When do trimmings become the main course? Or, to pose it in employment terms: When does a side hustle became the real hustle? And can that just go down without a hitch?
These are just ways into trying to think about developments in the career of Hayley Williams, who easily sold out two shows this week at the Hollywood Bowl, something we wouldn’t necessarily have taken for granted for her as a solo artist even a couple of years ago. In the first of two nights there Monday, Williams performed for almost exactly two hours without doing a single Paramore song — and what’s remarkable is, nobody cared.
Hayley Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 5, 2026
Zachary Gray
Part of the pleasure Williams is clearly taking in this current outing is that she’s getting to tour behind two albums at once — not just “Ego Death,” which she’s now doing 12 tracks from, but a good 10 from “Petals for Armor,” the 2020 album that she’d planned to follow up wih a debut solo tour before the pandemic changed plans. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a huge shock that, in contrast, she only picked one selection from the album that came between these two, 2021’s “Flowers for Vases/Descansos,” an album so flagrantly somber it felt like a side project among side projects. But the one “Vases” song that did get performed, “Just a Lover,” got an interesting spot — or spots, since solemn excerpts from it were played by her at the piano to open the show and then be reprised at the close of the main set, perhaps as a reminder of how un-perky her music could be if she let more depressing thoughts take over. (One of the despondent lines from that song, “No more music for the masses,” was emblazoned on one of the shirts sold at the merch stand, proving that the singer maintains a fine-tuned sense of irony.)
