With some great photos by Zachary Gray Paramore is back on the cover of DIY Magazine, for the third time in career. The reason isn’t unknown – later this week Paramore returns with a new studio album, This Is Why, being in the center of media’s attention. Click here to read the article and here to order a copy of it. You can also try to find it in your local stores, if you live in the UK.
“The interesting thing is, [After Laughter] was one of the most positive and liberating album cycles that we’d ever had, as friends and as a band,” Hayley explains. “But also, there was this realisation that, in our late twenties, we’ve never… we were in our late twenties and we didn’t feel like we’d gotten to just be adult humans that weren’t in this machine.”
“There were a lot of reasons,” she continues, “but some of that contributed to identity being misplaced and mental health issues; I certainly had a lot of undiagnosed shit going on. [Then there] was this point where Taylor’s family had lost a family friend and that was really hard on them. That culminated in us having a conversation that was like, ‘What’s important to us and how can we treat those things with the type of value and care that we’ve treated Paramore?’” Returning home after such a success was admittedly a risk. “It’s not a decision people thought was a lucrative one, but that didn’t matter.”
“We talked about this a lot in the studio,” Hayley offers, “the slowing down of everything and, at the same time, [how] all these social justice issues – whether it be racial injustice or food insecurity, which is intersectional with the race issue – all these things had everyone’s attention at one time. It was great for us to be at home while some of these things were happening so that we could be connected with our own city and community; we pitched in where we could, partnered with people and, at the least, just became aware and not ignorant of it.”
“It feels like not touring together for four years, it puts so many things into perspective,” Taylor says. “Coming back to it this time, we were able to see what we do in a fresh way. It is wild that people still want to come and watch us play. We started playing together – writing songs and playing covers – when we were 12,” he says.
“Paramore is one of the reasons we’ve grown as people, and it’s forced us to have to be accountable to each other, and forced us to have conversations that we probably would never have needed to have. I just feel like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s not because of a magazine cover, or a trophy, y’know? It’s because we have this bond to show for it,” Hayley says.
