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The Summer Punk Went Pop: Oral History of the 2005 Warped Tour

On the first day of Warped’s final run, we present the firsthand story of its watershed year - when Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and others became stars.

By Chris Payne

Chris Payne

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This summer, the Vans Warped Tour — music’s last major traveling festival — is  calling it quits , citing fatigue, disinterested teens, and a marketplace shift towards blowout weekends over season-long treks. But 13 years ago, Warped nearly collapsed beneath the weight of its own success.

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The storm had been brewing for some time. Warped was 11 years old in 2005, and it’d played an integral role in bringing the likes of Green Day, Blink-182, No Doubt, Sublime, and even Eminem to suburban superstardom during the ’90s and early ’00s. An annual Warped trip had become a summertime staple for teens raised on bratty skate punk and ska, but by the middle of the aughts, it had morphed into something completely new. And bigger.

In 2005, a more sensitive, precocious, fashion-focused brand of punk exploded into popular culture. Its eventual poster kids spent the decade’s early years grinding it out in America’s VFW halls, the venerable ethos of Thursday, Saves the Day, and Jimmy Eat World their guiding light. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance played Warped in ‘04 and after drawing fervent crowds, were signed on for the next year early; by the time June ‘05 rolled around, “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” and “Helena” were MTV staples, improbably climbing the Hot 100. 700,000 kids came out that summer, more than any Warped before or since (for context, last year pulled 300,000). Individual bands regularly sold over $30,000 of merch  per day . Bodyguards were needed for the first time. At summer’s end, the tour’s profits hit seven figures. But Warped’s summer-long slog paid another price; across 48 shows in 59 days, musicians and personnel grappled with oversized egos, volatile — if not occasionally hostile — environments, and a sideshow’s worth of distractions far from home, with a massive mainstream audience suddenly watching.

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On the first day of Warped’s final trek, we present the firsthand story of its watershed year.

I. “This Was Like the Moon Landing For This Type of Music”

Tyson Ritter, All-American Rejects vocalist-bassist:  2005 Warped Tour was everything people think about when they want to make Warped something of folklore. It was the real thing.

Kevin Lyman, Warped Tour founder & producer:  The Warped Tour’s only made money on tickets once, and 2005 was the year. If we turn a profit, it’s from sponsorships and merchandise.

Buddy Nielsen, Senses Fail vocalist:  It had everything to do with the scene’s success. This was like the moon landing for this type of music.

Lyman:  We’d done some early bookings. The year before, I had Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance on the smaller stage. The audiences weren’t huge at this point, but they were so engaged, so I said, “Gotta bring them on the main [stage].”

Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy bassist:  That was a surreal moment for us. That was when us and My Chemical Romance were both getting on  TRL  at the same time. It was wild because we’d never experienced that.  (Note: all Fall Out Boy quotes in this piece come from a  previous Billboard interview ).

Lyman:  TRL  was so popular… everyone was watching. They grabbed onto these bands, and radio was playing them.

Nielsen:  Senses Fail did Warped the year before. My Chem wasn’t My Chem yet, as we know them. Senses Fail wasn’t Senses Fail yet. On Warped Tour 2005, everybody was everybody. Fall Out Boy was Fall Out Boy. You had the most bands that were not only successful but, like,  pop music  successful.

Matt Watts, The Starting Line guitarist:  The whole scene started as a left-of-center, DIY thing. Lots of these bands started at VFW or Knights of Columbus Halls. It was such a personal connection with fans. In 2005, it hit a critical mass.

Nielsen:  It was the first time bands had security guards. Pete Wentz and Gerard Way couldn’t get around without them.

Ritter:  The difference between those bands and All-American Rejects? Fall Out Boy, three bodyguards. My Chem had a bodyguard.

Lyman:  The audience coming to Warped Tour transformed from that hardcore person who was out skating or going to the beach to a crowd that was watching TV all summer. We managed to get them off their couches for one day! But they weren’t ready to be in the sun for nine hours. They would stand in front of the stages all day long waiting for those hit songs. It wasn’t like you could just come, watch those bands and leave; you were there the whole day. By the time the band went on stage, these people hadn’t eaten, hadn’t drank water, hadn’t put sunscreen on, so many of them just collapsed. Our medical tents were full.

Lisa Brownlee, Warped Tour tour manager:  I often think of Kevin Lyman as a mad scientist, crossing boundaries that ought not to be crossed when putting together a lineup.

Al Barr, Dropkick Murphys vocalist:  Fall Out Turds and My Chemical Shit Pants — that’s what we called them — were both blowing up, and I kept going around Warped Tour the whole day going, “Jesus Christ, this singer must be so tired because he sings for every band!” Because it all sounded the same to an old timer like me. But that’s when I realized I sound like my dad! Those bands? Not my cup of tea at all. But they were working their asses off, just like we did, and nothing was handed to them. They worked for everything they got.

Lyman:  The core audience was pretty pissed. We talk about punk rock being all-accepting, but a lot of times, it’s still very niche and very “who’s in their club.” This was before Twitter, so they verbalized it to me on message boards. Well, the club got a lot bigger.

II. “They Were Connecting on a Much Deeper Level Than Most of the Other Bands”

Watts:  In the VFW halls, Fall Out Boy put in their 10,000 hours and beyond.

Nielsen:   From Under the Cork Tree  had just come out. Fall Out Boy was huge.

Watts:  They put out the right record at the right time.

Wentz:  It was like, Warped Tour happening at the same time [and hearing], “You guys are super famous, but maybe just on Warped Tour!”

Watts:  Pete Wentz is a captivating dude. Patrick Stump is a great writer.

Justin Pierre, Motion City Soundtrack vocalist-guitarist:  I thought Patrick Stump had an amazing voice. I was very upset at how effortless it seemed. I would have to work 10 times as hard just to pull it off. He was kind of a weirdo, kind of a nerd. I really liked that. There was an unspoken nerd quality we kind of shared. I [recently] found a  picture online  of us coming back from a Target run… I really dug Patrick a lot.

Watts:  Once “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” caught on, it opened up the floodgates.

Andy Hurley, Fall Out Boy drummer:  I remember going to a water park right after we’d gotten to number one on  TRL  that day. I was like, “Yeah, we’re number one!” going down the slides and no one in the park knew at all who we were.

Wentz:  They were like, fucking losers!

Lyman:  Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, I put them on at three or four in the afternoon. All the kids would be in the venue by then, but I knew their fans couldn’t hold up til the end of the day.

Watts:  My Chemical Romance was connecting on a much deeper level than most of the other bands.

Lyman:  A lot of merchandise was being sold. This is where Kate Truscott — who [now] helps run my company — was recognized because she was the merchandise person for My Chemical Romance. They were selling half a semi-truck of merchandise a day at that point. It was crazy.

Kate Truscott, My Chemical Romance merch manager:  I was out on the road with Chevelle, working for a company called BandMerch. I got a call that this new band needed somebody because they were suddenly doing way bigger numbers than anybody expected. They had some guy doing their merch and frankly, he was blowing it. Heather Hannoura [now Heather Gabel] did some shirts for us. Some of the stuff I was selling then is still for sale at Hot Topic. There were gloves with bones on them. They had fingers and no one bought them, so I would cut the fingertips off and then kids loved them!

Watts:  There were tons of kids coming out dressed in My Chem-appropriate attire. I use the term “goth vibes” responsibly: dark hair, black or red t-shirt, eye makeup.

Truscott:  One part of the summer, [guitarist] Frank Iero thought he was having some sort of brain bleed; He was blowing his nose and this red stuff was coming out. A doctor looked at it and was like, “Dude, that’s makeup.”

Lyman:  Some days, I heard they were doing $30,000 to $50,000 in merchandise.

Truscott:  Our highest day was $60,000, which to my knowledge, is a record that’s yet to be beaten by any band on Warped. It was in Detroit, a 30,000-person show at the Silverdome. Headed to banks on days off, our tour manager would be like, “What’s in your backpack? You can’t walk to the bank with $250,000 on you!”

