Paramore Is a Band

Paramore / Photo by Viki Forshee

They admit to frustration with how the British press singles Williams out, putting her on magazine covers alone. She frets that her bandmates don't get the recognition they deserve, and in hopes of combating this, hits U.K. stages in a T-shirt scrawled with PARAMORE IS A BAND, perhaps a nod to the BLONDIE IS A GROUP buttons of almost 30 years ago. She feels less singled out in the States, and it's a relief.

"I think it's because we've tried to be really smart about marketing our image," she says. "We're just breaking into this mainstream world, and people are hearing about us for the first time. And we don't want their first look at Paramore to be me by myself -- even if it says 'Hayley of Paramore,' it's that face, they're gonna see that. Until we feel comfortable and feel like the world knows who Paramore is as a whole, then we're gonna keep fighting to show people our whole band."

"We know exactly what we want, all the time," Josh says. "We're not gonna let anybody come in and tell us what to do, because it's not their band."

What Williams wants now, though, is a ride back to the apartment she shares with best friend Bekah, since she'll be up at 7 A.M., learning to shoot guns. She got a gift certificate for lessons from her grandmother, and the lessons, she figures, definitely threaten to be interesting, if ethically challenging. "I'm not sure how I feel politically," she says. You start to worry about all your choices, maybe, when hundreds of thousands of teens anoint you a hero via MySpace and LiveJournal posts. Role model isn't a job she signed up for, and the prospect scares her, even if her three bandmates agree she makes a great one.

"It's gonna happen, no matter what," Williams says, somewhat timidly. "But I still think it's cool that, I don't know, a 30-minute break between Tila Tequila and The Real World can be something we were a part of. And it's real -- it's not scripted, or topless, or shimmying like a pole dancer."