MC: They will hear it soon enough, and most likely on Rdio or Spotify. How do you feel about the industry shift into streaming music services?
Williams: I am one of those people in the stone ages. I like buying music. I don’t even think twice about it. Taylor and Jeremy are really into Spotify. It’s just something that I haven’t committed to yet. I’ve messed around and made little playlists on Rdio before, but it’s just not my vibe yet. [But] I don’t think [music streaming is] killing the industry—the industry’s been under attack since I was 12 years old when I was downloading Kazaa on my computer. I feel like music fans are going to get music however they want, and as long as people are coming out to shows I don’t really care if they’re streaming it for free, for a penny, I don’t really care what it is... I just want people to come out to the show and know the words and sing along!
MC: Well, you have the “Singles Club.” Is that Paramore’s battle against iTunes?
Williams: We’ve never been one of those artists that don’t put our album up on iTunes for 10 years and then you do it and it explodes... I’ve seen artists do that and I’ve wondered, is that genius? Is it stupid? I don’t know! With the Singles Club we wanted to do something that would go straight to our fans. We didn’t want all the hype. We didn’t want all the press about it. We just wanted something that said, “This is where we are right now, life is kind of sucking at the moment and these are the songs that came out of it.”
MC: Sounds like a perfect outlet for you.
Williams: We needed the Singles Club. It sort of fueled our fire. We were feeling a lot of different things [after the departure of Josh and Zac Farro] and we needed to prove to ourselves that we could remain Paramore. And I’d like to do more of that, honestly. Taylor is a super gearhead so we’re going to use all of his stuff and experiment a lot and enjoy our free time just making music. I don’t want to get into that place where we don’t write between records anymore. I want to keep producing new music for our fans and some of it will be on iTunes and some of it won’t.
MC: You’re no stranger to collaboration (mewithoutYOU, Set Your Goals, New Found Glory). We know you teamed up with B.o.B a couple years ago on his track “Airplanes,” which sold over 138,000 copies in its first week. A few years ago, Lupe Fiasco spoke with MC and shed some light on how forced the hip-hop collaborations are these days. How did your successful song come together?
Williams: We were playing a show at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York and Jeremy from Atlantic Records, who had just started working with B.o.B, came to me and said, “You would be so perfect on this song. We really need someone to do it.” I put it on and the guys [in the band] said, “You have to do this! This is such a cool song.” And yeah, I pretty much did the chorus without meeting B.o.B. Me and B.o.B didn’t meet until the VMAs after the song had blown up. It was crazy, but I am so thankful for it because I’m not one of those artists who feels comfortable going into a room with people I’ve never met and just writing. I know what Lupe is talking about, I know that vibe and how disconnected it can be, but in this case it actually brought Paramore and B.o.B together. We ended up doing a tour with him after that. He’s one of our greatest friends. He goes and visits Jeremy and stays at his house with Jeremy and his wife. It’s cool. That song brought two artists together who never would have met—and probably never would have crossed paths—and it was awesome. I hope to do more things like that. I write Paramore songs. I don’t really write for other people, at least I haven’t yet. So it would be cool to meet other artists and have it do what it did for us and B.o.B.