Watts:  When you see bands changing pop culture, you see fans embracing their style.

Truscott:  The only band that had more items for sale than us was the Murphys. They used Warped as a warehouse sale every summer [ Laughs ].

Lyman:  Dropkick Murphys were probably the highest paid band on that year’s tour. Them and the Offspring were probably both making $15,000 to $17,000 [per show]. I had to book Fall Out Boy, $1,500. Atreyu, $1,500. Story of the Year, probably $750. I was delivering this whole package of bands. I don’t have the exact price, but I could probably tell you it was about $125,000 a show, talent-wise. You had to try to be right on the edge.

Nielsen:  Everybody was literally printing money. Everybody was stoked.

Lyman:  Fall Out Boy tended to go out, hang around the parties a little more… My Chemical Romance, I don’t think anyone in the band was really a partier.

Truscott:  There was nothing salacious. Frank is still married to the girl he was dating back then. [Guitarist] Ray [Toro] is still with the same girl. Gerard’s had a couple different girlfriends, but it was like, three in the 20 years I’ve known him, and now he’s married.

Lyman:  They were always nice to the women on our tour, the girls working with these bands.

Truscott:  I had a boxset of the  Charmed  DVDs. Gerard came by asking what they were about. I’m like, “It’s about witches that own a bar,” and he was like, “I can get behind that.”

Ritter:  You’d stroll this alley of buses and see Gerard doing a sketch in front of the headlights on the ground in front of his bus. He was too shy to talk to the group, but he could still sit out in front of his bus drawing a piece of art, which I thought was so fun. He would get in front of the headlights and show off his talent.

Truscott:  Gerard was always doing art. He hung out by himself a lot, drank coffee. A lot of coffee.

Pierre:  I think someone was like, “Oh he’s sober, too! You should hang out!”

Truscott:  We all lived on the same bus together. They turned the back lounge of our bus into a studio. My bunk was right up against it. I remember when they were writing “I Don’t Love You” [from 2006’s  Welcome to the Black Parade ]. Bob [Bryar] put a drum kit in the back and Gerard was doing vocals. It was four in the morning and I remember hearing the lyrics and opening the door like, “That’s a fucking brutal song!”

III. “Rockstar Shit Was Going On”

Lyman:  We were at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit and 30,000 people showed up. That might’ve been the second biggest Warped show of all time. We had this massive show at the sports arena at Long Beach State, outside of L.A.. That was probably the biggest show.

Truscott:  I was selling merch out of a 10 foot by 10 foot tent. The crowd would push into it, start crushing into us. I had to get up on the table a couple times and say nobody was getting anything until everybody calmed down. There was a day in Camden, NJ — the site was too small for the crowd there — I had to stand on my table and wave down security because kids were moshing and throwing themselves inside our tent.

Watts:  There’d be signings all day. There was no barrier between the artists and the fans.

Ritter:  All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, and My Chem — we’d do signings all day, every day. You’d try to get through 400 people in two hours. It became a chore, literally sitting for 400 people that walked by you asking, “Hi, how are ya?”

Pierre:  I always liked hanging out, signing things, meeting the people that liked our music. That was my favorite thing I did, next to performing.

Watts:  I bought a Metro scooter —  basically a fake Vespa — for like $500. I would cruise around after shows to find hotel swimming pools and go swimming a bunch. Because the shower situation at Warped is sometimes less than ideal.

Brownlee:  I couldn’t get from stage to stage fast enough to see the bands I wanted to see. The bill was so stacked.

Ritter:  When you play Warped, you get thirty minutes. These were thirty-minute sets.

Watts:  There are no “set” set times. It’s sort of drawn from a lottery in the morning.

Nielsen:  How did our sets sound? Fucking terrible [ Laughs ]. Back then we were still figuring it out. Generally nobody really sounds that great at Warped Tour. It’s windy and hot.

Lyman:  We had a massive storm July 15 at Race City Motorsport Park in Calgary, Alberta. We had a lot of storms through the years, but that one was crazy. It looked like just clouds coming, but it was actually clouds of dust and wind. It blew tents 25 feet in the air. When it hit, the Transplants were onstage. I’ll never forget them playing while I was trying to hold all the tents down.

Barr: Transplants were on that tour. I spent a ton of time with my friend [Transplants vocalist] Skinhead Rob [Aston].

Nielsen: You had [Transplants drummer] Travis Barker walking around with his television show Meet the Barkers .

Barr: One day I was going over to see Skinhead Rob, and this guy from MTV was getting thrown out of their bus because he had asked Travis and Rob if they got dressed up in monkey suits for fun. Rob just lost his shit on the guy.

Lyman:  Billy Idol was trying to make a reconnection with fans, so they wanted him to play some Warped dates in between his own tour routing.

Nielsen:  Billy Idol! Billy Idol was fucking hilarious. He did not know what Warped Tour was. You never wanted to be playing near him because you had to deal with him starting late and his set going over 10 minutes. He didn’t give a shit.

Lyman:  You don’t start the stage next door until the other band is done. In Minnesota, it was a nightmare. My stage managers weren’t communicating and there was a meltdown onstage and they started both stages, so you had Billy Idol singing “Rebel Yell” and then Fall Out Boy singing something. It was merging into this mashup by my tour bus.

Nielsen:  He’d come out of the bus shirtless talking to himself like, “WHITE WEDDING!”, practicing his vocals. Billy Idol was fucking wild, just on another planet.

Barr:  I remember walking around thinking, who is this heavy, ferocious punk band playing? And I’m like, oh my god, it’s the Offspring. Now the Offspring are a great band but they’re not a ferocious punk band. But on the backdrop of all these pop-punk and emo bands…

Nielsen:  [Frontman]   Dexter [Holland] was flying in a plane from show to show. One time he took our tour manager: “Come fly to the next show!”

Lyman:  He didn’t know these bands but he’d invite them to go to the next city with him. If you were sitting here in Cincinnati and he would say, “Hey Kevin, I want to take so-and-so to Chicago with me. Can you put them on by 6 so we can be at the airport by 8?” He would fly the band, pick up a couple hotel rooms for them, and go party in the city.

Nielsen:  Rockstar shit was going on.

Lyman:  Then you had Avenged Sevenfold. You knew they were gonna be big because they were the first band that ever showed up on Warped Tour with a smoke machine.

Nielsen:  You’d look up in the sky and see a cloud of smoke and be like, “Avenged Sevenfold must be on!” Broad daylight, it looks like the stage is on fire.

Lyman:  Avenged Sevenfold always liked to gamble — dice and poker. The Offspring, too, but not Dexter. Cee-lo, I’m sure the Murphys were in the middle of that.

Barr:  I myself wasn’t, but our crew were big into poker. They’d play with Avenged Sevenfold almost every night.

Watts:  The first night of tour, I remember our drummer, Tom Gryskewicz cleaning up against… I think it was one of the Transplants dudes. Tom came back to the bus with money and we were all like, “What did you do?” I think he probably ended up losing it back to those dudes at some point.

Spencer Chamberlain, Underoath vocalist:  A band — who we won’t name — needed money. We let them borrow money and they all came back with new clothes and tattoos.

Aaron Gillespie, Underoath drummer-vocalist:  Oh my god, that’s right! They were struggling on the tour…

Chamberlain:  They were struggling with something else. But we can’t say, because people might know. They went to the Christian band, knowing we’d be giving.

Gillespie:  Did we give them a bunch of money or a little bit?

Chamberlain:  A bunch.

IV. “I’ve Got These Girl Bands, Can I Set Up?” 

Lyman:  Shira? My God. How do these people come into your life, you know?

Shira Yevin, Shiragirl vocalist; Shiragirl Stage founder and producer:  I was on the tour in 2003, working for the Truth campaign as an emcee. I noticed there were very few, if any, females onstage. I didn’t understand why. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and was friends with all sorts of all-girl punk and hardcore bands. My band approached Kevin in 2004.

