Wrap yourself in Petals
Hayley Williams of Paramore has been teasing a solo project for what feels like an eternity when really it's only been less than a month officially. Once she started posting references to movies such as "Midsommar" I decided to dive head first into the unknown and try to make sense of what I thought was going to be what we now know as "Simmer".
I intended on writing a review once the video and song came out on January 22nd, but there were so many other beautiful reviews written by people I love and respect that I didn't have anything more to add, however, I did want to speak on some of my own thoughts while also comparing how I felt before I heard it and after.
I had a few dreams about what the sound would be like, Taylor York (lead guitarist of Paramore) has a very complex way of creating that is always genre less and his influences range on the music spectrum, when I found out he was behind this, I suddenly had zero idea what we were in for, but part of me felt a very dark and punchy but muted sound, and to me that's what "Simmer" sounded like.
The video is complex in the way I know there are a lot of things I could try to decode from it, but really thinking about where to begin makes my head spin.
The video has been analyzed all across the internet but for a briefing for those who are new:
the video starts off with Hayley naked and running looking behind her and hiding. It starts off all red, the general tone of the whole video, which calls back to Paramore's video for "Told You So" off their 2017 record "After Laughter" where Hayley is sitting in a red room alone sitting with her depression and anxiety waiting for her friends and bandmates Taylor (York) and Zac (Farro) to come and rescue her from herself. Hayley finally reaches the house and inside there is a demon who comes to try to kill her, in turn, she ends up killing the demon herself and we come to find that the demon was her all along.
Hayley Williams in the video for "Simmer"
Hayley Williams in the video for "Told You So"
The video for me symbolized her fighting her own demons, insecurities, rage, sadness, and everything in between. For me, the video had tons of symbolism that mirrored the lyrics, and that's where I want to start with this review.
The lyrics we knew about were:
"Rage is a quiet thing" , "how to draw the line between wrath and mercy", "wrap yourself in petals" "nothing cuts like a mother" "if I had seen my reflection as something more precious"
I talked about each line in my episode "(60) You are now Surrounded by Flowers" and will go line by line what I thought before the song dropped and after.
"How to draw the line between wrath and Mercy" //
"wrap yourself in petals"
Hayley did an interview back in March, 2019 with I'odet where she had first talked about the idea for "Petals for Armor" (record coming out May 8th, 2020), everyone has already referenced this a bunch but for those who haven't read or followed anything before this, she said:
"I went to see what some people would think of as a 'coo-coo therapist,' like a craniosacral masseuse, but I fucking love her. She always just hits the nail on the head. During a session, she was doing body work on me and they say that our memories are stored in the nerves and tissues — not so much the head. It’s fascinating. So a lot of times when we do body work, we access emotions and memories we’ve tucked away or our body has done for us.
I was on the table and I had a lot of thoughts about my wedding. I remembered some stuff that I just hadn’t remembered before — just how uncomfortable I felt in that dress and things that I so quickly turned off because I wanted it so badly to work out. And then later in the session I had this vision of all of these flowers growing out of me. My cynical side immediately took it and was like, 'Well, the only way that happens is if you’re dead, you’re in the ground, and somebody put some pretty flowers there.' But then this new side that I’d never had access to, swiftly flew in and batted that away and said, 'No. That’s you. This is now. This is what’s happening right now and this is what you’ve been digging around in the dirt for during the last year. This beauty and femininity and new strength is going to come out of you.' And I chose to hold onto it.I swear to god I’m there with my eyes closed and we’re at the end of the session. I haven’t spoken a word of any of this to her. She goes, 'Alright, we’re done with the session.' You know, just really calm whispering. She said, 'Thank you so much for seeing me today. You’re surrounded by flowers.' I was like, 'What the fuck!!?'."
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
and also mentioned it when she spoke to Annie Mac on the premier of "Simmer" on BBC Radio 1 elaborating more than what she had said in her initial interview with l'odet and said "I felt these flowers growing out of me and not in a beautiful way but a very painful and grotesque way" and at the time before the release, Hayley was posting screen grabs from "Midsommar" where Dani (lead character played by Florence Pugh) was seen crowned as the May Queen and how in one screen grab she was pouting and sad and the next she is happy. I had talked about this in my episode and said (Spoilor Alert):
"she finds a healing comfort when she screams and cries intensely with the other women. In the end he is tortured and burned alive, she is seen smiling for the first time in the whole movie, but although she is smiling she is severely broken and empty inside but at peace in a weird way. Hayley has a caption while she was posting a lot about "Midsommar" and it said “the line between wrath and mercy” and in the moment of being May Queen, Dani had to choose to give in to letting her boyfriend die or seek mercy on him and let him live. In the Paramore song “Rose Colored Boy” there’s a line “you got me nervous and you're turning it into a joke” and ever since these clues have been dropping I’ve thought maybe that means her anxiety and how she felt wasn’t validated by her ex, much like Dani in the beginning of "Midsommar".
