Paramore Tackle Friendships on September LP: "There's Fast, There's Slow and In Between"

Paramore will release the follow-up to their breakout album Riot! in September, MTV revealed; the band's label confirmed the news yesterday. "We made a record that is exactly what we set out to make," fiery frontwoman Hayley Williams said on the band's LiveJournal page. "There's fast, there's slow, and in between... happy, angry, desperate and over it. And I can't believe it's real." For their third album, the Nashville power punks worked with Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot, Dave Matthews Band's Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King and Paramore's own contributions to the Twilight soundtrack, including the hit single "Decode."

"When I started writing for the album, I was really nervous about my role and what my opinions were worth nowadays. I figured, who is going to care what I have to say? We had a pretty successful record, we tour in a bus, buddy-up with MTV, and we recorded for the Twilight soundtrack... no one wants to hear me whine," Williams writes. Since Riot!, the band has faced break-up rumors, parents' divorces, even the death of a former member. "Most of the songs you'll hear have to do with friendship. In fact, this is the first Paramore album that wasn't written mostly about love relationships. I have made a lot of friends and I've lost a lot of friends over the past couple years... and it's all gonna be there for you to dissect," Williams explained.

When Rock Daily spoke with Williams in December 2008, the album was still in its embryonic stages. "I have a lot to say this time around, and there's a lot of things I thought I knew that I was absolutely wrong about," Williams told us. While September seems pretty far off, Paramore will likely test out some of their new material when they hit the road this summer to open for No Doubt. Rolling Stone recently hung out with Hayley and the band for an in the studio feature, so keep an eye out for the story in an upcoming issue.

Related Stories:

• Paramore's Tour Bus: Hunting Gear, Cocoa Puffs and Tiny Instruments
• Hayley Williams on "Twilight": "I Connected To It Immediately"
• Hayley Williams on Next Paramore Album: "I Have a Lot to Say"

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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