Lyman:  Shira just showed up with her stage. Just showed up. In Englishtown, NJ, with this pink truck: “I’ve got these girl bands, can I set up?”

Yevin:  He said, “Okay, great idea, maybe next year. It’s the tour’s tenth anniversary, we got a lot going on.” I said, “Next year?!”

Lyman:  She’s from New Jersey, so you know how progressive people from New Jersey won’t take no for an answer.

Yevin:  We ended up crashing the tour. I drove in with my pink RV and just set up — super scrappy punk rock. Kevin walked by and loved it: “Shira, this is great. So are you on for the whole tour now?”

Lyman:  Next thing you know, she’s hanging over by my bus, hitting me up about how she’s going to do the Shiragirl Stage in 2005.

Shiragirl Talks Hitting the Road For Final Warped Tour, Shares Punk Pop Anthem 'Summers Comin'…

Yevin:  2005 was the year we made it legit. His team helped us get sponsorships for the stage. MySpace was our media partner. We hand-painted their logo on our truck. We did the whole application process for the Shiragirl Stage through MySpace. In the 2005 music scene, MySpace was a big platform for how new artists came up. The Dollyrots played that year and were amazing. L7’s bassist Jennifer Finch had this side project called The Shocker — it was really cool to have them on Shiragirl. They repped old-school Warped.

Truscott:  We were a pretty strong bunch of babes, the other women on Warped Tour. We stuck together and the guys were really supportive of us. It was probably the opposite of what everybody would expect me to say — that it was really hard and that I had to really earn my stripes. But that wasn’t a big issue. They saw me work hard and we all respected each other. I remember there was a day some kid stole from me at My Chem’s merch table. A bunch of the other guys saw it and chased him down and brought him back to me.

Yevin:  We were not taken seriously. At first, especially. We showed up in this beat-up truck and there were bets against how long we would last. By the end, they respected us a lot more.

V. “I Know a Lot of Real Hard Motherfuckers”

Watts:  The cookouts were probably the highlight of Warped Tour. The sun goes down and it’s not 100 degrees anymore!

Pierre:  Everybody had to come to lunch and dinner, if you wanted to eat. It made me kind of nervous, like high school in a way. If I’m by myself, shit, where do I sit? I kind of know these people, but I kind of don’t. I heard that people thought I was a huge asshole because I didn’t talk to anyone, but I was too nervous.

Watts:  Justin was a little bit more introverted, but he was always incredibly welcoming to us. I remember Motion City Soundtrack hitting their stride that year.  Commit This to Memory  had just come out. They were one of the few indie-alternative, left-of-center-leaning bands. They came from a different world, but still hit all the boxes for a fan going to Warped Tour.

Pierre:  I bonded with Gerard over Coke Zero, which had just come out. I was in their bus for some reason: “Oh my god, you got Coke Zero?” If I’m drinking Coke Zero in ’05, I think I was sober then, because that’s when I basically went from alcohol to caffeine. I would drink four or five Monster Energy Drinks a day. It was really bad. I’d reward myself after playing a show with two Monster Energy Drinks [ Laughs ].

Watts:  This was before people were on their cell phones 24/7. So it was one of the last times in my life I remember just hanging out with a bunch of people and not having a phone, not being interrupted by anything like that. Just shared experiences, shared connections.

Senses Fail's Buddy Nielsen Fights to Survive a Chaotic Present & His Band's Toxic Past

Nielsen:  There used to be huge parties afterwards, sort of a teen movie set thing.

Ritter:  It was like  Grease  on the road. Everybody was looking for their Sandra Dee.

Nielsen:  There’d be 20,000 people at each show and afterwards, two or three thousand would wind up getting backstage. It was a different time. You weren’t as worried about five thousand people partying at the end of the night — epic bonfire parties with every band and also people that found a way to stay. If you stayed long enough, security left, so…

Ritter:  I was 20. I’m 34 now. So think I remember my M-O was, okay the show’s over, who’s gonna get me stoned?

? Lyman:  Warped kind of self-regulates on drugs and alcohol because it’s such a hard-working tour and you don’t know when you’re gonna play. I was out every night; if someone goes a little hard at a party, what’s the best cure for that? Put them on 11:30 the next morning. Be the first band up. That’ll cure people.

Gillespie:  We drank, but we weren’t like, partying hard.

Watts:  There was definitely drinking, but there weren’t a lot of drugs. We were never a drug band, so if there was, it didn’t hit our orbit.

Nielsen:  I was pretty much YOLO-ing every moment of every day. I was 21 running around smoking weed, drinking beer, hanging out.

Lyman:  During this period, there were maybe some pills going around Warped, but I don’t know.

Ritter:  It was all about the nomadic journey of the night. You’d bounce from bus to bus, picking up a beer, hitting on a girl, hitting on whoever you were hitting on.

Barr:  I’ll omit their name, but there was a band that got drunk and decided to disrespect Steve O’Sullivan, who was head of Warped Tour’s security at the time. We were in Phoenix, his wife was pregnant with their first kid, and he was riding in the car with her and this band was drunk and standing in the way. They asked him to move and got in his face, in his wife’s face. The next day I assembled a group of characters you’d look at and say, “I don’t want to fight one of these guys, let alone have one of them come into my tent.” I know a lot of real hard motherfuckers. [We confronted the band and] said, “So you’re the band that decided to disrespect Steve O’Sullivan and his pregnant wife? Shut your little tent down, you’re gonna find Steve, and you’re gonna throw yourself down at his knees and apologize to him. If we don’t hear you’ve done this in the next twenty minutes, we’re gonna be back.” Five minutes later, Steve pulls up on his golf cart like, “What did you do? They were so apologetic and so polite!”

Nielsen:  People would throw water. It was like, dude, it’s 90 degrees out — don’t throw it. Every day, you’re getting nailed with water being thrown from the crowd.

Lyman:  Buddy from Senses Fail, to be honest, was a shithead mostly. He hadn’t grown up yet.

Nielsen:  We were playing Phoenix and someone threw a fucking jug of water. I caught it by the handle and whipped it back into the crowd as hard as I could and literally watched it bee-line a hundred yards and slam this girl right in the face. This poor young girl, I think she was like 16 years old. I ended up knocking out one of her teeth, totally by accident. I wound up corresponding with her father and her afterwards. I remember we invited her to a show, gave her some merch and were really sorry.

Lyman:  Buddy was one of those kids that we knew we had redeeming qualities. So we kept working with Buddy. You don’t want to write him off, you know? Another member of Senses Fail [now ex-member] got taken behind the bus, because he wore a shirt that had the C-word on it. I know the Dropkick Murphys and the Transplants were involved. He got taken behind the bus and they said, “Look, you’re going to either get rid of that shirt because you see all the women running this, or you’re going to eat the shirt. If you ever wear it again you’re going to lose option one.”

VI. “This Was Paramore ’s First Tour”

Lyman:  We had [the traveling punk and hardcore tour] Taste of Chaos [in early 2005] and Livia Tortella [of Atlantic Records] goes, “Hey, Kevin you’ve got to check out this girl Hayley Williams and Paramore.”

Gillespie:  We were friends with Paramore. We met Hayley when she was 16 and [drummer] Zac [Farro] was 14. Hayley opened up acoustic for us on Taste of Chaos.

Lyman:  I put her on right before Killswitch Engage. She held her own. I was like, “Okay, we have to figure this out for Warped.” But I didn’t have anywhere to put them because I already booked the tour…  So I turned Shira on to her and she figured it out for the Shiragirl Stage.

Yevin:  The label flew me down to see the band in Orlando, and once I saw it, I got it. They were amazing — 16 years old! Hayley’s dad was the tour manager.

Lyman:  I remember the station wagon… Dad was still driving them around at that point.

