A Los Angeles gospel choir inspired an entire Paramore album: “I welled up with tears”
Paramore have traversed many genres across their long, illustrious career: grunge, pop, punk, shoegaze, emo, and indie, but one genre you might not’ve noticed, nor have come to expect, from the Nashville titans is gospel.
It all started when a young, naive Hayley Williams was born in Mississippi and grew up devoutly attending the southern church. There, she was exposed to all kinds of biblical gospel music, enriched by those big, round vocals that seek to transform the search for spiritual enlightenment into cathartic gospel hits. She even sang in the gospel choir, and by the age of 13, she was performing with a local funk cover band for cash.
For a while, Williams left this pertinent influence behind. Still on the precipice of their teenage years, Williams met Zac and Josh Farro, who introduced her to the likes of Radiohead and Deftones. Out came their first album, All We Know is Falling, which explored their grunge influences and captured the simmering core of angst and adolescence as if distilling the essence of a pip from the middle of a home-grown plum.
Circling through some tumultuous line-up changes, the band would go on to record and release two more albums, 2007’s Riot! and 2009’s Brand New Eyes, as they continued to lean into the sonic world of the distressed and the despondent, all slammy guitars and raucous vocals with some insanely catchy pop-inflected hooks.
After four years with no new music, the band was looking for a new way into their sound, which had in many ways become unfamiliar and estranged from their original high-school vision. The long, hard search would pay off: The boldest track on Paramore’s self-titled album, Paramore, won them the Grammy for ‘Best Rock Song’. However, unlike many critically acclaimed works of art, it came to fruition with surprising ease.
Williams and long-time collaborator and Paramore guitarist Taylor York found the melody and the looping marimba part easily enough in a hotel room in Los Angeles. But something was missing. They let the track breathe for a few months and picked it back up at an opportune moment when recording at Sunset Sound, a recording studio in the States.
As Williams told the Grammy Awards, the moment was somewhat fated: “A local gospel choir comes in, and by the second practice run-through it was perfect.”
The moment touched the young girl still trapped somewhere deep inside Williams’ chest: “I welled up with tears because I’ve loved gospel music all my life, and to hear a choir singing our parts – belting out that harmony – it just felt insane to be in a band that could have that kind of amazing moment as part of our song”.
“All of a sudden, we felt big, like we had really made it. Yes, we’ve got a gospel choir on our record. This is really happening.”
Hayley Williams
Though York didn’t have as nostalgic and emotionally resonant a response to the moment, he did reveal that the process of writing ‘Ain’t It Fun’ impacted the entire album, which would debut at number one on the Billboard 200. The sometime producer shared, “The fact that ‘Ain’t It Fun’ came together so easily and worked so well really was the turning point for the writing process of the whole record, and it helped us fall in love with the writing and recording process at a new level.”
The influence goes beyond the hugely underrated self-titled project. In 2025, Williams used unorthodox channels to release her third solo album, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party. The inspired project includes the song, ‘True Believer’, which navigates her complex experience with her Southern Christian upbringing and her subsequent departure from the organised church. The shock waves of this religious type of music are everywhere for those with ears to hear them.
