Paramore shows hometown love for Nashville crowd

Click to see a gallery of photos from Paramore's Municipal Auditorium show (this image: Samuel M. Simpkins/The Tennessean).

For all the gifts Paramore's Hayley Williams possesses, she’s missing one thing most arena-rocking lead singers have nailed: a look of smug satisfaction.

No, when the frontwoman for the world-famous Franklin rock group looked out at her audience at Nashville's Municipal Auditorium, her expression was more a mix of sincere excitement and gratitude.

"This is our home!" she exclaimed after the band's opening run of "Ignorance," "Feeling Sorry" and "That's What You Get." A fan tossed a massive stuffed animal on stage, and Williams made sure it stayed propped up in front of the drums before the show continued. Later, she returned the favor by accidentally swinging a bracelet off her wrist and into the crowd.

Paramore's biggest U.S. headlining tour came to Music City with a few more bells and whistles than the band's local fans are used to. The show opened with a floor-to-ceiling curtain drop and swinging florescent bulbs to mimic their MTV Video Music Award-nominated clip for "Ignorance." But more than the video screens and raining confetti, the crowd seemed dazzled by Williams' demeanor. Frontmen have been spitting on stage since the '70s, but in 2010, some audience members are still surprised to see a woman do it.

At Municipal, Williams and guitarist Josh Farro reprised their acoustic cover of Loretta Lynn's "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man." They first performed the song at their last Nashville show at the Ryman last year, and it's gone on to become a regular feature of their live set.

Williams said that they had recently gotten a kind letter from Lynn herself.

"Obviously, I died," Williams said. "And then I came back to life to play these shows."

Paramore has yet to achieve a huge crossover hit, but that also means that their audience — particularly in Nashville — is made up of attentive, devoted fans. When the band started into a song from their indie debut, All We Know Is Falling, some folks couldn't scream fast enough to show their recognition.

Then again, the loudest response came from the band's biggest hit to date, "Decode," as featured on the Twilight soundtrack.

That moment and the subsequent acoustic set are the moments where Paramore is expected to show signs of musical growth. They're growing up and proving to have a commercial reach far beyond the average pop-punk band, so there's probably considerable pressure for them to "mature." The acoustic cut "Misguided Ghosts" and set-closing ballad "The Only Exception" offered a nice reprieve from full-throttle rock anthems, but it's not the band at their best. The scrappy group of teens that proved its worth on the Warped Tour still rears up on a few tunes: Guitar swings, headbangs and rock acrobatics were in full effect on "Let The Flames Begin."

The crowd had to respond in earnest — particularly after Williams pointed out that her grandfather led the way by getting up and out of his seat.

As she and her band prepared to end the evening with an encore of "Brick by Boring Brick" and "Misery Business," Williams had some very kind parting words for their hometown crowd.

"We brag about you all over the world," she said.