Yevin:  This was Paramore’s first tour.

Chamberlain:  Paramore were like our little brothers. We hung out with them. They had similar viewpoints on life and we just got along with those kids. I think we all knew they were gonna be big.

Yevin:  They were actually signed to Atlantic, but their music was put out by Fueled By Ramen. So they had label support, but they were a new band. They were doing a lot of the Christian rock festivals. They came out on Warped right when their first album was coming out. The kids just loved it. The early crowds were huge.

Chamberlain:  Zac was like a little mini-Aaron. He would hit [the drums] so hard that the drum riser broke once.

Yevin:  Hayley was just one of the guys. That was sort of her thing. She wore the same t-shirt every day, the red and blue striped shirt  she wears in the “All We Know” video . She was very sweet, polite, very reserved. No makeup. Just came on, did her set, went back in the van, read her book. It was a little bit of a culture shock for us. We were these radical feminist punk rock riot grrrls. They were a very reserved band. They prayed before they went onstage. They kinda kept to themselves, but they killed it onstage.

Gillespie:  Hayley’s the real fucking deal. Deserves everything she’s got.

VII. “Sonny Moore’s Halo Name Was Skrillex”

Chamberlain:  ’05 was the first Warped Tour with [Tampa/L.A.-based post-hardcore band] From First to Last. We’d taken them on their first tour with [vocalist] Sonny Moore, so we were already buddies.

Nielsen:  This was when Wes Borland was in From First to Last. That blew my mind. Why the hell is a guy from Limp Bizkit here? I remember hanging out with Sonny and giving him a hard time, as a joke. And then he fucking turns into Skrillex [ Laughs ]. Ridiculous.

Chamberlain:  They used to come to our tour bus to play  Halo . Sonny Moore’s Halo name was Skrillex.

Gillespie:  He was having trouble with his voice back then.

Chamberlain:  He was such a sweetheart, and he had a lil’ personality on him, too. He would ask me, “How do you guys sing every night?”

Lyman:  The following year, he kind of changed to a kid named Skrillex. He came to Pomona, Cali. and played one of his first shows… Then I tried to book him that following summer and I think I could have got him for $1,500. I said, “He’s just sitting playing music on a computer, who the hell’s gonna care about this?” But I liked him a lot. Then by that next year, he was making $100,000 a gig or something.

VIII. “Equal Parts Relief and Sadness”

Ritter:  I think we played 19, 20 days in a row. By the end of it I wasn’t even talking. I was just giving sign language to people, clicks and whistles!

Truscott:  It ended in Boston: pouring rain, muddy, muggy New England summer day. Everybody was just done.

Pierre:  When it ended? Equal parts relief and sadness.

Yevin:  We were just grateful to have survived on our end. And we knew we were gonna do it the next year. There were bets against us saying we weren’t gonna make it. But we did. We got an MTV Warpie Award — “most punk rock way to win a place in the family.”

Lyman:  What were our profits that year? That year was seven figures.

Warped Tour 2018 Lineup: All Time Low, Simple Plan & 3OH!3 Return for Final Run

Watts:  The Starting Line toured with Fall Out Boy again in the fall, on the Nintendo Fusion Tour alongside Motion City Soundtrack, Boys Night Out, and Panic! At the Disco. I wonder what venues that tour would get if it happened in 2018; Panic! is bigger than they ever were. Same thing with Fall Out Boy. We’d be happy to be along for the ride. We’d play outdoors if we had to!

Chamberlain:  I think a lot of the younger bands now are kind of why Warped Tour’s ending. Warped Tour was a place where kids went to see bands they loved and discover new bands. Somehow over the last couple years it changed to bands on their first record with two busses, bodyguards, personal assistants. I think kids weren’t feeling as connected.

Gillespie:  It was so about discovery.

Chamberlain:  It got to be about how big of a rockstar you are.

Gillespie:  And that’s not why Kevin started it.

Lyman:  Relationships in this business were a lot different then. You could talk to someone and plan on working with them for a few years, you know? And they would understand that the first couple years, they weren’t helping you sell tickets. But hopefully that third year, they were actually helping to pull other bands like them along. A Day To Remember played one show in 2005, on the Ernie Ball battle of the Bands Stage. And then they fell into that same cycle, playing four more years… Now, that doesn’t exist in this world. Bands say, “Oh, we need Warped Tour to get to an audience” and then they decide to change their direction as a band.

Brownlee:  If you have been on Warped Tour as long as I have (and you’re as old as I am), it’s very difficult to have recall memory on specifics, including years. I wish I had the foresight to keep a journal for times like these… Our memories are a series of embellished half-truths. But in terms of the Vans Warped Tour, truth has always been stranger than fiction.

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In Conversation: Hayley Williams

The front woman on what went wrong with paramore, warped tour war stories, and her new solo life..

When Hayley Williams started the pop-punk group Paramore at 15, all she wanted was to be in a band with her best guy friends. And for a while, that’s what she did. But as she grew into an icon for emo kids , touring worldwide and releasing platinum albums with her band, Paramore was disintegrating. The narrative circulated by former bandmate Josh Farro, and favored by music trades, was that Williams was a domineering leader. “Bands have been honest about how much they hate each other, and you never think, Oh, Thom Yorke must be the fucking Hitler of Radiohead ,” Williams, now 31, said. “I wonder if it’s simply because I’m a woman? I could have had a dick and the story wouldn’t have gotten any traction.”

Farro and his brother Zac left the band in 2010, and over the years Paramore went through multiple member changes. (Zac returned in 2017.) After a tour in 2018, Williams decided that she, too, needed a break. She was going through a divorce (she’d married her longtime partner Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory in 2016), and her depression had become unmanageable. She admitted herself to an intense therapy clinic. And in 2019, she began writing the thing she swore she never would: a solo album. Petals for Armor, an album released in three parts, out in full May 8, is a meditative odyssey through Williams’s past and her search for creative solitude.

Over Skype, Williams is beneath a weighted blanket, and her dog, Alf, is goading her into giving him attention. “Hi!” she says, smiling. “Welcome to my bed. It usually takes more than a couple meetings before I get someone in here.”

Who was the last person you hung out with before quarantine? It was Joey [Howard, Paramore’s touring bassist and Petals for Armor co-writer] and Mike Kluge, who does visuals for Paramore. I went to Mike’s to talk about what the live show was gonna look like. We were getting ready to rehearse. It was the longest hang. Pizza in the living room with a huge screen to show all of the ideas. It feels like ten years ago.

Are there things you think you took for granted, now that you’re quarantined? I took everything for granted. I’ve thought about taking my car to the drive-through car wash — I think those aren’t closed right now — just to listen to music and sit somewhere where a machine is doing something for me.

You recently postponed your tour until 2021. Does it make sense to put a record out without touring it? The way I felt about it was everything happens when it’s meant to happen. There are moments where I feel ridiculous putting out music and I don’t feel equipped to handle what comes with that. You’re putting it out there to get something back, whether that’s a response or someone to buy a ticket to come and see you. Lately, I need to feel like this is coming out of me. I’ve been pregnant with it for so long. If I were to push this back, I would probably feel really depressed right now.

You’ve done a lot of work in therapy for your depression. In 2018, you wrote in an op-ed in Paper that at one point you’d hoped to die. What made you write that? I felt scared to talk about depression for a long time. When I wrote that, I hadn’t been diagnosed. I’m a smart enough person. I can think through what I’m going through even when I’m really down on myself. A lot of people with anxiety or depression are intellectual and can understand, but it’s bigger than that. It’s a chemical problem. I was realizing how out of my control it was. It mattered to talk about it. Getting that down in front of me was a turning point.

Who responded to it? People who were close to me who had not understood everything. Everything leading up to the summer of 2018 — one of the most beautiful moments in our band’s life — was a warm-up. We were learning how to speak to each other on an adult level. That was a good primer for me. By the time I did the Paper essay, I’d been articulating these feelings to my family. Now, when my friend Bethany [Cosentino] from Best Coast calls and we’re both going through something, we can talk about options: things we do have, ways that we can get around it. Even if we just need to vent.