after seeing the video and watching the video, I do still think what I previously said still stands, however the lines that follow:
"Gotta simmer, simmer, simmer, simmer, simmer down
Control
There's so many ways to give in
Eyes closed
Another way to make it to ten"
Shows restraint and shows how she is finding that line between wrath and mercy. It takes control, and you have to avoid all the ways to give into either, showing mercy often times is synonymous with weakness depending on the type of mercy you are showing, more often than not it is never a good thing. Wrath is also an extreme emotion, in this line it shows she is thinking about reacting in either direction. "another way to make it a ten" referring to intensity level for the reaction but also knowing there are other ways to react that aren't showing compassion and sympathy or rage and anger.
"rage is a quiet thing" // "if I had seen my reflection as something more precious"
In my episode I talked in detail about these lines. I said:
"Prior to everything that "After Laughter" was rooted in, I've always said I’ve never felt connected to Paramore, and this is the reason. Hayley never really wrote what helplessness felt like, she was always the optimist, she even said it herself during the Zane Lowe interview, she was always the one holding it together, and now for the first time she said 'maybe there’s nothing to smile about after all' which obviously is dark as fuck and not true, but if you’ve ever been at the mercy of a mental illness, you understand that feeling.I also want to mention these lines in no friend because I feel despite not being super relevant I had some more thoughts. The lines
-As protection from the paper thin perfection you project on me
-And drown my dull reflection in the naive expectation in your eyes-you see a flood lit form I see a shirt design
-I see myself in the reflection of people's eyes, realizing what they see may not be even close to the image I see in myself, and I hate I might actually be more afraid to let myself down
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
These lyrics I’ve spoken about before and again I don’t think they direct relate to her caption but it does show that her image of herself she sees in the mirror is skewed. She didn’t love herself the way she wished she did, she wanted to die, she most likely couldn’t bare the thought of looking at who she has become since she has always been on this pedestal and was always some sort of god or a savior to a lot of people and now she’s almost 30 and has gone through way more than she anticipated and she doesn’t know who she is anymore and maybe she wishes she appreciated who she was in the mirror before her mental health took a nose dive and she became unable to recognize herself or even want to see the new version of herself she has become. She stopped seeing herself as the unstoppable force who can get through everything and started to see a woman who has been through a lot and is taking off the cape and seeing herself for the first time since she was 14. She said when after laughter came in that same interview with Zane Lowe that she was no longer going to mourn that person anymore, the orange haired superhero, but I think part of her at some point wanted that confidence back because you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, truly.
I continued to mention another interview:
"In addition to his Hayley saw herself, her friend and photographer Lindsey Brynes interviewed her for Nylon ahead of her "Sanctuary of Self Love" 's first year at Bonaroo, Hayley said this that I felt really relevant:-In every corner of being alive right now, you find this conversation around mental health and what we're doing to better ourselves—or what we're not doing. For me, for the last two years, I was in huge denial about my depression. I knew I was sad, I knew that I had been through some shit, but I was like, I'm handling it, I'm handling it. And, honestly, right around the time that Bonnaroo came to me about this, I was not doing well. The first meeting we were having—I didn't know until recently that I do this—I was picking the skin around my fingernails incessantly until they bled. And I kept them, because I'm a hoarder, I guess…'
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
Still calling back to that idea she was not allowed to so to speak anything about being anything but the positive energetic front woman the public came to know and respect. She then mentioned how she keeps special and important things she does and with that she said:
'On these Bonnaroo papers, the first renderings, and these ideas, there's just blood all over the page. I was just going through it, man. I was still coming to terms with my depression, I was coming to terms with the trauma and the stuff that I had not dealt with from before, and suddenly my band's last record After Laughter started to make a whole lot more sense.That only made me more passionate about this job that they're asking me to do, which is to help give people a space to find what works for them, in their journey towards being a healthier human—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. For some people, that's going to be kinesthetic group activities, where they can create art and make things and see that they've made something. That's been a huge, important thing for me to have, to be able to see that I made something. For other people, that might be meditation, very quiet and more internal, things where they can sit with themselves, or maybe guided meditation, where it's still really quiet, it's still really internal. I need a little bit of both, and I kinda need tough love, too.'
