Sitting at her computer as a Southern teenager, with anger, confusion, sadness, and God, Hayley Williams opened a web browser, seeking answers: What is emo? “I totally researched the term ‘emo’ before I knew what it was,” Williams told Rolling Stone in 2008, a year after she and her band Paramore became the subculture’s new studded-belt poster children with their breakthrough second album, Riot! “There were websites like Howtobeemo.com… I became so obsessed with punk bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral that I started doing all sorts of research.”
Kids search for a reason. By her pre-teen years, Williams had seen a lot. She has said her earliest childhood memory was standing, at age 4, between her feuding parents who were soon to divorce. Later, Williams and her mother fled her abusive stepdad, relocating from Meridian, Mississippi to Franklin, Tennessee, living between a hotel and a trailer, with the support of friends and a local church. “Mom and I ran away as I was turning 13,” Williams told The New Yorker this year. “I knew almost immediately, when we got past the state line—now my life is starting.”
On her first day of school in 2002, Williams met 12-year-old powerhouse drummer Zac Farro, who introduced her to his guitarist older brother, Josh, and together they would plot a phenomenon. Before Paramore, Williams played in a local funk cover band—she cited her favorite selection, Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good,” as “basically why I sing”—and, to make extra cash for herself and her mom, she cut some country demos in Nashville. But it was camaraderie she craved. “I wanted to be part of a family,” she once said. In a rock band she found one. Paramore’s vision of misfit pop-rock brought the catharsis of clarity to William’s discontent, in every tidal riff and manicured gang vocal, in the brick-heavy drumming and each soaring, structured woah-oh-oh.
In a rabid international pop-punk scene made for the kids, Paramore were, themselves, children: Williams was only 16 when the band released its 2005 debut; Zac Farro, 15, was a ninth-grade dropout. As Paramore legend goes, Atlantic originally hoped to sign Williams in 2003 to mold her into an Avril-style pop star, and her parents didn’t want her to pass up the opportunity. “Explain to me this conspiracy against me,” she sang out, describing her professional torment with pitch-perfect teen angst, on the first tune she wrote with her to-be Paramore bandmates, who she convinced Atlantic to keep along for the ride. On the strength of Williams’ demo CD, the Atlantic A&Rs came to Franklin to check out the band in the bassist’s parents’ living room—majors shipping out to the suburbs to scout emo savants was not uncommon in the wake of Dashboard, My Chem, Taking Back Sunday, et al—and they were allegedly amazed: “Okay, yeah, Paramore, sounds good!” Williams’ own chronicle of how she defiantly rejected a solo career is decidedly more emo: “There was a heated conversation with a team of people [at Atlantic] in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life. It was a very empowered moment. My voice was shaking. I was crying.” She changed music.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
