The Paramore member Hayley Williams wrote an entire album about
There’s always been an enigma around Paramore. A glimmer of romance, a modern-day ‘will they, won’t they?’ that has never really been put to bed.
Undeniably, this elephant in the band has been the source of many frictions between frontwoman Hayley Williams and the musicians who back her. But at the same time, the only people creating those supposed love triangles and lust are themselves, so there’s no one else to blame on that front.
Yet it was clear that ever since Paramore’s formation in 2004, time flew quickly and things changed massively in a relatively short space of time, especially for a band that were still to experience some major successes later down the line. But in 2009, all the tension had mounted to a point where something had to give, and so Williams put it into song.
Well, it was actually far more than just a song and, in fact, an entire album, as the band’s Brand New Eyes not only created them a seminal new sonic cornerstone, but marked a fresh era where some ties had to be cut, and others became a whole lot stronger. At the heart of it all was Williams and her guitarist, Josh Farro.
But the true heartbreaking irony was that the record was ultimately the one thing that tore their romantic illusions down into a stark reality that neither of them could ever fully recover from. The root of the album was pretty clear to anyone who heard it, but it took the frontwoman some time to actually put her cards on the table about what went on.
She later admitted, “A large majority of those songs have to do with the relationship we had and then that we had to mend… it was really hard, because we were friends, and then going through a break-up and going through any kind of tension as a band really affected all the lyrics.” Their relationship, lasting only from 2004 until 2007, changed the course of the rest of their lives.
In this sense, Williams left no holds barred when she said she felt the relationship and break-up was “like my face was underneath a boot all the time”. It might have seemed harsh, but by the same token, she could freely express herself how she liked at that point. Farro had left the band for good.
It was a rather thinly-veiled fact that the guitarist’s departure from the band in 2010, shortly after the release of Brand New Eyes, could have been attributed in no small part to the rising tempers between him and Williams. Because of this, the album was symbolic of the closing of Paramore’s first chapter, but there was so much more still to come.
Brand New Eyes stood out amongst the crowd for its lyrical maturity, not typically found in the efforts of a young pop punk outfit. Songs like ‘The Only Exception’ became pillars of the late 2000s and early 2010s adolescence, not because they were rudimentary or watered down, but precisely for the fact that they were searing and real, just what the canon was crying out for.
This, of course, may not have served as any consolation for Williams and Farro, navigating their heartbreak and new terms under an increasingly glaring spotlight. But for Paramore fans everywhere, they needed that break-up to spur them on to the next level. You could say it was almost like an act of service.
