The Cover Uncovered: How a butterfly defined Paramore on ‘Brand New Eyes’
It’s not often that a record needs a “no animals were harmed in the making of this” warning, but if there was ever an album chaotic enough to need one, it would be one by Paramore.
The journey of the Nashville pop-punk band has been one so filled with twists, back-stabbing, affairs, accusations and acrimony that one can no longer compare it to other rock bands. Even the notoriously rocky lives of Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd have nothing on Hayley Williams’ mob, which reads less like a band biography and more like the synopsis to a season of Succession. What’s more, the band’s story didn’t become intense with time. No, it was this complicated from the very beginning, which is mental, because Paramore began when the band were teenagers.
Not older teenagers either, drummer Zac Farro was 14 years old when the first lineup of Paramore came together. Before he could get a driver’s license, he and the rest of the band were embroiled in contract disputes, inter-band romances and, with their breakout single ‘Misery Business’, a cultural backlash around taking the lord’s name in vain. Nothing about being in Paramore was easy, no matter how hard everyone involved in the band tried to pretend everything was under control.
After the release of the band’s second album Riot!, the jig was up. It was becoming fairly common knowledge that life in Paramore was no pleasure cruise. Speculation was rampant that the band had split and their label was finding a way of breaking the news to their devoted, newly enormous fanbase. Yet, somehow, the band managed to find a way through and on April 29th, 2009, Paramore’s third album, brand new eyes, was announced.
While the band still struggled on, they were putting a brave face on for the promo circuit. Claiming that every bit of friction had been worked out in their downtime, they were now closer than ever and ready to be, as they so often reminded us they were, a band. In hindsight, we should have known they were lying through their teeth the moment we saw the album cover. A dissected butterfly with its wings torn off, pinned to a wall.
Where to even begin with this!? I guess the place to start is whether this was a living butterfly before Paramore got their grubby little mitts on it. Thankfully, it wasn’t, according to an interview Hayley Williams gave to MTV before the album’s release. “The cover is actually a butterfly I found in my driveway one day, and it was huge and really gorgeous, and we clipped its wings off and pinned its body and its wings up to the fence in my backyard.”
They go on to explain how the poor creature was dead when Williams found it. Since it chimed with the lyrics to the album’s second single ‘Brick By Boring Brick’ (“The angles were all wrong / Now she’s ripping wings off of butterflies”), the image was chosen to be the cover. However, it’s clear that the imagery goes deeper than that, and all it takes is a cursory listen to the album’s lyrics to realise it. brand new eyes is an album so bitter that it borders on cynicism, yet it’s too angry to ever truly succumb to it.
The album details how the band, something beautiful and pure, was ripped apart by forces both within and beyond it. Now, it merely remains. Held up for display, yet divided and lifeless, with no hope of ever coming back together again. Thus, that butterfly was the perfect metaphor for the state of the band, no matter how hard they tried to grin and bear it. After a little more than a year, Josh Farro and his brother, guitarist Zac Farro, didn’t just leave the band; they did so with a bombshell blog post trying to destroy Williams’ reputation. While the band would continue in name, it would never be the same again.
