The musician Hayley Williams owes her career to: “I don’t think I would’ve been signed”
At the beginning of the year, Hayley Williams announced a new side project with her friend and producer Daniel James, titled Power Snatch. This, of course, on top of her forthcoming global tour and handfuls of guest appearances on tracks by the likes of Turnstile, Failure, David Byrne, and Jay Som.
Though only one original Power Snatch song has been uploaded to streaming platforms (the skittish, punky ‘Assignment’, as well as a sprawling cover of This is Lorelei’s ‘Perfect Hand’), ardent fans have found recordings online of other recorded tracks.
This leads us to ‘Duh’, on which the Paramore frontwoman adopts a lackadaisical tone and provides a stream-of-consciousness recount of sprawling vignettes that have led her directly to the here and now. As we’d come to expect, Williams describes “hanging out with band dudes twice my age, I think about house shows and good guys.”
Though it’s a worrying picture of the powerhouse vocalist who signed an oppressive 20-year record deal with Atlantic Records in 2003 when she was just 14-years-old, Williams, in the here and now, is appreciative, having finally found calmness, peace, and serenity in the cutthroat industry.
Along with “football days” and “forks in the road”, as well as “Fair Street”, where she owned a stone cottage in Franklin, Tennessee, Williams previously shared another (famous) addition to the list of variables that brought her to fame: Avril Lavigne.
In a conversation with Fader in 2017, the redhead turned her attention to the ‘Complicated’ singer, and admitted, “I don’t think I would’ve been signed if Avril hadn’t happened,” she says. “All of a sudden, I was in New York playing to LA Reid.”
Only a year before young Williams signed onto a contract that would define the limits of the next two decades of her life, Lavigne had released her debut album, Let Go. Like Williams, Lavigne’s path into the world began with a 15-minute audition in front of Reid (then head of Arista Records). In Lavigne’s case, she was signed immediately for a deal with $1.25million for two albums.
Let Go was, by anyone’s estimation, a success. Capitalising on the grunge of the 1990s Nirvana sound and the excitement of the early 2000s boom in punk rock, Lavigne earned eight Grammy nominations from the project, which included songs like ‘Sk8er Boi’ and ‘Nobody’s Fool’.
The industry quickly identified the booming market for anti-establishment versions of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Even then, Williams wasn’t exactly the bad girl they thought she was: “We grew up in the Bible Belt,” her bandmate Zac Farro revealed.
“There’s just a lot of rules that have been set by the church. Don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t cuss.”
Christian or not, Williams’ vocals and lyrical prowess were undeniable, and thanks to Lavigne’s ability to bring scuzz into the mainstream, Paramore’s All We Know Is Falling hit the shelves in 2005, borrowing the same angst. The debut is a frantic, high-energy Pollock-esque projection of adolescence: from the first drumbeat of opener ‘All We Know’, Williams and co give it their all.
Lavigne’s spectre followed Williams throughout her whole career. In 2022, when both acts played at the When We Were Young festival, the ‘Misery Business’ singer even slipped Lavigne a “really kind letter, saying some really nice things, thanking me for paving the way for young women like her”. Aside from their sonic similarities, the two formidable frontwomen continue to prove that kindness and care will get you further than any shmucky contract.
