Hayley Williams was merely 14 years old when she inked her first major label record deal. She’d recently relocated from her native Mississippi with her mother to Franklin, Tennessee, an aftereffect of her parents’ divorce. Now just a half-hour drive away from Nashville, the aspiring singer had access to the city’s premiere songwriters and vocal coaches. She began recording her first demos, which, through that web of songwriters, eventually caught the ear of Atlantic Records. The label’s plan was to make her the next big pop princess. There was just one problem: Some of Williams’ friends at her new school had already asked her to join their rock band. “I don’t see myself being the next Madonna,” she told her manager at the time. What she really wanted to be was more like the next Jim Adkins or Jeremy Enigk — just with her disarming, four-octave-spanning soprano.
Atlantic knew they had an undeniable star with Williams. Not only was she immensely vocally gifted, but she had a surprisingly clear foresight for someone who wasn’t even old enough to obtain a driver’s license. Atlantic weren’t yet totally sold on the idea of forfeiting their solo-pop vision for a band of teenagers, but they let Williams forego session musicians in favor of her friends: guitarist Josh Farro, drummer Zac Farro, and bassist Jeremy Davis. They decided to call themselves Paramore.
Even after hearing some of Williams’ demos re-recorded as potential Paramore songs, Atlantic still weren’t convinced — according to Josh Farro, the label thought the band sounded “terrible.” But he and Williams had also been writing some new songs together in the interim, including “Here We Go Again,” a pop-punk anthem with an emphasis on pop and lyrics about finally cutting things off with someone unworthy of your time. “I’ll write just to let you know I’m all right/ Can’t say I’m sad to see you go,” Williams declares on its chorus, the new wave riffs of the verses stepping out of the way for a headbanging breakdown. “Here We Go Again” would become the fifth song on Paramore’s debut album All We Know Is Falling, which turns 20 this Saturday.
I doubt “Here We Go Again” was the sole factor in getting Atlantic to board the Paramore train, but the label was pleased enough with it to not fire Davis and the Farros as they initially feared. The company had a distribution partnership with Fueled By Ramen, the pop-punk label that had a hand in making stars out of Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. Atlantic’s A&R department pitched Paramore to Fueled By Ramen’s then-CEO John Janick. After seeing Paramore live, Janick not only loved the music and recognized the kids’ technical skills, he instantly understood the proposed concept: Leverage major-label backing to get Paramore a coveted Warped Tour slot, but beyond that, let the songs speak for themselves and let word of mouth act as their primary mode of promotion.
“Even though we have one particularly good song called ‘Pressure,’ we just wanted kids to discover the band without it being shoved down their throats,” Atlantic’s then-A&R VP Steve Robertson explained at the time. “We lit the long fuse to ensure this band has a career.” Even Williams’ bandmates were optimistic that her voice was deft and robust enough to carry Paramore, and not just her, into the big leagues. “Our music was OK,” Josh Farro said. “It was a lot of fun writing, but as soon as we had Hayley come and sing, then we knew — and everyone was telling us, ‘You guys can make it.'” Davis and the Farros were never all that concerned with the potential setbacks of having a female frontperson in the mid-2000s, even if places like Warped Tour were only accommodating towards dudes. If she was already sounding like this at 15, she had to be unstoppable.
Fueled By Ramen was still based in its Florida birthplace in 2004, so Paramore hightailed it from Franklin to Orlando to finish writing and recording their debut album, commencing a three-week run of eight-hour studio days. Only a few sessions in, however, Jeremy Davis suddenly left Paramore. (“He had some personal issues to deal with” was the default explanation.) Of the 10 tracks that would make the record, Davis only performed on “Here We Go Again.” Williams and Josh Farro, then Paramore’s core writing duo, next cranked out “All We Know,” a song that all but explicitly references that dispute: “We tried so hard to understand, but we can’t/ We held the world out in our hands, but you ran away,” Williams belts over a biting guitar riff in its opening lines. Those would also be the opening lines of All We Know Is Falling, an album of which Davis’ departure became a central theme. Even the album’s cover would resemble Paramore’s feelings of betrayal; an empty couch in the woods backdropping an anonymous shadow, a nobody, seemingly walking away.
