Paramore fans got a very rare treat this week when singer Hayley Williams performed “Teenagers,” her contribution to the super emo soundtrack to the 2009 Megan Fox horror comedy Jennifer’s Body live for the first time ever. Seated on the floor while strumming an acoustic guitar and rocking green shades, Williams, 36, sang, “I’m gonna go on like I never met you/ And it’ll feel wrong at first, but I think I can forget you/ Ignore the fact that we sleep no more than three feet apart/ I feel you now, you’re all around me, underneath me.”
Bobbing her head and clearly into it, she quick-strummed her way into the chorus: “Well, how was I to know that what we carved in stone/ Would be so temporary?/ Well, how was I to know that my first crack in love/ Would not be the last? It won’t be the last,” she sang.
The caption to the performance read “#selfserenades wrote this for the jennifer’s body soundtrack when I was still a teenager,” adding to the tale in her Stories, writing, “lore behind this one is so ridiculous i cant tell if tellin it would make the song better or worse anyway, first self-serenade in years… hope its fine by you.”
In case you forgot, the soundtrack to the movie was a who’s who of emo at the time, including tracks from Panic! at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Cute Is What We Aim For, Cobra Starship, All Time Low and The Sword, as well as songs from Florence + the Machine, Little Boots, Screeching Weasel, Silversun Pickups and Lissy Trullie.
In addition to the performance, Williams also made an urgent call to action about the climate crisis, noting that the weather in Nashville when she recorded the performance was “glorious” after multiple tornado threats, flooding and “a sleepless night hiding in the basement. have come a little too close to multiple natural disasters this year. they continue to get worse and more frequent.”
Severe storms raked Nashville and Middle Tennessee last week, spawning multiple tornado warnings, one suspected tornado, as well as torrential rains and high winds that caused widespread flooding. Williams pulled no punches in describing the urgency she feels about climate change at a time when the Trump administration is touting efforts to revive the highly polluting coal industry and working to roll back many of the crucial green initiatives passed by the Biden administration to put the country on a path to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Climate crisis is definitely here and the ppl in power dont give a rats ass,” she wrote. The singer encouraged her fans to follow Mister Rogers’ sage advice to “look for the helpers,” with a shout-out to @supportandfeed, the organization founded by Billie Eilish’s mom, Maggie Baird, that is working to mitigate climate change and increase food security by promoting plant-based food options.
She also gave some love to @reverb_org, which has been striving for more than 20 years to green the touring industry.
Check out Williams’ performance below.
