Song Exploder - Paramore - Liar

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

I think one of the hardest things there is to do in music is to write a love song that expresses something real. I read that the song "Liar" by Paramore was written by Hayley Williams, the singer of the band, about her longtime bandmate Taylor York, and about the feelings she started to realize she’d had for him. Paramore has been a band for over 20 years, since Hayley and Taylor and Zac Farro, who plays drums, were all young teenagers. Paramore’s won a Grammy for Best Rock Song, and they have multiple platinum albums. But with all that history, Taylor and Hayley only recently became a couple. "Liar" is a song off of their most recent album, This Is Why, which came out in February 2023. So I talked to Hayley, Taylor and Zac in their studio about how their song first came about and what it means to them. For more, visit songexploder.net/paramore.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. I think one of the hardest things there is to do in music is write a love song that expresses something real. I read that the song Lyer by Paramore was written by Haley Williams, the singer of the band, about her longtime bandmate, Taylor York, and about the feelings that she started to realize that she'd had for him. Paramore has been a band for over 20 years since Haley, and Taylor and Zach Farrow, who plays drums, were all young teenagers. Paramours won a Grammy for Best Rock Song, and they have multiple platinum albums.

But with all that history, Taylor and Haley only recently became a couple. Lyre is a song off of their most recent album, This Is Why, which came out in February 2023. So I talked to Haley, Taylor, and Zach in their studio about how their song first came about and what it means to them. Lee, I sing for the band. My name is Zach Farrow. I play the drums. And I am Taylor and I play guitar.

With this record, we wanted to revisit a sort of aggression or like urgency that we haven't explored in a while. And I think I maybe in particular was pushing that a little bit hard at times. So we had been working on not even always aggressive songs, but just songs that felt jumpy and angular. And Zach and I were working at his studio at his house at the time. And he was like, dude, do you think maybe we could just like try to write something that's chill? Like I just need a break from just trying to kind of go all out. I just like really wanted a slow song. And I was like, yes.

I think I need that too. The guitar part is actually something that I had for years. I've been trying to find a song for that since I was a teenager. That happens all the time where there's like something all right. And every so often I'll play it and just like hope. Someone's like, ooh, what's that? You know, and no one normally ever bites. That's not true.

No, no, no. But all I'm saying is that when I played it and then you were like, oh, yeah, that's great. Let's do that. I was like, no way it might find a home finally. Taylor apparently has had this for years that I just found out about. But I normally work off, you know, just immediate inspiration. you know, like a reaction. So I went and tried a drumbeat over it.

Anytime I bring an idea in, there's always a split second when a drumbeat happens. It's not what was in my head where I kind of have to grieve where I saw things going, you know. But truthfully, Zach is my favorite drummer. And so it always turns out so much better when Zach starts getting his hands on things. And also when Haley does,

that's when it becomes our band. And it's not just what I have in my head. We were kind of just riffing off each other. He tried a couple things and then, you know, I was like nodding at him, you know, as dramatically as I could. I was like, yes, that is sick. After we wrote that, we were like, yeah, we need to get this and Haley tonight to see if this is even worth, you know, exploring. Taylor kind of was like, let's just send Haley, like, start ideas. Ten years ago, I remember when I would write an idea, I would get really carried away and I would spend sometimes a couple days making,

an entire song, you know, and I'd be so, so excited. And then, you know, I'd send it to her and she would always be incredibly kind, but, you know, sometimes wouldn't connect with it. And so then a part of me would die because I spent so much time and it wasn't the right thing. So I think we've learned as a group, it's like just doing little bite-sized things and then seeing if that sparked something. So they first sent me like the whisperings of the song, like the very beginning. It just was such a warm hug. I vaguely remembered that I'd heard Taylor play these types of chords before, but I was so

excited because I, too, was just ready for something different that felt a bit more like an exhale. Throughout our entire friendship and, like, the evolution of the band, I think we've always loved really beautiful, somewhat ambient music, like Blonde Redhead or Cockerner. twins, things that people would never equate with paramour. You know, they would not know that these are our influences. And I remember thinking, oh, the music's so beautiful. I wish I was the kind of singer that would write something just really soft and flowing to this. I always wish that about myself, but I love writing rhythmically. The only way I know how to describe it is it's just with

more of a hip-hop mentality. I'm thinking about how many bars I'm working with how many syllables I can fit into that space and if I can make a good melody out of those little beats. So I pretty quickly started writing what was the moment. It's hard to say. I'm sure I don't remember any way. And then I'm like, how do I put melody to that? What was the moment? It's hard to say. I'm sure I don't remember anyway. Before I only knew to hesitate, pinned back in the grenade. I was like, okay, I'm trying to say that there's an inherent wisdom, our physical selves try to move towards, but you're constantly, like, getting in the way of truth that your body

wants, but all of the decisions that we make, like, muck it up and make it complicated. I wanted to find a way to talk about that in the context of love. It was a revelatory experience for me writing this song because as some of those lyrics are coming out, I'm like learning about myself. Haley would actually sing and perform her parts for us in the room. And I remember Haley at one point just pausing and like the hesitation of singing about love. I remember you just making this like, well, I'm scared, but I like this a lot.

