Paramore’s Hayley Williams: ‘A lot of my depression was misplaced anger’
The singer-songwriter’s first solo album, Petals for Armor, was born out of therapy, a failed marriage and the turbulent relationship with her bandmates. What has it taught her about herself?
When Hayley Williams was nine, her dad often took her go-karting at Ultimate Fun World in Mississippi. The harder she pressed the accelerator, the more it alleviated her growing pains. She would spend all day driving until she forgot about the ache. “I thought I was gonna get taller,” she says.
Williams is now 31, and all of 5ft 1in tall. Sitting in a London hotel room, pastel tie-dye leggings breaking up her black attire, she lets out a delighted and mortified howl as I read the karting entry from her old LiveJournal and relate it to how she continued to ride out her pain: first as the songwriter and vocalist of the Nashville pop-punk band Paramore, she was plagued by a carousel of members quitting in high dudgeon, inevitably smearing the singer on their way out; and, later, as a wife in a marriage she knew she shouldn’t have gone through with. On Paramore’s first tour as a united front, for their superb 2017 album After Laughter, she preached self-acceptance while on stage, but drank to mask her depression.