It’s a vibe that breathed a renewed vigour into a rapidly stagnating scene. Speaking her truth in a male-dominated scene This one would be the party to end all parties. Williams knew from the outset that the theme would be a riot, but not in the literal sense of the word. And their youthful exuberance was in the driving seat. Despite their infancy, Paramore were compelled to follow their own creative vision. And it’s a skill they learned so quickly and so meticulously that any opportunities to work with external songwriters were rendered fruitless. Each member was 100 per cent focused on the music to the point that typical teenage distractions were rejected for the sake of spending every waking moment perfecting their craft. My hair is going to be orange, the mic stand is going to be orange…’”īut Paramore aren’t a band for whom image is more important than substance. I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ and she’s like, ‘I’m coming up with the concept for this whole record and what the album jacket is going to look like. What’s more, it was the then teenager’s creative vision that fed into the Riot! concept.Īs Bendeth recalled, “While we’re working on the record, Hayley is in my lounge, and she’s sitting there with a pen and a piece of paper drawing ‘riot’ in orange. Some drew parallels to Avril Lavigne, but where the Canadian songstress appeared to have been stylised for the MTV crowd, there was far more authenticity to the Paramore frontwoman. Williams was a young woman who had all the pop sensibilities of Britney Spears or Taylor Swift but was too edgy for the mainstream. “I’m coming up with the concept… Everything is going to be orange”
Paramore album sales how to#
There were lots of pop girls, Britney Spears and everything else, but there were no rock girls.” It was a hole that Williams knew exactly how to fill. I was like, you know what? There hasn’t been a girl in rock for so long. “There was a song on there called Emergency and I thought was really good. “I listened to All We Know Is Falling, and I thought Hayley was sensational,” Riot!’s producer, David Bendeth, told Billboard in 2017. The industry surrounding the band, too, saw a gap in the market. Even at 17 years old – as she was during the early gestation of Riot! – she knew who she was, where she wanted to go and exactly what it would take to get there. Not that Williams was intimidated by any of that. But for those who dug a little deeper, the lyrical content of their music could increasingly be perceived as unwelcoming to females – a breeding ground for misogyny, even, given the propensity for painting women as lying cheats. There was plenty of superficial appeal about these groups for female fans – they were essentially marketed as boy bands with guitars. Until that point, emo and pop-punk was dominated by the likes of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. “You know what? There hasn’t been a girl in rock for so long” The fact they were all still teenagers belied the songwriting prowess already demonstrated by, in particular, frontwoman Hayley Williams in the run up to the release of their second album, Riot! While the band have made much of the fact that they are just that – a band, as their leader scrawled on T-shirts, Blondie-style – there’s no escaping that it’s Williams who set Paramore apart from anything else in the scene in the mid-2000s. With one album, thousands of road miles and accolades in the music press under their belts, Paramore were already looking like veterans of the pop-punk and emo scenes in 2007.