What’s powerful about the venting? Being a woman in the music industry is not often a conversation I love to have. It’s just my existence. It would be like someone being to anyone: “What’s it like to have nipples?” I don’t know. I’ve always had them. But after going through some of the stuff I’ve gone through, I’ve realized how lonely I felt for a long time because I wasn’t able to share my weaknesses with people. You cherry-pick the ones you want to put in a song. Anger was my medium for a long time. When it comes to what’s underneath that anger, that shit is so scary. Putting some of it out there has made me more empathetic and connected to my fellow female artists. [Nashville-based singer-songwriter] Julien Baker and I have had great conversations that make me understand something in my brain from a different vantage point. I could have always had access to this community of people who need each other.

Julien’s life is so different from mine. She grew up in Tennessee and has anxieties I’ve never had to deal with. A lot of things are innate to a woman’s experience in the world and also in the music scene. The shared empathy we have for one another is access to a cult I didn’t know I had an in for. I had to find the door and whisper some secret word. I needed to be vulnerable in a new way.

Bethany Cosentino has used anger as a medium in the past, too. Was there a lightbulb moment between you and her about mental-health issues? There’s a lot of lightbulb moments with Bethany. We toured together in the midst of breakups from long-term relationships. We struggled with so many of the same manifestations of anxiety. Hormonal stuff, skin. We have a text thread that’s basically “Acne Anonymous.” We had a couple nights before she got sober . We were playing a casino. We’d eaten at the hotel, had a bottle of wine, ate loads of pasta, and talked about the shit we were going through — how we’d not been alone in a long time but we’d been lonely for so long, what [being on] tour felt like. Best Coast was opening for Paramore, but her hotel room was so much nicer than mine. I was like, “Holy shit! I’m staying here tonight!” We hung out in her room and did face masks. We watched Shark Tank . I had a massive hangover the next day.

We’re both lucky. We have amazing guys in our bands. I’m at the point now where if someone can’t call themselves a feminist, male or female, I’m like, “What are you then?” I wish it didn’t have to be a word — feminism. It’s just common decency.

Was there a point when you didn’t like the word feminism ? Yes. I just talked to Alicia [Bognanno] from [the Nashville-based punk band] Bully about this. For a long time, people would ask us about being women. I would get an opportunity and think either I don’t deserve it, or It’s only because I’m a woman, or I want to belittle it because I don’t want to stand apart from the guys. I don’t want to be treated specially. I also don’t want to be treated like shit. She started touring [when she was] a little bit older than I [was when I started]. The shit she had to put up with as a woman in her 20s is obscene. People saying [to her], “Who are you fucking?” when you walk into a venue. I was 16. People thought I was a merch girl. I looked like I was 12. I wasn’t fucking anyone, you know what I mean?

Paramore is almost two decades old. Watching old “ webisodes ” the band made, you were always the only female in male spaces. It’s not a glamorous world. Were there ever times when you were told you were high maintenance? No. I made sure I would never be high maintenance. I got shit for not wearing lip balm in a photo shoot. ChapStick. The photographer wanted me to try it, and I was like, “The guys aren’t doing anything, I’m not doing shit!” The first time we got offered Warped Tour [in 2005], I’d been waiting. Never attended, was too young, wasn’t allowed. The guys and I didn’t listen to pop punk before writing “ Pressure .” We listened to heavier stuff like Deftones. We wanted to be darker. Suddenly, we wrote “Pressure,” and that was it — we were gonna write emo bops! Sick! I’m psyched that happened. But suddenly the type of attention we were getting was different. I did not know how toxic that world could be.

The Warped world? The pop-punk and emo scene in the early 2000s. It was brutally misogynistic. A lot of internalized sexism, and even when you were lucky enough to meet other bands who were kind and respectful, there was other shit that wasn’t. And I was really feisty. We got offered Warped tour, and there was a caveat: “It’s a stage called the Shiragirl Stage. It’s all female.” I was pissed! I wanted to qualify for a real stage. When I’ve been offered female opportunities, it feels like a backhanded compliment. But people sometimes think that’s anti-feminist, that I don’t wanna be grouped in with the girls. As a 16-year-old who had dreams of playing with the big boys, it felt like we were being slighted. That summer we went out, and I’ll never forget [it]. We played in Florida, and the stage was a truck that had a flatbed on it. It was so flimsy it would shake and fall apart. There might have been one other female in a band [on tour], and people were gawking. I don’t think in a pervy way. They were confused, like, What’s in this for me? What’s she singing about? I’m a guy — how do I relate?

You think it was that overt? I purposely wrote without pronouns for years because of it. Then I was like, Fuck it, I don’t care . Some things won’t have pronouns, but when it’s my experience it will. We had to prove ourselves very hard. I would spit farther, yell louder, and thrash my neck wilder than anyone. The next summer, we moved up to a slightly bigger stage. That was the year of the fucking condoms.

The year of the condoms? Dude, yeah. Summer of condoms, 2006 . I got condoms thrown at me. In 2005, I wore T-shirts every day. In 2006, I was a little more comfortable. I’d wear a tank top. But my chest was exposed. We were in San Diego or San Francisco, and a condom flew at me , and it stuck to my chest while I performed. I was so embarrassed. I started talking shit because I was so young and arrogant. I don’t think I was wrong. It’s just I have more anxiety now than I did at 16. I had way more confidence then. Ignorant confidence. Another time, we toured with a band and we were on their bus and one of their friends said something about my pussy. In front of me. And—

One of whose friends? They were embarrassed. I don’t wanna give them away. It wasn’t a huge band — one of the openers.

What did they say? I can’t remember what this guy said because I saw red so fast, but he referred to my pussy. I was literally 16, about to turn 17. Everyone was laughing. No one paid fucking attention. I was like, “Why do you think it’s cool to refer to my pussy?”

How old were they? In their late 20s. The guy and the girl that were in the band … Fuck it. The band was Straylight Run — one of the guys from Taking Back Sunday and his sister . She was my saving grace. It was the first time I’d ever toured with a woman. She was much older than me. But John [Nolan from Taking Back Sunday] was so pissed . Once I spoke how I felt into existence, it was like I created a vacuum: Oh, yeah, that’s not okay. I was so much bolder when the opportunity arose for me to speak up for myself, because the internet wasn’t what it is today. Only two years later, I became pretty silenced.

Silenced how? You stopped fighting about your experiences of sexism? I was loud about the things I thought I could win: overt injustices against my femininity or the band. There was stuff in the press that was wrong. I hate to feel misrepresented. When people started to talk about something I said to Zac in the van on the way to a show, and there was a journalist there , and they got me wrong because they don’t have context for our friendship … I was a little quieter the more confused I became about who I was. I’m not sure if the confusion came from the mirror image all over the press about me or if it was personal decisions I was making that were taking me off course. Or if it was a perfect storm of both.

Paramore has been a band for 16 years amid drama and lineup changes. Josh Farro’s comments to the public when he and his brother Zac quit in 2010 set up a narrative that you were a tyrannical leader nobody could work with. We could interpret that now as sexist. Thank you for saying that. I find it interesting that bands we’ve loved who have been through lineup changes — even bands who haven’t — have been honest about how much they hate each other, and you never question their loyalty. You never think, Oh, Thom Yorke must be the fucking Hitler of Radiohead. He can be an asshole. I wonder if it’s simply because I’m a woman? I could have had a dick and the story wouldn’t have gotten any traction. For a long time I was mad. Now I look back and I think we needed that to happen. There needed to be infections cut out. We needed to shed blood.

So Josh leaving was necessary? Yeah, he made those incisions himself. That was so painful. But the toxicity between the five of us? We weren’t really friends at that point. Now, when I run into Josh, I barely feel anything. No part of me is triggered.