Indeed, “Pressure” would’ve been Paramore’s first proper hit had Fueled sent any of their songs to radio. Remove the boilerplate mall punk instrumental and it’s a bona-fide pop tune, a walloping singalong chorus seemingly tailor-made to showcase Williams’ dexterity. “We’re better off without you,” she declares, though the sentiment carries more relief than resentment by the time she flips it in the final lyric: “You’re better off without me.” In a way, the songs about Davis were almost a self-fulfilling prophecy for Paramore, a band who in the following two decades became somewhat notorious for their lineup changes.
Of the songs on Falling that aren’t about Davis’ exit, many are darker and deeper than most songs to come from teenaged major-label prospects in the same era. Williams’ parents’ divorce was the basis of “Emergency,” the album’s best song and most lucid indicator of her post-hardcore fanship. “You do your best to show me love/ But you don’t know what love is,” she sings, her voice flipping between a monotonous drawl and an impassioned wail, creating a baseline of emotional tension in itself. Next comes the more balladic “Brighter,” a song Williams wrote for a childhood friend who died in a boating accident: “If you have to go/ Well, always know that you shine brighter than anyone does.”
And though Paramore were still aging out of their baby band phase, their music industry gripes were already strong enough to permeate the record: The moody, mellower “Franklin” grieves their prior lives as unknowns — “Could you remind me of a time when we were so alive?” Josh Farro sings in the duet — and would likely feel hyperbolic if it weren’t for the preceding context of “Conspiracy.” Written in the throes of Williams’ back-and-forths between Atlantic and her bandmates, it spotlights her precocious skepticism, figuring out in real time where to draw her boundaries: “Please speak softly for they will hear us/ And they’ll find out why we don’t trust them/ Speak up, dear, ’cause I cannot hear you/ I need to know why we don’t trust them,” she sings over massive guitar chords. “I didn’t wanna put out an album of songs I wrote with my bandmates and recorded alone,” Williams told Vulture in 2020 of Paramore’s early years. “That’s what the song ‘Conspiracy’ is about. I felt like I’d lost all my power. Everyone was against me. All I had was my bandmates, and even they’re looking at me like, ‘Why aren’t we in this together?’ And I was like, ‘We are in this together.'”
All We Know Is Falling didn’t excel commercially at first, but the record and the extensive touring around it earned Paramore a solid fan base. Williams tried her best to keep the band from falling apart, but for the next few years it would become a revolving door of old and new members; Davis ended up rejoining Paramore after Falling, but was then fired shortly thereafter due to a “lack of work ethic,” only for Williams to successfully campaign for his return again. Davis reaped the benefits of performing on 2007’s Riot!, Paramore’s celebrity-making sophomore album and a modern pop-punk classic. But Williams and Josh Farro briefly dated during the Riot! album cycle, and their breakup nearly caused the whole group to collapse along with them. From 2009’s Brand New Eyes to 2013’s self-titled LP, that revolving door of Paramore spun so much that you’re better off just looking at Wikipedia’s color-coded timeline chart than reading me explain it.
For 20 years, Williams has been Paramore’s only constant member. She could’ve been the next big pop princess. She’s earned a unique type of crossover appeal where she’s applauded for joining her old friend Taylor Swift onstage as much as one of her early idols, Deftones’ Chino Moreno. She did eventually release a solo album with 2020’s Petals For Armor, which gave her more room for unbridled experimentation — despite Atlantic releasing it — but it didn’t pack a musical punch quite as memorable as Paramore’s 2017 new wave pivot After Laughter. In retrospect, the circumstances around All We Know Is Falling were incredibly telling of Paramore’s career trajectory, with Williams caught between her disinterest in a one-woman show and her inherent tendency to command the spotlight.
As an emo-inclined Southern girl myself, a tween during Warped Tour’s heyday, Williams wasn’t just a source of entertainment for me: She was a role model. She was a star but not a diva, perennially neon orange hair elevating the basic skinny jeans, baby tees, and Chuck Taylors she’d typically wear onstage. She was funny, charming, and down-to-earth in interviews, confident in her own talent but quick to show gratitude to her collaborators: “I get comments about [my vocal range] quite a lot but I think the biggest asset I have, and that all of us have in the band, is each other,” she said in 2005, just as All We Know Is Falling was beginning to pick up steam. “We are each other’s biggest assets.” They say a team is only as strong as its weakest link; from business brawls to interpersonal fallouts, All We Know Is Falling was the introduction to Williams, Paramore’s eternal anchor, and her lifelong effort to assemble a team of only the strongest links.
