Paramore might have plans to perform head-banging shows for the next couple of decades, or until Hayley Williams‘ neck gives out, but her grandfather Rusty Williams retired his musical dreams long ago.
The 78-year-old recorded an album when he was younger with his close friend and producer Frank Morris. He shared the songs with Hayley just as they were written, sitting at his piano or pulling out his guitar. He was the only one who could conjure those melodies, given that the album never made it much further than the Mississippi studio where he recorded it in the Seventies. Until now.
On Feb. 14, Rusty will see his 13-track album Grand Man released for the first time. “I don’t expect anything, and I’m too old to be famous,” he said in a statement. “But I just want to know someone liked what I did, and to be touched by whatever the hell they are listening to. I want people to see how it felt when things were real.”
There’s a crackling warmth to “Knocking (At Your Door),” the first single from the record. Jazz horns and sweet guitar melodies intertwine as a lovelorn Rusty tells a tender tale of lost connection. “What will it take to win your love again?/To open up your heart and let my love come in,” he asks. “Why should we be apart?/You are mine from the start/Won’t you tell me, tell me now.”
“So many people our age are mining these albums for tones and things you can’t even replicate,” Hayley shared. “And Grandat has a way of cutting to the core of a feeling, and not overcomplicating it. Which we tend to do, because the world is hard. It’s nice when you can hear something plain and simple and know that it is true.”
Five decades ago, Rusty recalled, “Knocking (At Your Door)” was “the number one most requested song for three to six weeks” after a local radio station added the record to its rotation. “And I still ain’t done nothing with it!” The chances of someone having heard the track way back then and stumbling across it now might not be exponentially high. But for the first time since then, it’s higher than zero. They might have even lived enough life since then to relate to it if they hadn’t before.
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Grand Man will be released via Congrats Records, the Nashville-based indie label founded by Paramore’s Zac Farro. “I thought that it was a crime that these songs were sitting there on the shelf,” Farro shared. It was Morris who uncovered the album after all of this time and Paramore’s Taylor York who took on the mission of digitizing his music. “You write stuff, and you want somebody to get something out of it,” Rusty said. “I just had to wait for a granddaughter and a band with her to really do anything with mine.”
Hayley is often celebrated for her range as a performer and vocalist, but also as a true fan of great musicians. The soul that emerges in Paramore’s music and across her solo releases Petals for Armor and Flowers for Vases / Descansos, feels too deep-rooted to be a front. She credits Rusty with pulling back the veil on gospel music for her. He also introduced her to the likes of the Temptations, Elvis, Bread, the Shondells, Kenny Rogers, and Anne Murray — not to mention himself. “Friends or Lovers,” a song Rusty recorded decades ago, was sampled on “Crystal Clear,” a percussive and hazy cut on Petals for Armor.
“I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, but I remember the drums,” Hayley said. “I got an education because of him, and learned to love really great singers. He wants to hear melodies and harmonies, and that’s the foundational education I got from him. There’s just something about a great singer that he taught me, and that’s how he sings.”
