Paramore fans everywhere are getting out their paint and brushes to apply full clown makeup. In late 2023, the band's social media disappeared and their website was deemed inaccessible, sparking rumors that they had called it quits for the umpteenth time. But behind the scenes, Paramore were calibrating after signing their 20-year record deal with Atlantic Records and preparing to embark on their next chapter.
On Wednesday, Paramore returned to social media and shared the first official trailer for A24 Music's upcoming Stop Making Sense tribute album. It's the only post on their Instagram account. Paying tribute to Talking Heads, the record will feature 16 artists performing songs from their seminal 1984 live album Stop Making Sense. In the clip, directed by Paramore's AJ Gibboney and Zac Farro, frontwoman Hayley Williams receives a huge package in the mail. Inside the box, he finds an oversized suit jacket that replicates the one worn by David Byrne in the album's original artwork.
“I've got a tape I'd like to play you,” Williams tells Pharo and Taylor York, exiting the Stop making sense cassette. The trailer closes with a clip previewing Paramore's cover of “Burning Down the House.”
Paramore first teased a collaboration with Talking Heads during a performance at the New Yorker festival in October 2023. “All I'll say is it's crazy. It is incredible. It's unreal,” he told the audience. He revealed that Paramore had originally sought to include Byrne on their recently released album About: This is the reasonbut they decided it would be better to “save” it for something.
Williams added: “And hopefully it won't be too long before we share it. But we decided it was too special to wait, and there's more to this story, and you'll know all about it as soon as we can share it.”
Re: This is the reason marked Paramore's final release under their contract with Atlantic Records, who signed Williams as a technical solo artist when she was around 14 or 15 years old. Even before their slate was completely wiped clean, the trio looked forward to the future.
“To have people who obviously knew music and knew the business and knew how to take advantage, we got into a situation where I was being taken to labels. And it's a really long story that I promised to put into like a book or something one day, but because it's so layered — especially when I realized how young we really were,” he explained at the New Yorker festival event. “I think we were playing checkers and everyone else was playing chess. But it's one of the most heartbreaking things about our history is that we were such a unit and I kind of pulled away from that. And at the same time, we're grateful because maybe this was our chance and that's how we can still be here.”
This is the reason, released around this time last year, marked the first album in Paramore's discography to be made with the same lineup as its predecessor. After years of building the band only to have to effectively start over not too long later, they're more solid than ever. Later this year, they'll join Taylor Swift on her Eras European tour, and Williams has already hinted that Paramore will be back in the studio.
In an October 2023 interview with Rolling rock, Williams shared, “I was talking to Zac and Taylor about it recently. Sometime in the middle of this tour, we all started getting really excited about making new music again. We're ready to get back into the studio. And we still have a lot of shows — we're going to do the Eras tour next summer, we've got New Zealand/Australia, there's a couple of dates early next year. But there's something we're all metabolizing at last, about the last years of the band, but also existing.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paramore-talking-heads-stop-making-sense-tribute-album-1234943842/
