Hayley Williams Talks with Track Seven

Paramore

Hayley Williams of Paramore sat down with Track Seven:

It was both of those things,” she says. “[The lyrics] literally came from a page in my diary. What I couldn’t have known at the time was that I was feeding into a lie that I’d bought into, just like so many other teenagers – and many adults – before me. The whole, ‘I’m not like the other girls’ thing… this ‘cool girl’ religion. What even is that? Who are the gatekeepers of ‘cool’ anyway? Are they all men? Are they women that we’ve put on top of an unreachable pedestal?

Hayley Williams Talks with I-D

Hayley Williams of Paramore recently sat down with I-D:

I found myself in a really weird headspace in the last few years where I was going through these things in my personal life, but we had just come off of this successful album. People would come up to me in my hometown and have pictures of me in these very superhero type poses across their shirts, and [they’d say], “Oh you’re perfect, I’ve looked up to you for so long.” I never discounted anything that they said because that’s the truth for them and I appreciate that, but what I couldn’t shake was how much that contrasted with the way that I viewed myself. I was crumbling. I was losing friendships, I was going through things with my family, my relationship. I just felt like, “Wow, this person that I’m standing right in front of, has no idea that I’m probably doing worse than they’re doing. And they’re asking for advice, and they’re telling me that I’m perfect.” It made me very angry at myself that I wasn’t at that level, and I never could be.

Hayley Williams Talks with The Fader

The Fader has a pretty interesting interview with Hayley Williams of Paramore:

She tells me that after we spoke, she had a panic attack in her car. She apologizes profusely for how this encounter has played out, and tells me that she felt triggered when I asked about the fallout from the lawsuit with her former bandmate. She says that legal reasons make it difficult for her to know what she can and cannot say, and that it both bores her and stresses her out that every recent story about the band has focused on band drama and not on the songs. Fair enough. I keep digging, though, and eventually she admits it was more than that, but that she is having a hard time explaining, or figuring out for herself, what it is.

I offer to let her sleep on it, telling her I was now likely to write about this strange episode, and that it might be good if she provided a more fully realized account from her own perspective. This idea, to my surprise, seems to immediately pique her interest. She quickly agrees and we hug, then go bowling at a little neon spot that doesn’t seem to have changed the decor since the 1980s.

The entire thing is worth reading.

David Bendeth Talks 10-Year Anniversary of ‘Riot!’

Paramore

David Bendeth, who produced Paramore’s Riot!, sat down with Billboard to talk about the album’s 10-year anniversary:

It’s funny, when we started the record, all of the songs that we thought were going to be singles, never were. “When It Rains,” I thought for sure was going to be a smash at radio. In fact, John Mayer heard it and said, ‘If that’s not a hit song, I quit the business.’ “Hallelujah,” we thought that was going to be the first single at some point when we were making the record. Even with “That’s What You Get,” which I think was the third single, the song was in 6/8. It’s very difficult to make something in 6/8 sound like a normal sound for Top 40. So, I felt like the risks that had been taken paid off.