On Wednesday, October 8, Hayley Williams of Paramore took the stage on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to play a goosebump-inducing performance of her recent song “True Believer.”
Williams, who officially released her most recent solo album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party on August 28, has waited roughly 5 years to finally take her solo music on the road. Her first solo album, Petals for Armor, was released in May of 2020, with the forthcoming tour being cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Her sophomore album Flowers for Vases followed in 2021.
Unfortunately, neither album received a tour. Williams then took a break from solo music when Paramore released This is Why in 2023. Now with Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Williams is finally on a much-deserved press run for her solo career.
The song “True Believer” was first released as a single. In fact, the first 17 songs from the new album were all released as separate singles earlier in August, before being released as a collective album. “True Believer” is one of the heaviest, if not the heaviest, songs on the album, dealing with the intertwinement of religion and politics in the South, specifically the prevalence of Christian nationalism and the South’s dark history of racial violence. This topic hits close to home for Williams, who was raised in Mississippi before moving to Tennessee.
In her Tonight Show performance, Williams was accompanied by a supporting band and orchestra—the majority of them people of color, and mainly women. Also on the stage was Daniel James, a producer on Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, and Doug Peck, who arranged the strings. Williams performed from the back of the stage, opening the song under a single spotlight with keyboard and vocals. The stage opened up for the pre-chorus, with the lights shining down on the orchestra and band, beautifully arranged surrounding Williams.
Multiple socio-cultural aspects of the South are communicated through the song with lyrics such as “They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children” especially chilling. The chorus lyric “I reanimate your bones ‘cause I’m a true believer” can be interpreted both as belief in Christianity, and belief that the South has redeemable qualities that can be fostered by those that deeply care about the region. Performing this song for a large audience on national late-night television was undoubtedly a very thoughtful decision.
The performance was closed with an orchestral instrumental of “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, with the orchestra members being showcased at the forefront of the broadcast. “Strange Fruit,” a song about the lynching of people of color in the South, was first written as a poem by Abel Meeropol, and released by Holiday as a song in 1939.
Williams directly references this song in “True Believer,” with the lyric “Strange fruit, hard bargain.” Through this interpolation, Williams proves once again that she is not one to shy away from deeply important and often dark topics.
In an Instagram post on Thursday following the performance, Williams dedicated the performance to Trey Reed. Reed, a young black student, was found dead at Delta State University in Mississippi on September 15, in an alleged homicide. An independent autopsy, funded by former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, is awaiting release.
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party will be released on CD and vinyl on November 7, and Hayley Williams is expected to announce a tour in the near future. The album was released under her self-owned label Post Atlantic, and is being distributed by Secretly Distribution.
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