Hayley Williams connects with Zane Lowe to discuss her surprise album Flowers for Vases / descansos and the raw emotion poured into this project. Hayley opens up about writing “Inordinary” and referencing back to her childhood when moving to Nashville. Click HERE to listen to the full one.
I think I’m really, really proud that I played everything on it. And I’m also really, really proud that this album is what I have to show for surviving a year that was tough for everyone. No matter if real and very personal things kept happening to everyone and global things happen to the collective.
I lived it. And also, at the same time, it is so raw and so of the moment, but it also is such a culmination of all the lessons I’ve learned throughout multiple relationships that just felt like my own body was eating itself, you know? I just haven’t had a good enough relationship with myself to receive pure and simple stuff, like romantic relationships. I’ve been in therapy now since we got home from After Laughter, and I still go every week. I’m very fortunate that I can do that, but writing all of this stuff was kind of my … I didn’t know I was writing songs. I know that probably seems hard to believe, but a lot of them before we got into the studio were just half songs. Things that I would just turn on my voice memo on my phone and barely mumble through some stuff, and then I was able to sort of make sure that I was crafting it right once we were in the studio
I realized as I was untangling a lot of knots in myself that there are just so many ways that I learned how to love that were not right. And unlearning something that you’re 31 years in on is really tough. And so some of the stuff that I talk about on Petals for Armor, it’s like I’m still in those processes.
One of my favorite songs on the record is called ‘Inordinary.’ And the reason that I have such a reaction to it is that I think I started talking about something small, and an incident in my life, and then it blooms into… It goes from wanting to belong to someone, and then belonging to a lot of people, and then belonging with somebody. And then realizing, oh man, I can barely remember what it feels like to just belong to myself. And I got to experience of a long period of time in this, however many minutes this song is. And I’m really, really proud of that.
