Thirteen years after its release, Paramore revived “All I Wanted,” a Brand New Eyes classic, for their first-ever live performance at the When We Were Young festival.
“All I Wanted” was the only song from the 2009 album that has never been performed live until now. Although it doesn’t explain why it took more than 10 years for frontwoman Hayley Williams to even attempt the song once, it has been hypothesized that the song’s requisite vocal range would have put too much pressure on her vocal chords to perform the music consistently.
In fact, the song with the original title “All I Wanted Was You” nearly didn’t appear on the band’s third studio album. Williams said to Alternative Press in 2009, “I don’t remember why we didn’t think it would succeed.” If it hadn’t been there, “we would be furious right now.”
“The whole time we were writing and rehearsing at home, I was in this state where I wouldn’t come out or go out unless it was to write with the boys,” she recalled of the beginning. I believe that because I was in my apartment by myself for such a long time, I started to feel incredibly depressed. I once arrived at practice to see Taylor performing this song. Another of his, in fact. I just started writing whatever came to me when it hit me.
“All I Wanted” made its live premiere not long after Paramore resurrected “Misery Business,” which band had originally removed from their setlist in 2018 due to its “anti-feminist” lyrics composed while Williams was an adolescent. She made light of the situation when they performed live for the first time in five years, saying: “What we did not know was that just about five minutes after I got canceled for using the term ‘whore’ in a song, TikTok decided that it was okay. Make sense of it.
I’m not going to preach about it, she continued. I just want to say thanks for having fond memories of this because it’s one of the best parts of our show and it’s nice to feel like there’s a good reason to bring it back.