Earlier this month, Jimmy Fallon affirmed that The Tonight Show has “never really been that political,” in an effort to distance his show from the conversation about late-night’s recent rupture. While he might keep his monologues clean, his musical guests bear no similar obligation. Hayley Williams took the Tonight Show stage on Thursday for the first live performance of “True Believer,” a chilling record about the sins that haunt the South and the ghosts that aren’t geographically contained.
“They put up chain-link fences underneath the biggest bridges/They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all their children/They say that Jesus is the way, but then they gave him a white face/So they don’t have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them,” Williams sang. She performed at a piano draped with a canvas that read “Mississippi G-d Damn,” a nod to Nina Simone’s 1964 protest anthem.
At the start of “Mississippi Goddamn,” Simone makes clear, “I mean every word of it.” She feels the weight of Alabama and Tennessee, and of course, Mississippi, as she pleads, “Lord have mercy on this land of mine.”
“True Believer” is born from a similar sentiment. “I’m the one who still loves your ghost/I reanimate your bones/With my belief,” Williams sang. Her critiques of the South — and particularly Nashville, where her roots run deep — serve more as a warning than a complete condemnation. But hard truths aren’t always easy to swallow. “The South will not rise again/’Til it’s paid for every sin,” Williams continued. “Strange fruit, hard bargain/Till the roots, Southern Gotham.”
The depth of the record was amplified in its live form by a 12-piece band, including a string section that brought a deeper intensity to William’s harmonies.
“True Believer” appears on the Paramore frontwoman’s latest solo album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. “I mean, I’m never not ready to scream at the top of my lungs about racial issues,” Williams recently told The New York Times about the song. “I don’t know why that became the thing that gets me the most angry. I think because it’s so intersectional that it overlaps with everything from climate change to like LGBTQIA+ issues.”
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She added: “I reference this neighborhood in Franklin, really close to where I grew up, called Hard Bargain, that this formerly enslaved man bought from his former enslaver. It’s still there, predominantly Black families, and it’s protected now. But of course, Franklin and Nashville are being gentrified all the time. The reason I was writing about Nashville a lot is that we came home from tour and I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna go to L.A. — get me outta here. Trump just got elected again, and I don’t wanna be in a red state.’”
She stuck around Nashville, anyway. There was more work to do there.