Even after all of these years, I think all three of us still have some nerves at that moment every time because your hope is that you all connect to the same thing. But I just remember getting halfway through it and be like, why are we not recording? You've recorded this, right? Like, why are we not like start tracking this? Because this is gold. This is the original demo for Liar. We were.

writing the song and we weren't happy with the tempo and I like was moving the tempo up and down in logic and it warped the guitar part but Taylor left the guitar part in the actual recording because it sounded so glitchy and weird now I thought that that was a fun I don't know why I said fun because it wasn't that fun it was just a cool thing that we left in there we recorded this record with Carlos de la Garza we've just always really had such a great creative relationship with Carlos. And he was the catalyst of building the chorus up to feel more open and lush. The chorus got a lot more like dreamy.

Everything is a little bit more drawn out. Almost every part of the music in the chorus was like dancing around another part. But there was still a lot of beautiful space. And I remember trying to figure out. trying to figure out, do I want to keep being rhythmic with it? Or do I want to try my hand at being one of those singers that does the pretty thing? And I really went for it. I have spent quite some time fighting a very simple feeling, which is just like falling in love.

And so a lot of my life I was realizing as I'm writing these lyrics, I've just spent so much time complicating things that really are simple. For me, so much of my experience of love and intimacy and relationship has been muddled by trauma that either I experienced myself or witnessed in my family. And I think that for a lot of my life, that's not the kind of vulnerable you want to be because you really could end up in some scary situations. So in my case, having something be simple and feel okay, I actually felt very scary and wrong. I always like when there's a song that the entire lyric can be summed up in like a line or in a moment. And that's why the bridge, you know, love is not an easy thing to admit I'm not ashamed of it. We get very emotional and opinionated in the studio because we're trying to make something that we know is going to last until after we're gone.

Brian Robert Jones played bass on this record. And so, you know, he had so many people speaking in his ear. And yet he would still come up with these really beautiful parts. You know, like that part is really simple, but none of us would have come up with that. When we demoed this song out, Zach played those notes on a MIDI melitron plugin. But at some point, a friend of a friend let us use this crazy studio in L.A.

They had a vibraphone there, and so we were like, we actually have to make that real and recreate it. So Zach played it. Those are flutes, clarinets, and a bass clarinet. Our friend Henry Solomon played all of those things. When we were writing this record, I was really inspired by really airy things, you know, like pipe organs, that really breathy character. Like, I just was obsessed with it.

I was like trying to sneak it in anywhere that I could. So those parts were actually like MIDI clarinets. So he just played all of those parts down from the MIDI notes, you know. It was a really emotional moment for me, you know, to see this thing that we had worked on and then have someone come and like bring it to life. I loved his like massive NASCAR shirt he was wearing because when you think about people like that, I think like someone wearing like a straight up bow tie, you know,

just like so professional and like rocking. And then he just came in with these big baggy jeans and this NASCAR shirt and I was like, oh, who's this cool dude? And then he was like rocking the clarinets. And I was like, wow, this is, that's my kind of dude. It's amazing like the mental gymnastics that you'll do, the emotional gymnastics that you'll do to run away from something that's really actually pretty simple and actually right for you. Love is not a weakening if you feel it rushing in. it's like to an extent it happens to you and you can't control that but then you're met with the choice it actually was a harder lesson to learn to receive it like almost to like let it in and I had to

allow myself to feel that and to understand that that I'm safe here coming up you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final song I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Keishkeh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite

artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Mansuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, on and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Now here's Liar by Paramore in its entirety. For more info, visit Sonsonelod. SongExploder.net slash Paramore. You'll find links to buy or stream, Liar. If you like this episode, check out Wolf-Alice's episode from 2018 about the song, Don't Delete the Kisses. Carlos de la Garza was the engineer on that song, and it's also about love.

You'll find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at songexploder.net, or wherever you listen. This episode was made by me, Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt.

I'm Rishi-Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.