Watch Hayley Williams Play An Extremely Fun Tiny Desk Concert With Julien Baker
When she announced her debut solo album Petals For Armor earlier this year, Paramore leader Hayley Williams had big plans to tour behind it. For obvious reasons, that didn’t happen. But this morning, Williams is the latest participant in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series, and that means we get to see her play three Petals For Armor tracks with a very cool backing band.
The great singer-songwriter Julien Baker, a longtime Paramore fan, sang backup on the Petals For Armor song “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” which also features Baker’s boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. For the remotely-recorded Tiny Desk Concert, Baker plays guitar for Williams, doing some cool jazz-pop guitar stuff that she never gets to do on her own records.
For the Tiny Desk, Williams also has indie-country singer-songwriter Becca Mancari on keyboards and backing vocals, Paramore bassist Joey Howard, and Nashville drummer Aaron Steele. (Howard and Steele both played on Petals For Armor.) Williams sings and plays keyboard, and she brings a bright, energetic live presence that we don’t often get to see in these quarantine-era live videos. She dances, she high-fives bandmates between songs, and she seems extremely happy about her power to hit big notes. The Tiny Desk features the songs “Pure Love,” “Taken,” and “Dead Horse,” and it’s a lot of fun. Watch it below.
Petals For Armor is out now on Atlantic. Read our We’ve Got A File On You interview with Williams here.