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If anyone can make misery look fun, it’s Hayley Williams and Billie Eilish.
During Eilish’ headlining set on Saturday night at the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the 20-year-old Grammy Award winner surprised the crowd when she brought out the Paramore frontwoman.
The unexpected appearance marked Williams’ first time on the Coachella stage.
She and Eilish performed a high-energy duet of the 2007 Paramore hit “Misery Business.” As Williams, 33, proved more than a decade has nothing on the timeless revenge anthem’s appeal, Eilish easily sailed through a series of beautiful, breathy harmonies.
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Amy Sussman/Getty
Eilish first hinted she may bring out a surprise guest after a mysterious second stool sat empty on stage while she and brother Finneas performed an acoustic rendition of their song “Your Power.”
“Oh, look! An empty seat. Who’s that for?” Eilish mischievously said before urging the crowd to welcome her “friend” Williams to the stage.
“This is my first Coachella, whoa,” Williams said to the audience after she and Eilish shared an elated embrace. “Thanks for sharing this with me. This is sick!”
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The performance came as an especially rare treat because Williams has publicly distanced herself from the song in the later years of her career, citing certain lyrics she interprets as problematic, namely: “Once a whore, you’re nothing more/I’m sorry that will never change.”
Williams first expressed her feelings looking back on the song in a post on her blog in 2015.
“Misery Business is not a set of lyrics that I relate to as a 26 year old woman. i haven’t related to it in a very long time,” Williams wrote in the post. “Those words were written when i was 17… admittedly, from a very narrow-minded perspective.”
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At a Paramore show in Nashville, Tennessee, in September 2018, Williams announced the band would no longer be performing the song live. “This is a choice we made because we feel like we should. We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while,” she said at the time.
This weekend at Coachella, after the pair completed the duet and William’s exited the stage, Eilish couldn’t help but express her own amazement and excitement to the crowd.
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“Oh my f—— god,” Eilish said after bidding Williams goodbye. “Absolutely what on Earth could be cooler than that? I’m dead serious.”
Coachella’s second and final 2022 weekend will close out Sunday night with a headlining performance from Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd, who replaced Kanye West after he dropped out just two weeks before the festival.
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