Do you feel any love toward him now? You know what I feel? If I can remember right, this is what [guitarist] Taylor [York] and I said to Josh when we ran into him in a coffee shop. We said, “We did something that was so crazy and unbelievable. One day we were at school together. The next minute we were at Wembley!” Wembley was a shitty show. Backstage? Terrible.

What happened? [ Pause. ] [Josh] asked me what monetarily I thought he was worth.

How did you react? I looked at him and said, “I’m not good with numbers. Are you kidding me? Don’t ask me that.” He [Josh] knew they [Josh and his brother Zac] were gonna leave, that this was some of their last shows. He was trying to figure out if he was going to take legal action against us to own the name or … I don’t remember everything he was going to fight for, but he ended up not. It’s not easy to fight your friend. What I like to believe is there was a moment when he realized it wasn’t worth it. It all got dropped. It sucked. You didn’t think you would come out of it. And [Paramore has] made two albums since then that are the best we’ve ever made.

You were originally signed to Atlantic in 2003 as a solo star, but you fought with the label to let you pursue your goal of being in a band. Did you understand the ramifications of being the only name on the contract? No. I thought I was smarter than everyone. I’m 15 at the time. I wonder what words I used because I didn’t have the perspective I do at 31. We had all these songs the label liked more than the songs I’d written by myself, but the label wanted me to put them out as Hayley. I didn’t want to do that. I told [the then-president of Atlantic] Julie Greenwald I didn’t want to put out a song or do interviews under my name. There was a heated conversation with a team of people in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life. It was a very empowered moment. My voice was shaking. I was crying.

A boardroom meeting? Yeah, attorneys and shit. There was a bidding thing going on. It was the early 2000s. Avril Lavigne was fucking massive. Kelly Clarkson was on her heels trying to do guitar pop. Ashlee Simpson had signed with Geffen and is pop punk. Suddenly I was this prospect for a label. My dad and my mom wanted me to be smart. They didn’t want me to pass this up. I’d have that talk with them, then go to the guys and be like, “I don’t know!” I didn’t want to do this as Hayley. I was like, “You’re the only label that’s entertained the thought of the band, so let’s figure out how to make this work.” During that time, we found our manager, Mark [Mercado].

I really thought a contract didn’t matter. In a lot of ways it doesn’t. I was so ashamed of myself for being the only name on the contract. Later, Mark was like, “Here are all the bands where only one person is signed.” I’m not gonna list them. I’m not gonna be a rat. But it’s not that big a deal. My thing was, “Mark, just make sure everyone’s safe.” I don’t want to know about contracts. It never mattered to me. I was so ashamed of myself for being the only name on the contract. I’ve never talked about this. I still don’t know how to articulate it. I feel like the part of me that speaks on it is still 15.

The impostor syndrome stuck with you. What bothered me the most is people pitted us against each other as friends, as if I was masterminding some crazy plan. I tried to mastermind like, “I’m gonna fuck over Atlantic Records! This is gonna be a band after all!” What happened was great. Fueled by Ramen was working with Atlantic, and we wanted to be on a label like that. I didn’t wanna put out an album of songs I wrote with my bandmates and recorded alone. Ironic because that’s what I’m doing now! That’s what the song “ Conspiracy ” is about. I felt like I’d lost all my power. Everyone was against me. All I had was my bandmates, and even they’re looking at me like, “Why aren’t we in this together?” And I was like, “We are in this together.” It’s just the nature of it. You get enough people whispering in your ear and everyone starts to think some shit’s going down. That was amplified in the press. Specifically when we came to the U.K. for the first time.

The U.K. music press does have a knack for tearing the bands they love apart. Oh my God, yes. Let’s be real. If we didn’t have all that stupid fucking drama for all those years, would people even fucking know who we are anymore? Did that or did that not help us during some of the slower years? I don’t know. I’m not trying to go back and fix it. After Laughter was such a sweet time. Especially for me and how depressed I was. We enjoyed each other, we talked about this stuff. Zac [Farro] was able to talk to us about where he was when he quit. I didn’t talk to him for six years.

At all? At all. The first time I talked to him was when we were playing a headline show in Auckland during self-titled [2013]. Zac was living in New Zealand. We were in his territory. I was trying to take inventory of how that felt in my body. I wasn’t mad anymore. As I’m sitting in my hotel room thinking about it, a commercial for a festival comes on and Zac’s band HalfNoise is on. I was surprised I felt so proud. Out of nowhere. Six years had gone by, but I was like, “Fuck, yeah, that’s my boy Zac.” I remembered him making GarageBand demos in the van, and now he was playing a festival in New Zealand on his own. I looked up his email address, and I wrote him: “You just came on my TV. All I wanna say is that I’m so proud of you.” That’s when the ice was broken.

How did he respond? He was so sweet, like, “I can’t come to your show, but I’m so proud of you and I miss you.” We didn’t end up hanging out for a while. It wasn’t until we got into the studio for After Laughter . I was nervous to hang with him again. It was so life-affirming. Me, Taylor, and Zac sitting in a room again. They were the guys I hung out with when we were younger. When I was 13 or 14 and I had a crush on Josh, he didn’t like me back. He would go hang out with his girlfriend, who I wrote “ Misery Business ” about because I was a dick. I would hang out with Taylor and Zac. We’d sit on Instant Messenger and be idiots. It’s so surreal to me to still play music with them, let alone enjoy knowing them.

With those relationships fixed, you went out on the After Laughter tour, but you had just begun the process of your divorce. What were you faced with when the tour stopped and you came home? I never took care of what was going to happen with my dog. I left it because it was too painful to sort in the midst of a deafening sense of failure. My parents’ divorce was the pivotal moment of my life. I keep discovering ways in which it asks me how to work on myself.

I came home in August or September [2018] from After Laughter. There’s a post I made on Instagram on the way home from Japan, like, “I’m ready to go back and heal for real.” I don’t think I knew what I was saying. Had I known what healing looked like, I never would have looked forward to it. I would have wanted to book another tour. I come home and there’s a week of flying high — I finished this album cycle with my guys and shit’s great! Then I realized I didn’t wanna trade my dog back and forth anymore.

I assume you had to see your ex regularly to do that? Yeah. And there’s no growing from that. Look, maybe some couples can do that. Not this one. I had to get therapy. I was having a lot of bad dreams. I still do. Now I think the dreams I have are my body processing things so my consciousness doesn’t have to do it in the day, like it’s working out the kinks.

What are the dreams? They’re pretty fucked. There’s often water in my dreams. I’ve always written about relationships using water metaphors. My most memorable recurring dreams from childhood are all water related. I started to have a lot of those again. It resulted in me having panic attacks, and I ended up in a hospital. I’d faint.

When was this? Late 2018. It’s been a slow lesson for me — how much power our emotions have on our physical health. It started to happen because I was in denial. I found a facility where I could go and be in a safe group or by myself and talk. That’s where I was diagnosed with depression and PTSD. Talk therapy has been more important for me than medicine. Now I don’t deny stuff that I felt or was exposed to through my mom and other women in the family. Their experiences were carried down and not corrected or taken care of.

Did the work help you understand why you were getting a divorce or why you had gone through with the marriage in the first place? Well, that’s easy. I went through with the marriage because I had a lot of shame about mistakes I’d made. I got into that relationship prematurely . He was not divorced [from his previous wife] yet. I was very lonely. It was the beginning of the guys and I not having a great time in the band. I started making bad decisions: running, looking for the right door. Ten years trying to redeem one terrible mistake will send you to a lot of wrong doors, including directly down the aisle.

