In early December last year, in Los Angeles, Paramore chatted with Entertainment Weekly about This Is Why. Hayley, Taylor and Zac answered questions about the origins of This Is Why, the recording process and the past as a driving force for the future. They already reveled that “Thick Skull” was written almost entirely on their first day of the writing process for the album.
“It’s our most political album in the sense that, I would expect or I would hope, any single person can find something that they fully understand that they’re directly impacted by when it comes to social politics or otherwise,” Hayley says. “I tried lyrically to express what was going on internally for me as a human being living on this Earth in this time. The album reflects something of what all of us are experiencing currently and the anxiety of it. But there’s also the hope that our album and, of course, our shows can be a wonderful release for people, an escape or a shelter from what’s happening. It’s balancing the acknowledgement and acceptance of s— is not okay and something needs to be done, and then also having a five-minute time out every now and then just to give yourself the opportunity to recharge and protect your energy.”
“The world shutting down — gosh, we’ve learned a lot and we all went through a lot. That’s why this record, there’s a lot more aggression than we’ve had in a while. There’s different types of an emotional release in certain songs that I don’t think we’ve had in a little bit. A lot of that was a product of the times, and not only trying to reflect on what had happened, but also taking that long of a break, we were able to rediscover different sides of ourselves musically that was fun to dive into,” Taylor says about 2020 and its effects.
“As long as we stay healthy and people continue to want to hear what we have to make and go to shows, then all eyes are just set on continuing,” York says. “We’re on the ride. We don’t really genuinely get to decide what happens with our career — it’s the fans.”
Click here to read the interview in full.
