Hayley, I was reading some of the Paramore diary/blog entries from this year. There is a theme of rebirth in what you were talking about—like when you were discussing how you were on the cover of Cosmo earlier this year. You were saying things like, “I’m going to accept my role” within Paramore.
Hayley Williams: I still think about that. Being on Cosmo is not something I’ve ever strived for. I never was like, “I want to be a Cosmo girl.” I don’t know if you know me, but I don’t typically care about things like that—even [though] as a girl, I love fashion magazines, I love beauty products. That was a weird thing for me to go through, because I did have to accept, like, “Dude. Cosmo magazine just came to me and they were like, “You know what? Your band’s kickass, we like you. Come be on our cover.” What other band band are they even talking to? Other than a pop singer like Rihanna, all the rest of the cover girls this year have been actresses—I remember right before me was Olivia Wilde. [They were] just gorgeous, beautiful women—and I will never put myself in the ranking of those women. It’s not like I have super issues with myself—I definitely am like any other person, I’m self-conscious a lot of times—but I will never put myself on a list of women. But Cosmo did.

Holy crap! I still don’t accept it, and I still don’t feel like it was real, but I accept the fact now more than ever that I am the girl in Paramore, and even though I don’t always want people looking at me, sometimes they’re going to. And I gotta get over it and stop whining about it. Because we’re okay—we weren’t okay, and that’s probably what made me so kind of insecure about being the singer. But we’re fine now, and I don’t have anything to prove to [my bandmates]—they know I’m not trying to be, like, [Gestures like she’s attention-getting] all the time.

That was a head trip doing Cosmo, for sure. I’ll never wear those outfits ever again. [Laughs.]

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