![]() As Williams asked, “Why do we like the hurt so much?” and confessed, “We are broken”-as she screamed “This time we’re not giving up” and “We were born for this”-the genre’s typical despair was tempered by the uplift in that collective we, so distinct from emo’s persistent I, a unity perhaps learned in the Southern Baptist congregations where she first trained her multi-octave voice. The very feeling of their pop-emo has few analogs still. Williams, the only woman fronting an emo band of their stature, knew they had to work extra hard to prove themselves. Whether they were grassroots, industry-core, or, more realistically, a group of kids for whom bits of both experiences overlapped, is no matter: Paramore were too good to be denied. Paramore practically dared you to feel that way, and to then reckon with the fact that you just couldn’t. The band chronicled its own ascent, of course, on LiveJournal.Īs commodified-for-Hot Topic dissent abounded, one could have easily viewed the release of Riot! cynically, as a brazen attempt to exploit the passion of underground rebel girls as much as the hunger for candy-coated girl power. Paramore played its official first show that year opening for small-town dreamers Copeland (“ Coffee” was away-message canon), quickly released the thrilling All We Know Is Falling, and became a fixture of the teen-punk caravan and marketing apparatus of Warped Tour. Fueled by Ramen was originally founded by a member of ska lifers Less Than Jake, but by 2004 Atlantic already had a stake in the label. I was crying.” She changed music.Ītlantic decided to soften the optics of major-label backing by bringing the band to the bastion of mall-punk excellence, Fueled by Ramen, which was riding the successful debuts of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. 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 in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life. “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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. “I wanted to be part of a family,” she once said. 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. ![]() 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. “I knew almost immediately, when we got past the state line-now my life is starting.” “Mom and I ran away as I was turning 13,” Williams told The New Yorker this year. 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. She has said her earliest childhood memory was standing, at age 4, between her feuding parents who were soon to divorce. By her pre-teen years, Williams had seen a lot.
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