Hayley Williams says she's "really proud" of playing all instruments on new solo album

Last Friday (5 February), Williams delivered her new solo album FLOWERS For VASES / descansos, and in a new interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Williams discussed her personal achievements with the record.

On how proud she is of the album, Williams told Lowe, "I think I'm really, really proud that I played everything on it. And I'm also really, really proud that this album is what I have to show for surviving a year that was tough for everyone. No matter if real and very personal things kept happening to everyone and global things happen to the collective. I lived it."

Williams continued, "And also at the same time, it is so raw and so of the moment, but it also is such a culmination of all the lessons I've learned throughout multiple relationships that just felt like my own body was eating itself, you know? I just haven't had a good enough relationship with myself to receive pure and simple stuff, like romantic relationships. I've been in therapy now since we got home from After Laughter, and I still go every week. I'm very fortunate that I can do that, but writing all of this stuff was kind of my ... I didn't know I was writing songs. I know that probably seems hard to believe, but a lot of them before we got into the studio were just half songs. Things that I would just turn on my voice memo on my phone and barely mumble through some stuff, and then I was able to sort of make sure that I was crafting it right once we were in the studio."

The Paramore singer also revealed that she improved her guitar playing during 2020, "I mean, I feel like I got better at guitar, which was cool. I haven't had this much time to play guitar since I was a teenager before we started touring, and that was also just really therapeutic."

She also discussed how she got over the pressure of having to play every instrument on the album, "I'm really hard to please with it too, because I'm in a band with my favourite drummer in the world. So it's like, I really... Yeah. I was always going to be hard on myself, but I also, with all of the instruments, I was easy enough on myself to understand, look, this actually... Like, doing all this shit is just fun for me. And I don't have to play it perfectly. And I recorded this with my friend, Dan, who wrote "Dead Horse" with me, and "Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris" with me and Taylor, that he produced this. And we did this in this room that I'm sitting in right now in my house. And I just told him, I was like, "Look, be as hard as you need to be on me when I'm playing. But also, I'm not going to be pissed if you nudge something because I just fucking couldn't get something right." I just tried not to agonise over it, and really let myself play. Because I think that is real healing is when you are a grown adult and you can still remember how to play like a child and enjoy something for what it is."