When Wallpaper* witnesses The Hayley Williams Show’s stop at New York City’s Forest Hills Stadium, the texture, lights and silhouettes that bring the performance to life are striking. Williams’ face, music videos of her dancing and simple silhouettes are projected on white drapes. She’s flanked by her band, who are taking up equal visual space. The atmosphere is inviting and nostalgic. It’s all intentional. 'Hayley wanted it to be much more personal than just the regular rock show,' Swedish lighting and conceptual designer Tobias Rylander tells Wallpaper*, describing his work as 'enhancing someone else’s art.'
Tapped to work on the solo tour of Paramore’s Hayley Williams, he and longtime collaborator, lighting designer and director Michael Straun, started by meeting with her and picking her brain. '[The process is] as individual as the artist themselves,' Rylander says.
Williams’ latest album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, offers a candid glimpse of personal and professional anxieties, sung with snark and gospel vibrato as she shifts from synth-pop anthems like 'Parachute' to mournful ballads like 'True Believer.' 'You do have to learn the music, and you do have to care about it,' Rylander says. 'We studied the music, read the lyrics, and talk to the artist about what the song is about to them.' They also made sure their concept reflected where she is in her career right now. 'She’s coming from a band and finding her identity in this new band,' Straun says. 'She wanted it to not all be about her, and to also be about the other performers on the stage.'
They worked together in lockstep, sharing references of architecture, paintings and films they felt captured not only the album but Williams’ entire solo discography. 'I think we were all quite aligned from the start,' Straun recalls. 'When we got into actually drawing, it came naturally and organically.' They also work with the Williams, as they do with all artists, on the show’s overall flow. 'I build a big piece of paper, which I call the show arc, where each song has got a card,' Rylander explains. 'And on that card, we have a little annotation of where the automation is on stage, but also a thumbnail of what the video content might look like and the information of what colour the song should be. We sit around this table and they tend to rip it apart and put it back together, sort of like a puzzle. These pieces often become almost like an art piece at the end because we draw so much on them and they move so many times.'
One of Williams’ main objectives was creating intimacy regardless of the size of each venue. 'Hayley physically wanted to be close to the band,' Straun says. 'We shrunk everything down so they’re effectively on one island, and Tobias had the idea of making the show super low so we could fit it under the ring in the Hollywood Bowl [the show will stop at the legendary venue in October], but we decided to make that our height for the whole tour. We’ve gone low and wide, which has this feeling that you’re in the room with them.' Starting with that venue in mind, they adapted to the other arenas and amphitheatres she’d be stopping at, keeping the integrity of the concept.
'The layering of the fabrics is actually how I started to make sure we could scale it,' Rylander explains. 'They’re overlapping, and the way that all the video is programmed and the lighting is laid out in a way that we can overlap and adjust everything sideways so we can actually fit the whole show into more or less any size of stage that they go into. We’re not dependent on the stage depth because we don’t have a huge upstage video wall. We noticed that works really well in big amphitheatres where you normally don’t see a landscape expression on stage.'
In the end, they landed on a show that’s 'much smaller and more intimate than I first had thought we would,' Rylander says. 'We knew that Hayley really wanted it to feel homey, and it was about her and the band and the songs and the music more than putting on the biggest show we possibly could. It’s still a quite complicated show with the automation of the fabrics, but it’s also quite delicate. I think Hayley set the tone quite early. It felt natural that we were going to frame something beautiful and soft and singular.'
Rylander and Straun first met in 2012 when Tobias was asked to work on The xx’s Coexist tour. 'Michael was already then their longtime lighting designer and lighting director,' Rylander says. 'So together we created, again, with video projection used as lighting. Since then, we have more and more often collaborated on shows from anything from The 1975 to Beyoncé.' He adds that they both appreciate 'the quality of projected light in terms of video projection instead of LED screens.' They’ve continued that thread on the current tour. 'We quite early on had the idea of projecting these different worlds onto a white canvas of a stage, which gave us the possibility to colour the stage in any colour that we wanted and also show textures and paint different scenes on stage, but also show historical photography from Hayley’s campaign and her personal life.'
Their attention to building intimacy between Williams and her fans begins as soon as the lights go down. 'We start the show with hardly any front light, so that gives a sense of mystery and you don’t just get drawn into Hayley, you get drawn into all the band as one,' Straun says. Instead of big front key-light moments, the projection is sometimes her only front light or sidelight. 'We also don’t use the [image magnification] on the curtains for the first part of the show, which means your eye adjusts to looking at the stage,' Straun continues. 'You get drawn in, and then gradually we reveal the cameras.'
To make sure the design comes to life properly on stage, they do a lot of testing in their studio, checking the opacity or transparency of fabrics and how they take projection. 'We do a lot of experimenting with technology,' Straun says. 'In the show, we’re using a lot of new technology and all the lights are LED, the projectors are laser projectors, the cameras are 4K, but it’s done to make it look old or make it look like it fits. We found some new lights, so we got them sent to our offices, and we played with them and sent Hayley videos of shadows on a wall with different lights. [When we] get the material, we look at what the projection looks like on that. We make sure structures for the wind are hidden, so you don’t notice that.'
The result is a show where very little of the intricate behind-the-scenes tech is revealed. 'When you look at the show, you don’t really see many light sources,' Rylander says. 'You see the light, but we don’t have lights on trusses that are facing the audience, and you don’t see the lenses of the little LED diodes. We use lighting as the physical medium that it is. So in that term, that way, it’s very classical.'
The dedication to using high-tech to create analogue simplicity can be seen throughout the set. At one point in the set, Williams covers Nina Simone’s 'Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,' making playful hand gestures around her head that create a silhouette of devil horns against the draped curtains. 'Shadow play is the oldest trick in the book,' Rylander says. 'But it’s so effective, and everyone can relate to it, and everyone knows how it works. Everyone knows their own shadow. It’s really special, and my favourite part of the show is how we use the shadows.' One of Straun’s favourite lighting moments is during 'True Believer,' which evolved from Williams’ earlier tour this year. 'We followed some of the musical sounds with these single light bulbs, and on this tour, we have some automation that moves, and just seeing that go from this small venue idea to something bigger that still has the intimacy, that’s a special moment for me.'
Rylander and Straun have worked on everything from esports to large-scale arena tours and theatre. And even when they want the experience to feel simple, science still sits at its core. 'Lighting design is physics,' Rylander says. Each design is planned around how long the stage will take to build and how many trucks the show will travel in before the artist even sees a picture. Rylander also says that as a rule, nothing he shows an artist should be the product of AI. 'I have a firm belief that what we do is a craft and a skill and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. The AI won’t sit in the room with Hayley Williams and talk her through 36 songs that need to boil down to 23, or talk about the feelings that we want to communicate. It’s becoming more and more important for the artist and for the audience to be there in the room and seeing the real thing.'
Despite nearly 20 years of experience and working with some of the biggest artists in the world, they still got 'really nervous,' according to Straun, while watching The Hayley Williams Show on its first night. 'Was this too intimate?' Straun remembers wondering. 'Would you see Hayley from the back of the lawn? We both went up and watched the show from the back of the lawn, and everything worked.' Rylander says the payoff comes with the audience’s first roar. 'It’s a lot of work to get to that moment, and then it’s so definite that it just happens in front of you. It’s why I do what I do. It’s the coolest, and that’s the payoff.'