Paramore‘s Hayley Williams is about to have some familial competition in the music game, with her grandfather releasing his debut album five decades on from its recording.
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Rusty Williams, at 78 years old, will release Grand Man on Feb. 14 thanks to the help of his granddaughter and her bandmates, but his musical journey has been a long time coming. According to a press release, Rusty was a lifelong lover of music, having written songs and joined a band in his earlier years. In fact, his talents even made an appearance on Hayley’s Petals for Armor album in 2020 – providing vocals and piano on the closing track, “Crystal Clear”.
For many, that was likely as far as Rusty’s musical story was going to go. Despite claims that he’d recorded an album back in the ’70s, few were certain the album even existed until “the senior Williams’ old production partner” Frank Morris rediscovered the record.
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“So many people our age are mining these albums for tones and things you can’t even replicate,” Hayley said in a statement. “And Grandat has a way of cutting to the core of a feeling, and not overcomplicating it. Which we tend to do, because the world is hard. It’s nice when you can hear something plain and simple and know that it is true.”
Rusty’s songs hadn’t ventured much further than the Mississippi recording studio where the tracks were first laid down all those years ago. However, Paramore’s Zac Farro put his hand up to ensure that they live on, plotting to release the record by way of his Nashville-based label Congrats Records. “I thought that it was a crime that these songs were sitting there on the shelf,” Farro said.
Ahead of its arrival next month, the album has been previewed by way of the single “Knocking (At Your Door)”. However, despite the long-awaited release of Grand Man, Rusty isn’t hoping for a major career renaissance to come his way.
“I don’t expect anything, and I’m too old to be famous,” he explained. “But I just want to know someone liked what I did, and to be touched by whatever the hell they are listening to. I want people to see how it felt when things were real.
“You write stuff, and you want somebody to get something out of it,” he added. “I just had to wait for a granddaughter and a band with her to really do anything with mine.”
Rusty joins a slowly-growing list of famous relatives who have released albums due to their more famous descendants. In 2023, Lana Del Rey’s father, Rob Grant, issued his debut album Lost at Sea at the age of 69, all while leaning into the tongue-in-cheek “nepo daddy” descriptor.
