a head last summer, when the band began to implode on Warped Tour. “On that tour there were days where we would just fight and we had no time to breathe,” Williams explains. “One day, Josh just started bawling and was like, ‘I just need to go home.’ That’s when we realized we weren’t really looking out for ourselves, we were just looking out for everyone else’s interests—which is pretty much just money.”
Ultimately the band had to have a sit-down meeting before this tour to realign their priorities and after they communicated their feelings to each other, they claim everything went back to normal. Of course, the fact that their current headlining tour is largely sold out probably doesn’t hurt morale, either. “This tour has sort of redeemed the touring lifestyle and music for all of us,” Williams confirms. “We’ve been with great bands and we’re kind of taking it easy.”
“I don’t really get sick of watching them,” confirms the Starting Line’s frontman Kenny Vasoli, who occasionally joins the band onstage to sing on “That’s What You Get.” “Some bands rock or try to rock and it just comes across as wimpy or childish, but there’s just something about the songs [Paramore] write that are really well-crafted.”
Although they’ve come to terms with the treadmill that comes along with being a successful band, it doesn’t mean the members of Paramore haven’t had any more setbacks on their ascent to stardom. The most notable being a controversial cover story in the British rock magazine Kerrang! that alleged Zac and Jeremy were gay because they were lounging around on each other during that story’s photo shoot (in reality, they’re the only two members of the band who have girlfriends). Another far more common misconception is that Josh and Hayley were secretly dating.
“We’ll do interviews in the U.K. and the journalists will [act like] the coolest dudes we’ve ever met and then he won’t even talk about the music,” Zac explains, palpably frustrated when the subject of the band’s first cover story overseas came out (you can read Williams’ response to it on the band’s Livejournal site).
“Hayley wanted to write ‘riot’ on her shirt for a photo shoot and we didn’t know [the writer] was watching,” Josh continues. “She stretched out her shirt and I was writing it with a marker. And [the writer] was like ‘Josh gracefully brushed up against her breasts and they both didn’t seem to mind.’” He ends with a frustrated sigh.
For the record, Williams and Josh are not dating, although many of their fans—as well as their peers—assume otherwise. “People are obsessed with that, but we’re not,” Josh answers when asked about the duo’s relationship. “Everybody in the band all had crushes on her when she was in high school, but she’s not that type of girl. There really are so many attractive things about her: She’s fun to be around, has a good personality and of course, she’s cute, so I can see why people think that.”
While the band are open to talking about their personal lives, they’d rather discuss their music, which, between getting compared to other acts and being sneered at by cynics, is something that they’ve really never gotten the chance to do during their five-year career. In fact, despite Paramore’s pop sheen, their favorite bands are indie acts such as Jimmy Eat World, Failure, Death Cab For Cutie and Sunny Day Real Estate. While one might not pick these up from a cursory listen to Riot!, songs like “Miracle” have a palpable aggression that wouldn’t sound of place on indie labels like Sub Pop or Saddle Creek—if either of those labels had the budget to get Howard Benson behind the boards, that is.
“I think there’s more depth to Paramore’s music than most bands out there right now,” explains Say Anything’s Max Bemis, who recruited Williams to sing on two of the standout tracks on his double-disc opus In Defense Of The Genre. “They actually are coming from a sincere place and it’s not stupid—and that’s more than most bands can say for themselves at this point.”
In fact in a move that’s sure to further confound critics, Williams often mutters couplets from At The Drive-In’s “Invalid Litter Department” or “One-Armed Scissor” when they perform “Here We Go Again” live and also insists that the biggest influence on the writing of Riot! was the Christian post-hardcore band mewithoutYou. “I love Aaron Weiss’ lyrics and his approach toward faith and life in general,” she explains. Speaking of faith, while Paramore don’t give onstage shout-outs to J.C. like their tourmates the Almost, Davis’ father is a children’s pastor and the band rarely swear, prompting Vasoli to refer to his own band as “the sin meat in a Christian sandwich” on the somewhat ironically named Riot Tour.
However, like most teenagers, Williams is still trying to formulate her own belief system—and when she’s asked what religious denomination she identifies with, she still isn’t quite sure where she stands. “It’s weird because I grew up in a southern Baptist church, but it was so one-sided and strict that there was no life in it,” she explains. “It was just all rules and religion and I don’t feel like that’s a relationship with god,” she continues. “That’s not human to be perfect all the time.
“I think that’s why I’m still struggling with the fact that I’m very flawed; I’ve got problems and issues and it’s okay,” she adds. “I grew up with it being pounded into my head that I’ve got to be right all the time—and now it’s at the point where sometimes I’m embarrassed to say I’m a Christian because there’s so many negative connotations linked with that word,” she summarizes, adding that while the band have attempt to do bible study on, these days there just isn’t time. “Now I just tell people I have a relationship and faith in Jesus Christ: I’m not southern Baptist, I’m not Presbyterian, I’m not any one thing, I just believe in Jesus. “
Religious affiliations (or lack of) aside, Paramore are currently playing two markedly more mature songs during soundcheck. But the question remains: Will 14-year-old girls share the band’s penchant for relatively obscure (and mostly defunct) post-hardcore and indie-rock acts?
“We want to bridge the gap between indie and pop; we’re not going to change our sound, but we do enjoy the slower, more melodic songs,” Zac admits, speculating the band’s next record will sound like a mix between mew, Thrice and the Arcade Fire—bands whose photos aren’t exactly taped up in lockers in suburban high schools. (Not that Zac would know firsthand; he dropped out of ninth grade. The last time he was in a high school was during the video shoot for “Misery Business.”)
Ultimately, despite the fact that the members just are trying to be themselves, that’s exceedingly difficult to do when everyone is trying to single members out, one in particular. “Hayley knows everything about music,” explains New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert who befriended the band on the 2007 Warped Tour and has even visited them in Franklin during time off from his own band. “I think that the label and MTV and everyone wants them to be No Doubt. But if you listen to the record and hear the new songs they’re writing, they’re good rock songs. They’re not like ‘Hollaback Girl.’ Hayley would never write lyrics like that.”
This type of uninformed attitude that Gilbert alludes to was best exemplified during Paramore’s recent appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live, where the VJ Damien Fahey insinuated Williams was being groomed to be a Stefani-in-waiting. Hayley’s response was polite but succinct—and it was also a subject she’s clearly had to address before. “I’m really flattered to hear those things,” she replied. “I like Gwen Stefani as part of No Doubt. We’ll see what happens, but we want to be the first Paramore.”
While only time will reveal if the band will be allowed to simply be Paramore, there are currently more pressing things to deal with. For example, given the band’s seemingly endless photo shoots, autograph sessions and gig schedule, will there ever be a time when Williams, the Farros and York will simply be allowed to enjoy their adolescence?
“Some of my friends are in their first year of college right now, and there are parts of me that feel like am I missing out,” Williams admits, adding that like many of her peers, she’s finally moving out of her mother’s place after this tour and getting her own apartment with a friend. “I know that’s such a ignorant kind of thing to say when I’m living the life that so many people want to live, but I need to find a balance because the four of us really need to experience growing up.”
As she pauses, her dark eyes sparkle through her lenseless Garth-frames, an accessory we both know could be flooding high schools by the time this story comes out. “This might not be like anyone else’s life, but it’s normal to me.”