Williams says it was Davis who initially started working on the song, which was inspired by the British pop band Dutch Uncles, who later remixed the track. Davis began working on the song in an L.A. hotel, setting up his own makeshift studio using Fiji water bottles for speakers.
“It was the most ghetto rig,” Williams said laughing, explaining that she was coming by to meet him for dinner, but ended up skipping the meal to finish the song instead.
On it Williams sings about the transition from childhood to adulthood, “Don’t go crying to your mama/ Now you’re on you’re own.” Even taunting herself a bit with the snarky chorus: “Ain’t it fun?/ Living in the real world.”
“The lyrics were my sarcastic way of realizing you can’t be the king of the hill all the time,” she says. “It was a really good exercise for me as a human being—as a 23-year-old person at the time—understanding that life is so much bigger than your own perspective.
“It’s a really fun song to record,” she added, “but it was sort of me telling myself off.”
In hindsight, Williams says the song was just what she needed to get out of her funk. “I felt like I was going kicking and screaming on my own. But it’s funny, because I needed that,” she said. “I needed a change of perspective to know I could do a lot of things on my own.”
The song, which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, also had Williams revisiting her gospel roots. Williams and Davis actually first played together in a late ’70s R&B cover band where they tackled songs by Chaka Khan and Stevie Wonder.
“I grew up on gospel, I love gospel and I think I never thought it would mesh at all with what Paramore would ever do,” she said. “But luckily on this album, we were a lot more openminded.”
Three months after recording the original version of “Ain’t It Fun,” Paramore headed back into the studio with a six-person gospel choir in tow.
“They put so much soul and so much feeling into their sound that makes it real and raw,” Williams said. “I actually cried like three times just hearing these people sing our song. It was so cool.”
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