When Taylor Swift kicks off the European leg of her Eras tour next summer, her opening act will be rock band Paramore, whose lead singer Hayley Williams is a longtime friend of Swift's. During an Oct. 6 interview on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Williams revealed how the two first met: through Swift's mother, Andrea.
As she explained to Fallon, the two musicians started getting into the Nashville music scene "around the same time, around the same age." At the 2008 Grammy Awards, Paramore and Swift were both nominated for Best New Artist - the late Amy Winehouse ultimately won - and attended Timbaland's afterparty .
"A woman came up to me and said, 'I'm Taylor Swift's mom, and you know, Taylor doesn't have a lot of friends her age making music. I'd love to, like, you know, introduce you guys or get you guys phone number," Williams said. “So Andrea, she’s a legend and she brings us together.”
Fallon held up a throwback photo of them, which Williams teased. “Every picture of us on the internet, whether it’s one of us or the two of us, is like a *thumbs up*,” she laughs. "It's our thing. It just goes to show how cool we are."
The Grammys have played an interesting role in their friendship over the years. In a separate interview with Rolling Stone , Williams revealed that Swift was the first person to tell her that Paramore won their first Grammy in 2015 for "Ain't "It Fun" won the award for Best Rock Song.
"I was in Europe when I found out we were nominated - I couldn't believe it," she said. "Then when we won, we didn't go. Within the same 30 seconds, I got a text from Taylor Swift and [band member] Taylor York. Taylor, She just sent me a bunch of capital letters like “[RANDOM VOICE] EXCITED FOR YOU! "I was so shocked."
In addition to supporting each other, they collaborated musically. Earlier this year, Paramore kicked off the first two shows of the Eras tour, with Williams and Swift dueting on "Castles Crumbling," one of the tracks from "Speak Now" (Taylor's version) A "From the Vault" track.
" Because Speak Now is primarily about my songwriting, I decided to go to the artists that I felt had the biggest impact on me as a lyricist at the time and ask them to sing on the album," Swift told X in June ( (formerly Twitter) wrote. . “It’s so cool and so generous that they agreed to support my version.”
