Review: Hayley Williams shows up, raw and enthralling

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Hayley Williams knows Southern hospitality. Though she does it her way. For our Artist of the Year interview, Williams invited us to Tennessee — where she’s returned, after relocating to Los Angeles for some time, a homecoming tale that appears on EDAABP — and we sat on the floor and drank tea at the small table where she’d written some of Paramore’s earliest songs. A gift from her mother’s trip to Japan. Wrapped in a sweater, bespectacled, she said of this era, “I just want to be cozy.”

In many ways, for Williams, EDAABP is a return and a reclamation of home. Literally, Nashville’s studded through the tracklisting, especially evident in songs like “True Believer” and its title track, with its reference to a “racist country singer’s bar.” Less literally, the album also finds Williams scanning her internal landscape, reconciling a host of feelings from depression and anger over love lost to vehement determination to emerge on the other end, evolved. It asks for a new relationship with music, with the stage, with music — all of which have shaped her identity as long as we have all known “Miss Paramour.” It’s got substance and subtlety, with lore baked in for fans with a fine-toothed comb, plus a vulnerability that welcomes listeners into her world that’s not dissimilar to sitting on her floor, sipping tea. Between the meat of the album itself and its unique rollout, Williams arrives, arguably, at her most present.

Read more: Water From Your Eyes: Building a mystery

Review: Hayley Williams shows up, raw and enthralling

Zachary Gray

With the same graciousness, she’s showing up for those attending her live shows. In the small venues, the crowd is close enough that with decent eyesight, it’s easy to identify each audience member’s Good Dye Young shade. The stage, draped with simple white sheets, sparse lights, and chandeliers, speaks to intimacy over showmanship. Together, we’re all in her living room, listening to Water From Your Eyes, the enigmatic duo Williams played on a loop during our AP cover shoot — and whose winding, danceable music happens to make a delightful gateway into Williams’ woozier side project, Power Snatch.

It kicks off with “Mirtazapine,” Williams wielding a red electric guitar and some form of eclectic headgear — each in itself a power move, but it’s the battle cry that shatters the room at the song’s end that lets the audience know we are now, officially, at a Hayley Williams concert. She’s joined by Paramore’s touring band, the “Parafour” — Brian Robert Jones, Joey Howard, Joey Mullen, and Logan MacKenzie — who have stepped into the role of her solo band with confidence (and noteworthy harmonizing) as a unit in lockstep with Williams, rather than an ensemble behind her. On “Hard,” Williams headbangs joyously to percussive rhythm guitar before a breakdown that has the crowd go wild, grooving as she spits out the hook; while the group is bathed in a projection of yellow-haired Williams traipsing down Nashville’s Broadway to a shuffling bassline, the trip-hoppy drums veer from their deep pocket into an explosive, rock breakdown.

Zachary Gray

Throughout, the idiosyncrasies between the album and live experience are objective and subjective. The songs have lived and grown — while “Ain’t It Fun” at a Paramore gig might always hit that same spot in a particular way, don’t expect “Whim” to feel the same as it has before, whether it’s side by side with their recording or Williams’ Boston gig last week. That’s much of the beauty.

Regarding the crowd — they go wild a lot. It’s deafening, at times. After the funky “Love Me Different,” they just cheer and scream, for a solid 60 seconds. “Isn’t it nice to sing with people in real life?” Williams asks, though her fans’ reaction is an answer in itself. She answers the question herself, each night, too, by inviting friends onstage for the final song, the gut-wrenching “Parachute” — another manner in which Williams has twisted a tune about heartbreak into an opportunity to strengthen community, tie us all together, invite us into her life.

Each guest has felt personal, whether they’re a hardcore figurehead whose influence has left its mark on her for decades — like Thursday’s guest Toby Morse, or Atlanta’s Josh Scogin — or a friend and fellow creative, like songwriter and collaborator Steph Marziano, who joined the band in Philadelphia, or Saturday’s Nina Ljeti of Kills Birds, whose high-energy stage presence, even for a song, felt infectious. “Good Ol’ Days” got a special surprise that night as well, with a guest appearance from Claude and Annie DiRusso, whose giggling presence and sloppy group hugs with Williams took the song from a nostalgia-laden look back at a relationship into a moment where three friends together onstage let the audience take the lead, while they sang along.

Zachary Gray

There’s a small megaphone that comes out, through which she shouts, “I’m in a band! I’m in a band!” flexing her muscles. If you watched our Artist of the Year interview, and heard Williams talk about the role anger played in the making of this album — it’s a cathartic moment, seeing her flip that feeling into something fierce and sardonic. Those are two words that fit across the board for this show, certainly when Williams picks up that guitar, a weapon on “I Won’t Quit on You” — and one she’s historically admitted to having nerves around playing live — and even during tracks when she’s sitting at the piano, crooning Nina Simone.

The times where Williams speaks to the audience are few, though with an album that’s clearly soaked so thoroughly into her listeners, who’ve lined around each venue block to sing along word by word, it feels appropriate. During one, she asks that everyone “breathe in love that wasn’t enough, and breathe out space for the kindness you deserve.” If both EDAABP the album, and the show, were summarized in a statement, it would be exactly that.