When Tennessee pop-punks Paramore first joined No Doubt on that band's comeback tour back in May, singer Hayley Williams remembers seeing a gang of young girls in the front row all doing their very best imitation, style-wise, of Gwen Stefani.
It was a scene that Williams, 20, could certainly understand.
Growing up, she was a big No Doubt fan who found herself in awe of the band's dazzling, charismatic frontwoman.
"I look at Gwen Stefani and she's barely even a real person she looks so amazing," said Williams in a phone interview. "She's an amazing woman to have done as much as she's done and to be impacting so many people still . . . I really hope to follow a career path like that."
Of those dedicated Stefani-ites, Williams couldn't help but notice that "they didn't really know who we were."
But the Gwen-gang kept turning up at shows, Williams says, and after awhile she began to feel like they had also become Paramore fans.
Meanwhile, there's been another group in those crowds that seems to be growing in number steadily and those young women have a different look.
Instead of Stefani's platinum blond, they're sporting bright orange locks in homage to Williams herself. It's something she's seen increasingly over the last year or so and she still doesn't quite know what to make of it.
"It's odd to look out there and see a bunch of Mini-Mes," says Williams. "You're wondering what possessed them to do such a thing . . . It sort of does a reverse psychology on you. You'd think you'd be like 'Hey, all these people want to look like me. I feel pretty cool.' But actually it makes you feel more self aware and I'm not really fond of that."
As taken aback as she is though, Williams can't help but feel like such a phenomenon is a sign of huge things to come for the band she joined in high school.
Indeed, Paramore's last studio disc, 2007's Riot!, has hit platinum sales of one million in the U.S. As for the group's next record, Brand New Eyes, set for release in late September, it was produced by the highly sought after Rob Cavallo, whose studio credentials include Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Avril Lavigne.
With all of this, Williams can't help but feel that Paramore is on the verge of a major breakthrough.
"I feel it's the calm before the storm, I really do," she says. "We're so stoked. I can't wait for everybody to hear (the new record)."
Part of Williams' love for Brand New Eyes comes from her insistence that making the record "saved our band."
She's vague about the exact tensions that existed, but it was widely speculated when the band cancelled its European tour last year that Paramore was close to splitting up.
Many assumed that the root of the problem was that age-old malady of mostly male rock bands fronted by attractive females. We've seen it before from Blondie to No Doubt. The media shines the spotlight on the chick and the dudes get bent out of shape.
That certainly seemed like the issue when MTV.com quoted the band's guitarist and Williams' co-writer Josh Farro saying: "We are a team. We are a band. It's not just Hayley -- it's not her band."
Williams acknowledged as much.
"I got the most frustrated about it because I just wanted to be one of the dudes," she says. "With people focusing on me, yeah, there's times I shy away from it and I'm sure the guys don't always love it. But we take it in stride. As long as people are listening to our music, that's what we care about."
One bond that exists between the members of Paramore which helped them to carry on is their shared Christian faith, something that comes through in songs such as "Hallelujah," "Miracle" and "Let The Flames Begin."
Williams says that at times, while rising up through the punk-pop ranks, the band did feel like they were "the minority" among their peers, which may have solidified their unity.
But she stresses that while Paramore takes pride in their faith they "don't want to be pigeonholed as a Christian band."
"Our music and our message is so much wider than being just for the Christian public," Williams says. "We don't want to preach . . . We just want to play our music. I'm not singing songs about God and my relationship with God. I'm singing about life.
"But (Christianity) is a part of us and it's very real. If people want to know Paramore, that is a part of us."
