Paramore’s Hayley Williams is “still dealing with a bit” after sharing her demons on debut solo album
Paramore’s singer Hayley Williams has revealed her private health battle, the breakdown of her marriage and hopes for the future on her debut solo album.
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Every day has the potential to be a perfect storm for Hayley Williams.
“I’m trying to so hard but I’m not aceing it!” she says about life in lockdown in her Nashville home.
“Like I thought I had a routine, I thought I was getting it down but one thing happens, you get your period or something, and all hell breaks loose.
“I am so tired and so sad every time I watch the news, the trauma of it all.
“It feels like a giant s … has been taken on 2020 and we all thought this was going to be our year.”
It is a significant year for the 31-year-old artist who has fronted emo punk heroes Paramore for half her life.
The petite, firebrand performer with the candy-coloured hair and her bandmates were catapulted onto the global pop charts with the 2005 debut album All We Know Is Falling, and have maintained their rage through four subsequent records and a dizzying revolving door of members.
Williams has just unleashed her first solo album Petals for Armor, her big launch plans months in the making now a dim memory courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.
Yet the songs she issued over the past few months to introduce the album, intimate, soul-searching, heartbroken and angry tracks, like Simmer, Leave It Alone, Over Yet and Why We Ever, have been embraced as emotional soundtracks for these times of isolation and introspection.
“For some reason I will never understand, this is how it was supposed to go into the world. I can’t control it, all I can do is manoeuvre through it,” she says.
There is a hell of lot to navigate on Petals For Armor across 15 tracks because Williams had plenty of demons to exorcise on her solo debut.
Fans seem focused on searching for references to her ex-husband, New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert, who she split with in 2017 after a tumultuous decade together and a year after their marriage.
The post mortem of her marriage is there, of course. Along with the impact of her parents’ divorce when she was four and then her mother’s split with her allegedly abusive stepfather.
She also examines the inevitably of loss on Leave It Alone, written after her grandmother suffered a fall.
“I just lost my grandmother to dementia and Alzheimer’s; I felt there was so much more of a powerful response from fans to that song,” she says when comparing it to the first single, the rage anthem Simmer.
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The album also documents her struggle with mental health issues which bubbled just beneath the surface throughout her teens and 20s but became inescapable after Paramore finished touring their 2017 album After Laughter.
When she came off the road, she went to a therapy retreat and was diagnosed with depression and PTSD. Much of the writing she did at the suggestion of her therapist, to examine childhood trauma and her relationship with Gilbert, laid the foundations for Petals For Armor.
“I didn’t know I had depression, I wasn’t diagnosed until I came home from that whole touring cycle,” she says.
“I think After Laughter was the primer for this record; it was the best way to learn how to open up about my mental health, it made me feel a lot less alone because I was met with such grace and empathy from people willing to share their experiences.”
Songwriters may be empathetic beings but sharing their vulnerability doesn’t equip them to be a counsellor.
Williams admits “some days are a struggle, some days I float” and will steer clear of social media when she doesn’t have the “mental capacity to do that.”
The common question the 31-year-old artist gets when she does log on is “How did you get through it?”
“I am careful to explain to fans it is a long process and I am not through it. It’s a beautiful place in my story to be able to articulate these feelings and put it out there, but I am still dealing with quite a bit … right now in quarantine, it’s on a minute by minute basis,” she says.
“But hopefully it’s encouraging people to make beautiful things out of pain or confusion.”
The greatest triumph of Petals for Armor may be the musical freedom it has unlocked for Williams and those she collaborated with, including her current Paramore bandmates Taylor York and Joey Howard.
Her experimental embrace of electronica and beats has prompted favourable comparisons with the works of Bjork, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos and Kate Bush, all heroines to Williams.
When she started working with York and Howard on the songs, she warned them she wasn’t going to hold back “what it really is to be a grown-ass woman.”
“I told Taylor and Joey ‘You guys don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and it’s no fault of ours,” she says.
“I told them how f … ing angry I am that our rights are being taken away, our health care is threatened. I am pissed off at the abuse women in my family have suffered at the hands of men.
“I am not a man-hater but if you can’t see there is abuse of power and injustice, then you are blind.
“I credit them for being empathetic as I am speaking about these issues.”
Williams was due to kick off her Petals for Armor tour this month but those dates have now been postponed until 2021.
She had been holding off joining the virtual gig revolution but “I’m ready to consider it now”.
“It was really overwhelming until about a week ago to go there in my brain but now I’m ready to figure out what it’s going to look like when I do it, I want it to feel special.”
Petals For Armor is out now.
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