Watch Hayley Williams Cover Failure’s “The Nurse Who Loved Me”
Lindsey Byrnes
In the past year, Paramore leader Hayley Williams has released two solo albums, Petals For Armor and FLOWERS for VASES / descansos. She has also posted a whole lot of videos of herself covering other artists, including Massive Attack, Radiohead, and Björk. Yesterday, Williams dug a little deeper into the ’90s canon and busted out a solo-acoustic cover of Failure’s crashing, anthemic 1996 alt-rock dirge “The Nurse Who Loved Me.”
Paramore have always been vocal fans of Failure, the big-riff LA band who broke up in 1997 and reunited in 2014. As Brooklyn Vegan points out, Paramore covered Failure’s “Stuck On You” on their 2006 EP The Summer Tic. Now Williams has posted her webcam-recorded version of “The Nurse Who Loved Me,” which she calls “one of my favorite songs of all time on one of my favorite albums of ever.”
Failure’s “The Nurse Who Loved Me” is a vast, gleaming, textured song — exactly the sort of thing that made Failure cult favorites among their fellow musicians. (A Perfect Circle, for instance, have also covered “The Nurse Who Loved Me”; their version is on the 2003 album Thirteenth Step. It’s not necessarily the sort of song that lends itself to a solo-acoustic cover. But in Williams’ version, you can hear how much she loves the song, and that melody really comes through cleanly. Check out Williams’ cover and the Failure original below.
Read our feature on Hayley Williams here.