What was the mistake? Getting together with him when he was with someone else? Yeah. I felt powerless and ashamed. It felt like the only way out was to stay in it. [When] I tried to start dating [again], I was sabotaging potential [relationships]. I met with my mom and was like, “What is wrong with me? Why do I do this? Don’t tell me it’s your divorce.” She had a lot of answers about what my first months were like out of the womb, what life looked like during the divorce. I had a 4- or 5-year-old brain. I couldn’t remember. I had a memory of the door slamming and suddenly I was only with one parent, and I can’t remember which parent I was with and which was on the other side. I’d been trying to fix where mom and dad went wrong in my relationships. With my ex I felt like, “Finally, someone picked me.” My mom felt like that in her relationship. But at the first sign of danger I said, “I’m gonna redeem this.” It doesn’t matter if someone’s not faithful, it doesn’t matter if I feel crazy all the time, I’m strong enough, I’m gonna fix this. That’s my mom. My dad is a wonderfully sweet man. But they were kids when they got together. Some of the worst parts of their relationship I’ve been reenacting.

Your latest single, “Dead Horse,” recounts when you were the other woman and how subsequently it was you who was betrayed . Singing that was like being in a plastic bag for years and finally poking a hole in it. I had a lot of shame about being the other woman, about being betrayed, about staying. The song is meant for myself. It’s not like I was sitting there looking at someone, being like, “Hurt me, it’ll feel great.” But I stayed a lot. I stayed so many times. I think I like myself more than that, you know? I don’t know what it’s gonna take to rid myself of the shame, but maybe it turns into something that helps me have compassion and not be in denial.

There are parallels with what you’ve expressed about infidelity and the way Fiona Apple talked about her new record Fetch the Bolt Cutters . Is this what she wrote the song “Newspaper” about? I listened to that song and was like, “I’m this person, I’m in this.” “Under the Table” really fucking got to me. I’ve heard her voice singing those lyrics in my head every time I’ve read some ignorant sexist-ass comment from undoubtedly a certain age of white man.

In Vulture’s interview , Apple talks about being the other woman, too. She says: “I felt a boost in my ego at first. But I’ve never stopped being disgusted by the memories, and I wonder if that’s because I never apologized to the women.” Wow. Okay, well, I don’t know how personal to get, but I’ve been able to make amends — after my divorce, and due to the kindness of the other person. I don’t want to put her out there, because it’s unfair. I don’t know when this took place in Fiona Apple’s life. I can imagine that if she’s carried it a long time and she’s not able to say “I’m sorry,” it must be awful. I know that feeling. It took me far longer than I’d have liked, but we understand each other on a level. The person I offended when I was the other woman, at that point in my life, was the only person in the entire world who could have understood my specific pain. Because I was betrayed and felt alone and stupid. Considering that at one point we were at odds with each other, that’s interesting.

Reconciling with the woman he originally betrayed healed you of your subsequent betrayal? Yeah. The thing that’s hard for people who feel betrayed is understanding that it has nothing to do with them. It’s about the offending party. For me, making amends meant being able to flush out all the poison that was floating around in me. It helped me finally let go, because so much of why I stayed was to prove I wasn’t a bad person.

Your voice has always been synonymous with emo rage. On “Simmer,” the debut single from Petals for Armor , it sounds more muted. It reminded me a bit of Radiohead. After Laughter was very dance-y. Happy songs, a bit bombastic. This stuff felt subdued, like it was literally simmering. It felt angry. It’s like we had to whisper because we don’t know what shit is about to burst through the walls. The sounds I’m choosing don’t all have to sound angry to express that. The way that [Thom Yorke] pushes to find new tools is inspiring and helped me to step into a new courage. Björk’s Debut was impactful. I was listening to Sade and Erykah Badu.

Did making this project make you feel more free to use your voice differently? Whoa. Yeah. There was no pressure to sound like I’ve always sounded or to be recognized. Every song was a different process. “Cinnamon” started with me on drums. “Simmer” started with me scatting into a mic. There wasn’t a map, so my voice matches whatever compass we were using. I feel most in my power when I can say “yes” or “no” calmly, even if there’s a lot under that. I’ve spent a lot of my career and my life trying to yell at a wall, trying to get a point across to people who often didn’t care what the point was. Now I realize my power doesn’t exist there. There’s no movement there. But when I can stand in it and it’s just for me, it’s not about proving anything. I have more conviction. Then the point gets across.

What about writing these songs made you realize you needed them more for you than for Paramore? Well, Paramore had agreed to take time away. When we finished self-titled [2013] , we were wrecked. We won a Grammy , and we were so unhappy. Taylor’s the only one that’s never quit. Between records, he’s the only one that never stops working. I said to Taylor, “Never again, bud. We’re not doing this again. We don’t need it.” We were on the phone watching the MTV VMAs from our respective couches, and I go, “This shit sucks, bro. From now on, what does it matter what people will promise us if we don’t want it in the first place?” We made an agreement that we were gonna do things differently. Then I tried to quit the band because I was going through personal turmoil. Then we wrote After Laughter and I was not okay.

We were wrapping up the record, and I said to Taylor, “Promise me that you’re gonna tell me when you’re not okay.” At the “ Rose Colored Boy ” video shoot, his family went through a crazy loss. He told Zac and I we had to stop as soon as we had done the tours we agreed to. I took it seriously. When I realized I was writing this record, I thought, “I should make a Spotify page and throw them up.” As if it’s that easy. Then two other songs came and Taylor was like, “At what point are you going to tell our manager you’re making a record?” I said, “I’m not making a record!” And he was like, “You’re making a record.”

Were you scared to tell the label? Of course. Once I tell the label, it’s real. I get on the train. We’re pulling away.

Were you afraid to be a solo artist? Yes. I’m still scared to be a solo artist. I don’t want to be a solo artist. I will never be a solo artist. I’m in denial. Taylor and Zac are doing their own things. They’re happy we can individuate. It’s a great exercise for us. But I’m very afraid of it. I don’t prefer it. It’s more of a need. Some days, I wake up and wish I didn’t start it. Hopefully, it’s a good year.

Is the lyric “Nothing cuts like a mother” on “Simmer” about you? Yes and no. I’m obviously not a mother.

You kind of are. To Paramore? I’m working on this in therapy presently. On the fact that divorced kids feel orphaned. Doesn’t matter how hard a parent tries or how well a parent loves, we feel orphaned. When I was young, I related to stories about Peter Pan. What I’m learning in therapy is that I have tried to Wendy Moira Angela Darling my way through shit all the time. I found my family in my bandmates. From then on, we put ourselves in a position where we’d go out on the road, live like Lost Boys, and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to take care of them. I feel an immense responsibility to our crew. Who is taking care of me? I would love to be a mom someday. More than anything, I’m still learning how to mother myself. That young version of me that felt orphaned or lost and didn’t deserve the shit she saw is hard to accept. It sounds like I resent my parents. My parents are wonderful and kind to each other. They grew up. At the same time I felt orphaned. It was both.

If you look back at 16-year-old Hayley, how would you mother her? I don’t know if it’s possible for a 16-year-old to not worry about what people are saying about them, but I would want to impart some type of shield. My parents couldn’t have known what we were getting into. Everyone wanted to talk about how young we were, but people treated us like we were old enough to handle stuff. We weren’t in a natural position. I think about what I would tell my child. I would say: “Here’s your supplements, take magnesium every night. It fucking works, man. You’re a 16-year-old teenager, and emotions are not going away.” But it was near impossible to learn practical solutions for a life that felt so impractical. It’s so hard for me to be light. I do interviews, and it’s heavy. I always think, God, they must think I don’t have any fun . But it’s the nature of the season of life that I’m in, and it’s thick with it. It’s like we’re in the fucking topsoil, turning it over right now.

