LIVE MUSIC
04/29/2026
Hayley Williams spends 3 nights in Southern Gotham
A three night residency playing Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party in full at The Ryman in the city the record keeps coming back to
I don’t think there was a neutral way for Hayley Williams to play these shows.
She brought her first solo tour, Hayley Williams at a Bachelorette Party, to the Ryman for three nights in her hometown. Each night, she played Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party in full — a record that keeps pointing back at Nashville like she’s trying to decide whether she wants to save it, grieve it or drag it by the collar into a mirror.
The Ryman is almost too perfect a place for that kind of record. It is 134 years old, all wooden pews and stained glass and old tabernacle bones, sitting in the middle of a downtown that keeps getting louder, shinier and somehow… cheaper at the same time.
Broadway is right around the corner, full of party buses, rooftop bars, matching bachelorette party sashes, unscuffed white cowboy boots and the full drunk little costume Nashville keeps selling to people who want the “South” without its consequences.
Of course, even the Ryman has been folded into the machine now. You can tour it, buy a t-shirt and walk out through the gift shop. Somehow, it hasn’t been entirely flattened yet. The room still has its own memory which makes it a hell of a place to hear songs about a city losing its own.
Hayley was singing about Nashville in Nashville, while Broadway kept proving the point right outside.
The record points at the city directly. Broadway. The Cumberland. Megachurches. The places people used to go before another chain or luxury loft space was decided to be more profitable. There’s nothing abstract about the grief in these songs. The grief has street names and church language and old rooms buried underneath it.
“True Believer” was the center of the whole run for me.
Every night, the loudest thing people screamed was:
“The South will not rise again / til it’s paid for every sin.”
Nobody screamed it like a line from a song. They screamed it like they meant it.
A room full of people in Tennessee yelling that the South still has sins to pay for is serious, especially with Broadway right outside pretending the South is boots and beer and a good time. The room felt safe because the politics were clear. Hayley said “Fuck ICE.” She called Christian music a psyop and said megachurches should be taxed accordingly. She brought out Justin Jones, a Democratic Tennessee state representative, on the Ryman stage.
None of it felt like a bit. It felt like she knew exactly where she was, who needed that room and who could stand to feel uncomfortable for once.
The room felt open to everybody except the people who make “everybody” feel conditional. That sounds like an obvious line to draw until you remember where we are. Tennessee doesn’t make that easy. Nashville doesn’t always make it easy either, no matter how badly it wants partial credit for being different.
A room can have a line and still be generous. Sometimes the line is the whole reason people can breathe in the first place.
And maybe that’s why the love in the room felt different these three nights. Neutrality was thrown to the wayside. It knew what it was making space for and what it was shutting out.
People had grown up with Hayley’s voice. They learned how to be angry from her, or weird from her, or how to navigate being “too much” from her. Paramore gave a lot of people, young women especially, the language they needed before they knew what they were trying to say.
That love gets messier once you leave the room.
Nashville wants artists like Hayley because they make the city feel soulful, interesting and alive. It wants to point at someone like her and say, see, real art still comes from here!
But the city gets a lot less comfortable with the full version of her: the anti-Trump version, the pro-queer version, the version that talks plainly about racism, religious hypocrisy and the systems that keep certain people protected while everyone else is told to wait, pray, forgive or be quiet.
She doesn’t do the vague “love everybody” politics that let a room clap and leave unchanged.
She says the part that ruins the dinner.
Hearing those songs under her own name, in that space, made the whole thing feel more exposed than a Paramore show usually can. Paramore plays arenas and even stadiums now. There’s an entire structure around that band, and I don’t mean that cynically.
Paramore is history at this point. It’s friendship, fallout, repair and songs people have lived with for years. Even when Hayley is the person everyone looks at first (don’t hate me — it’s true), the band name and the whole idea of them as a collective still hold some of the weight for her.
The Ryman didn’t offer that kind of distance. It was her name on the ticket, her songs, her record, her politics, her humor, her public breakup and her standing in a room small enough that you could feel the difference.
She seemed vulnerable but never fragile. More visible than anything else, I’d say. There was no arena scale to make the feeling bigger than her and no Paramore brand or mythology to absorb impact.
Just Hayley, in her hometown, singing songs that were actively arguing with the politics of the city outside.
The guests and debuts widened the room instead of turning the solo tour into some “I can do this alone” proof-of-concept.
“Friends or Lovers” got its live debut during the run. She had recently recorded it, but the song goes back to when she was a kid. She told the crowd she used to play it growing up and thought it was some famous song. Turns out, it was her granddad’s. Rusty Williams wrote it, taught it to her and never recorded it himself.
When she played it, the room got quiet. People weren’t trying to sing over her or turn it into a crowd moment but instead, they stopped and listened. For those few minutes, it was just her voice, the piano and this song that had traveled from her childhood into the Ryman with her family in the room. It had a sweetness to it that felt specific to being home.
She also brought out Annie DiRusso, Noah Kahan, Daniel James for the debut of Power Snatch and Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee. On paper, that sounds chaotic but in the room, it made sense.
A Nashville songwriter. A huge musical guest. A fringey side project. A Tennessee politician. Family history and friendship sitting beside politics and humor to build the atmosphere around her.
For a first solo tour, she certainly didn’t make it lonely.
The band was kickass, the guests had a reason to be there and the politics belonged to the room instead of sitting on top of it like decoration. Even under her own name, she kept building the show through other people.
Maybe that’s why her vulnerability works. She’s exposed, but never isolated.
That feels like the better read on the Ryman shows. Hayley wasn’t proving she could exist outside Paramore because anyone paying attention already knew that. The more interesting thing was watching what she built around herself once the Paramore frame wasn’t there.
A room with family in it. Friends in it. Tennessee politics in it. A crowd screaming the ugliest truth in the loudest part of the night. Songs about Nashville performed in a room old enough to know better, surrounded by a city that keeps giving those songs more evidence.
Hayley is loved in Nashville, but the love isn’t clean and it likely never will be. She belongs there but not in a way the city can fully control. She is part of Nashville’s music history, and she also refuses to help Nashville feel innocent just because it raised her.
That’s what I’ll remember most.
A hometown show with the comfort ripped right out of the center of it with a room full of people who loved her enough to follow her straight into the parts Nashville would rather leave blurry.