One of popular music’s most talented vocalists is Paramore front-woman, Hayley Williams. The band first hit the charts when she was sixteen. Today, she is pushing thirty-seven and has just seen the end of Paramore’s historic twenty-year contract with Atlantic Records. To celebrate, she covertly released seventeen singles from her new label, Post Atlantic (there may be some bad blood there). No, it’s not an album, and you can’t buy it as one. It is seventeen distinct singles, each with a black, white, and yellow cover image. (The picture above fills out its grid with four unrelated singles from Williams’s past work.)
Why do I say that Hayley Williams is one of our best vocalists? Am I comparing her to Adele or Kelly Clarkson? Well, in a way. Hayley’s not at all the same kind of singer as those two, but she does what she does just as well any day of the week. For twenty years, we’ve known the punk-laced snarl in her voice—a sound she has grown to match in image and personality as the years went by. But it’s not just that X-factor rock-star thing. These days—and especially on her excellent solo projects—she is displaying amazing control over her voice. It goes high and it goes low, loud and soft, sure. But she can also fill any note, word, or sound with such specific and nuanced emotion that she is truly performing in a dramatic sense as well as a musical one.
Her new releases are definitely her most musically complex and upbeat solo collection, and the production shows clear influences from Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. Fans have decided (as they will) to call the project “Ego,” which is not the title I think Hayley would have chosen. Then again, her last solo album was painfully titled FLOWERS for VASES/descansos. The decision to release the songs separately means that the listener has a sort of choose-your-own-adventure experience. There is no official order that the tracks should be played in, and the singer surely anticipated her fans’ crowdsourcing of a title. I respect that; it’s a playful twist on industry conventions, a mark of her punk attitude of breaking all the rules, and a comment on the way music is marketed and disseminated these days.
I’ll tell you off the bat that I love this non-album. It’s excellent! I do not love that I had to buy seventeen singles, making the collection upwards of $20. But I do love those singles. Let me give some thoughts on a number of them.
“True Believer”— This is the buzziest track because of its comments on The Church (and the upside-down cross on its “cover”). Paramore has always downplayed their faith, but they were definitely Christians when they recorded their first album, All We Know Is Falling. Over the years, individual songs have touched on Christianity, but Williams is clearly not going to publicly self-identify at this point. But don’t let that inverted cross bias you: the critiques that she levels at church culture are harsh but also true. The song is very complex lyrically, taking on gentrification, the South’s tendency to clutch its past sins, and the way many Christians invert the gospel. These themes collide in two memorable passages:
“Gift shop in the lobby. Act like God ain’t watching. Kill the soul, turn a profit.”
“They say that Jesus is the way, but then they give him a white face, so they don’t have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them.”
In the chorus, however, Williams addresses her native South and the living God:
“I’m the one who still loves your ghost. I’ll reanimate your bones ‘cause I’m a true believer.”
“Negative Self Talk”— Williams suffers from depression and was devastated when she divorced Chad Gilbert in 2017. At the time, she was diagnosed with PTSD and underwent worrying weight loss. Here, she sings about the title affliction:
“Now it’s just so quiet. I hate this gorgeous house.”
“Mirtazapine”— In this half-tongue-in-cheek song, Williams continues thinking about mental health as she serenades her anti-depressant.
“For when you’re happy for a day and then wake up remembering things will never be the same. Feels like it’s your fault it turned out that way. Here comes my genie in a screw-top bottle.”
“Disappearing Man”— This song contains an elegantly insightful chorus:
“Disappearing man, you could really have anyone, and you had me. Why’d you let go? You could really have anyone, except for me, I suppose.”
“Love Me Different”— She continues the lost love theme with some more great lines. (Notice that she does add the “-ly” to “different” near the end, when the rhythm allows and her thoughts finally reach their conclusion.)
“You said that I deserve someone who knows what I am worth. Now I wonder, what am I worth to you?”
“And I know that you’re probably telling yourself that no one’s going to love me like you did. And I know that you’re probably right about that, but someone’s gonna love me different.”
“Endless hours of therapy, two prescriptions, longer routines. I guess I’m the one who’s gotta to love me differently.”
“Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party”— Ego death is a term used in a number of ways, but I believe that the original meaning was “a complete loss of subjective self-identity.” Combine superstardom and mental illness with trauma, and that’s about exactly what you will get. It can also, however, imply the loss of arrogance. This self-critical song sees Hayley boasting everywhere she goes, saying
“I’ll be the biggest star at this…bar.”
I can see how easily someone who has been world famous since she was sixteen could slip into this mindset. I worry in every social situation about the hierarchy of power (and there always is one), so of course she wonders if she’ll be the queen bee when she’s out with her friends in Nashville or if a bigger star will take the spotlight. And it’s just as easy to see that she would be disgusted with herself upon noticing those thoughts.
“Glum”— That same famous-all-my-life perspective leads to a lovely line here:
“When you look around and no one’s home, do you want to go back to wherever we’re from?”
“Discovery Channel”— Quite cleverly, Williams coopts the lewd chorus to a Bloodhound Gang song, turning it into a rumination about human cruelty and competition:
“You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”
I could go on and on. This not-an-album is full of smart lyrics and great melodies, but I’ll stop now with one last observation: one song is titled “Zissou”, which is a reference to a Wes Anderson movie. 😊
So, if you can handle the prevalence of f-bombs here, I highly recommend the so-called Ego.