Paramore's "This Is Why" Has A Far Deeper Meaning Than You Might Realise

With their faces pressed up against a pane of glass, Paramore look like they’re almost straining to escape the confines of their comeback single “This Is Why.” The band’s first release since their bright, poppy-sounding record After Laughter back in 2017, it paves the way to a brand new album and era for the hugely influential U.S. rock group.

Over the course of lockdown, the band members went on their own journeys of personal growth, with Hayley Williams releasing two notable solo albums. By the time the three of them reunited in Nashville to focus on Paramore, they knew they needed to have a proper conversation “about living in the south during [lockdown], during racial injustice, and a social movement that was bigger than it’s ever been in America,” Williams told The Guardian. “It felt really important for us to be home while so much crazy sh*t was happening.”

Many of these conversations inform Paramore’s new forthcoming album, while “This Is Why” stems from a kind of despair that months of lockdowns and isolation didn’t lead to any kind of great reset or reevaluation of the world’s inequalities. Rather than forging a new kind of life afterwards, it felt to the band like things snapped back to normal, in all its flawed glory. “If you have an opinion,” Williams sings in the opening line, “Maybe you should shove it.”

“This Is Why” was the very last song we wrote for the album,” Williams said in a press release. “To be honest, I was so tired of writing lyrics, but Taylor [York] convinced Zac [Farro] and I both that we should work on this last idea. What came out of it was the title track for the whole album. It summarises the plethora of ridiculous emotions, the rollercoaster of being alive in 2022, having survived even just the last 3 or 4 years. You’d think after... [the] impending doom of a dying planet, that humans would have found it deep within themselves to be kinder or more empathetic, or something.”

“How sad it is that we’ve gone through this horrible thing globally, as humans,” Williams told Los Angeles Times, elaborating. “Whether it’s racism, or conspiracy theories… I think about how the internet is supposed to be this great connector, but drives us further inward and further apart. I’ve watched people be so awful to each other. How could we go through these things together and come out worse?”

Take a look at the full “This is Why” lyrics, below:

If you have an opinion

Maybe you should shove it

Or maybe you could scream it

Might be best to keep it

To yourself (To yourself)

To yourself (To yourself)

This is why

I don't leave the house

You say the coast is clear

But you won't catch me out

Oh, why?

This is why

Better have conviction

'Cause we want crimes of passion

Survival of the fittest

You're either with us or you can keep it

To yourself (To yourself)

To yourself (To yourself)

To yourself, yourself, yourself

To yourself (To yourself)

This is why

I don't leave the house

You say the coast is clear

But you won't catch me out

Oh, why?

This is why

This is why

I don't leave the house

You say the coast is clear

But you won't catch me out

Oh, why?

This is why

One step beyond your door

It might as well have been a free fall

One step beyond your door

Falling down an endless hall

One step beyond your door

Might as well have been a free fall

One step beyond your door

And I'm floating like a cannonball

This is why

I don't leave the house

You say the coast is clear

But you won't catch me out

Oh, why?

This is why

Ah, ah, this is why

I don't leave the house

You say the coast is clear

But oh, no, you won't catch me out

Oh, why?

This is why