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

*A version of this article appears in the May 11, 2020, issue of  New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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• June 22, 2006 Setlist

Paramore Setlist at Jacksonville Fairgrounds, Jacksonville, FL, USA

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• Pressure Play Video
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3 activities (last edit by alert23 , 4 Aug 2018, 16:24 Etc/UTC )

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• Jun 19 2006 Warped Tour 2006 Bonner Springs, KS, USA Add time Add time
• Jun 21 2006 Warped Tour 2006 Antioch, TN, USA Add time Add time
• Jun 22 2006 Warped Tour 2006 This Setlist Jacksonville, FL, USA Add time Add time
• Jun 23 2006 Warped Tour 2006 St. Petersburg, FL, USA Add time Add time
• Jun 24 2006 Warped Tour 2006 Miami, FL, USA Add time Add time

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July 18, 2007

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• 1 Lucky Stage
• 2 #13 Stage
• 3 Hurley Stage
• 4 Hurley.com Stage
• 5 Smartpunk Stage
• 6 Ernie Ball Stage

Lucky Stage [ ]

• 11:45 - Pepper
• 12:45 - Hawthorne Heights
• 1:45 - Yellowcard
• 2:45 - Norma Jean
• 3:45 - Straylight Run
• 4:45 - Tiger Army
• 5:45 - New Found Glory
• 6:45 - Bad Religion
• 7:45 - Pennywise

#13 Stage [ ]

• 11:15 - Nothington
• 12:15 - Funeral for a Friend
• 1:15 - The Starting Line
• 2:15 - Circa Survive
• 3:15 - The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• 4:15 - Chiodos
• 5:15 - Cute is What We Aim For
• 6:15 - Killswitch Engage
• 7:15 - Coheed and Cambria
• 8:15 - Paramore

Hurley Stage [ ]

• 11:45 - The Dear and Departed
• 12:40 - The Spill Canvas
• 1:35 - Amber Pacific
• 2:30 - Gallows
• 3:25 - Escape the Fate
• 4:20 - Bayside
• 5:15 - The Almost
• 6:10 - The Toasters
• 7:05 - The Unseen
• 8:00 - K-os

Hurley.com Stage [ ]

• 11:30 - Scary Kids Scaring Kids
• 12:30 - Big D and the Kids Table
• 1:30 - The Matches
• 2:30 - The Automatic
• 3:30 - Meg and Dia
• 4:30 - Family Force 5
• 5:40 - Anberlin
• 6:40 - All Time Low
• 7:40 - Boys Like Girls

Smartpunk Stage [ ]

• 12:00 - Haste the Day
• 1:00 - Eyes Set to Kill
• 2:00 - Throw the Fight
• 3:00 - The Graduate
• 4:00 - Alesana
• 5:10 - The Human Abstract
• 6:10 - The Vincent Black Shadow
• 7:10 - Blessthefall
• 8:10 - Mayday Parade

Ernie Ball Stage [ ]

• 11:15 - Suburban Camoflauge
• 11:45 - Seven Story Fall
• 12:15 - Hollywood in September
• 12:45 - Dear Enemy
• 1:20 - Typhoid Mary
• 2:00 - Throwdown
• 2:40 - My American Heart
• 3:20 - The Fabulous Rudies
• 4:00 - Bleed the Dream
• 4:40 - Evaline
• 5:20 - The Chariot
• 6:00 - Scenes from a Movie
• 6:40 - Parkway Drive
• 7:20 - It Dies Today
• 8:00 - Don't Die Cindy
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paramore warped tour 2006

Meet Goth-Punk Superheroes My Chemical Romance

By Jenny Eliscu

Jenny Eliscu

This story was originally published in the July 28, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone.

More than ten years of tradition dictates that every night of the summer-long Warped Tour end the same way: In a parking lot crammed full of tour buses, dozens of tattooed and mohawked punk bands gather to eat barbecue, swill beer and chat up the barely legal alterna-chicks who’ve somehow managed to slip past security.

It’s Day One of Warped 2005, in Columbus, Ohio, and the party is well under way when the five members of the New Jersey Goth-punk quintet My Chemical Romance hop in a white minivan headed on a much more important mission: a trip to Wal-Mart to stock up on diet soda, cereal, horror movies and, God willing, Spider-Man pajama bottoms. As they enter the store, each guy grabs a cart and begins exploring.

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Released last year, My Chem’s major-label debut, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge , has sold close to 800,000 copies, thanks to two hit singles, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Helena.” The cinematic videos for both songs have made the band unlikely regulars on MTV’s Total Request Live and its members — the Ways, guitarists Frank lero, 23, and Ray Toro, 28, and drummer Bob Bryar, 24 — Tiger Beat -style pinups for the Hot Topic generation. And beyond: Green Day , one of My Chem’s own idols, brought the group on tour this spring; Pink and John Mayer are fans; and Courtney Love has said that My Chem is twelve-year-old Frances Bean’s favorite band.

“You see us playing these songs about fic­titious gunfights, cowboys, electric chairs, about getting fucked in jail,” Gerard says, re­ferring to the jaunty punk cabaret tune “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison.” “The abstraction is there for a rea­son. It’s for people to get what they want out of it. This band is therapy for us. What we’re saying through the performance is ‘This can or cannot be therapy for you, too. Either way, we’ll still do it.'”

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He makes it unnoticed past a dozen or so teen girls in pink and blue T-shirts waiting in line for a Tyler Hilton show at a down­town club, but a few blocks later we hear some college-age dudes coming up behind us, and Gerard tenses up in anticipation. “You suck!” hollers one, followed by “Emo sucks!” and then one last “You suck!” for good measure. Way shrugs and says, “I was once that exact kid, the one who came into the city from Jersey to hang out on St. Marks Place and act like a punk.”

Gerard had given up on playing music at around fifteen, after his band booted him because he either could not, or would not, learn to play “Sweet Home Alabama.” He turned to his other major passion, drawing superheroes, and ended up studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York. After he graduated in ’99, he hit the pavement with his sketches and nearly struck gold while interning at the Cartoon Network, where an exec loved his idea for a show called The Breakfast Monkey, about a flying simian with an accent like Björk’s who was blessed with the ability to make waffles, French toast or any breakfast food appear out of thin air. Way took meetings with production companies and was talking licensing deals. But that was all before September 11th, 2001, which had as profound an effect on Way as it did on anyone who was living or working in New York at the time.

“Something just clicked in my head, and that was when I said, ‘Fuck art’ for the first time,” he says. “I thought, ‘Art’s not doing anything for you. It’s just something on a wall, it’s completely disposable, and it’s not helping anyone.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck Break­fast Monkey , because all it’s gonna do is line somebody else’s pockets.’ I felt like I had given my life to art and that it had betrayed me. And then I saw Thursday perform at this club for fifty people, and it changed me.”

Gerard reconnected with his old neigh­borhood buddy Toro after they attended an Iron Maiden show together. They recorded a three-song demo with original drummer Matt Pelissier and then recruited Iero and persuaded Mikey to join their new band. They built a fan base through hyper-charged live shows where they would spit in one another’s faces or trash their instru­ments, “We just went out there and tried to destroy things,” says Gerard. “I didn’t want people to stand there and look at it like it was art. We wanted it to be explo­sive and cathartic.”

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Last year, Gerard was convinced that Three Cheers was a concept album about “two lovers who die in the desert in a gun­fight. The guy goes to hell and meets the devil, who tells the guy he can only be reunited with his lover if he brings the devil the souls of 1,000 evil men.” A year later, Gerard is sober and has a different vision of the album. “There is a pseudo-concept,” he now says. “But really it’s about two boys living in New Jersey who lost their grandma, and how their brothers in the band helped them get through it.”

My Chem have some European dates and their first headlining tour ahead of them this fall, but they have already started writing songs for a new record that Gerard antici­pates will still be clever and dark but likely more direct. “There’s just so much I want to say about real life now,” he says. “We’re starting to see the beauty of the world and to truly understand our relationships with other human beings like our loved ones. What’s wrong with writing a song about missing somebody instead of vampire as­sassins? There’s a common saying in My Chemical Romance that ‘This is bigger than us,’ but what I’ve come to realize is that, at the same time, there’s nothing bigger than the lives of the five guys in this band.”

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