I think what she said in that last bit really speaks to how much she wanted to make something that was hers and felt finally after denying herself of 'going solo' because of how people would react, she said fuck it it’s my life I don’t owe anyone a reason this mine and I need this.
Lastly this line where she said when Lindsey was talking about her orange hair back when Paramore first jumped onto the charts
'I think, subconsciously, I thought it was kind of cool even though it had also annoyed me that people only focused on my hair. I was like, Focus on the band, the music. It was very... I wanted it to be cool. I wanted to be cool'
And I want to mention that part because often times we do things we might know is wrong or a red flag because we, mostly as women, don’t want to make a fuss, we don’t want to be difficult, we aren’t like your last ex you made us believe is crazy or a bitch, we’re the cool girl, and it’s frustrating to no end to feel like you are competing with a version of someone you don’t know because the person you love made you believe you had to be better."
I said so much about the "reflection" line but ended up feeling a little different once I heard the next line.
"If I had seen my reflection as something more precious
He would've never"
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
Adding the “he would’ve never” part to this makes me now think in addition to what I said about how Hayley sees herself, I think this line now says “if I loved myself more this man would’ve never gaslit me and manipulated me and since I don’t love myself or care (since she said she wanted to die and thought about death a lot) I have no self worth and just let him do whatever he wants” and then the next line talking about if she had a daughter she would never allow a man to treat her the way she has been treated, which calls back to what I said about how Hayley’s mom probably hated watching her own daughter go through divorce and terrible things and only wanted to protect her, this line also brings self awareness to Hayley’s character now and how she realizes how she was treated was not okay
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
Also, adding to the "Rage is a quiet thing" lyric, to me that represents bottling emotions up. I know I didn’t know how angry I was until the dust settled and I had time to process the things that weren’t okay. The glasses come off, your projector bulb has burned out, and your left with the reality of the person you allowed to make you feel a way nobody should feel. Rage is often quiet, Especially after awhile and you’re just letting it simmer in the background when the other person does most of the talking and eventually gaslights you into believing bullshit until you just say okay.
I mentioned this part in the l'odet interview when Hayley was talking about her divorce, she said:
"My own…it was sort of the beginning of me having to reckon with my parents’ divorce too, and I didn’t know that until recently. My divorce felt like a train crash that I knew the whole time was coming — even from the moment we started dating. I tried my best to pad it, wear all the right gear, and protect myself — and maybe even potentially, at the last second, derail the situation to where things might work out in a way I couldn’t foresee.
When it really hit, I felt like such a failure. I felt embarrassed because I knew that I shouldn’t have gone through with the marriage. And we had already dealt with a lot of the heaviest parts of being a couple and why things were bad. I just hurt. I had no trust left whatsoever. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I did anyway; that’s why I felt like I had to stay. The reason I ended up deciding to leave is, I had started to have a lot of suicidal thoughts. I was thinking about death all the time; I was thinking, 'What is the point of anything ever? Why is this supposed to be the best time of my life? This is terrible.' "
with that addition of the lyric I feel there is a lot that can be said about it. But, I will leave it at that.
Lastly, the line:
"because nothing cuts like a mother"
In my episode I said:
"Hayley posted a bunch of movie and a TV reference on the same day she posted “nothing cuts like a mother” on the petals for armor Instagram all her references for mothers going through hell for their children, mainly, their daughters. It’s no secret Hayley and her mom have a good relationship, it’s also no secret her mother went through a lot of bad relationships, an abusive ex, and went through her own divorce while Hayley was young.
I personally never talked about my relationship or anything that made me anxious or didn’t sit right, it wasn’t until we broke up because part of me always knew a lot of things were wrong like I had already mentioned and I didn’t want my friends or family to judge so I kept it all in, and it wasn’t until the break up that I started to talk and my mom was the first person to try to do whatever she could to help. Me going through all of that and knowing the nature of Hayley and her moms relationship being close, I wouldn’t doubt her mom would do whatever it took to help her daughter heal. I truly believe her mom saw her go through all these nasty things, him cheating, just everything and it probably hurt like nothing else because nobody wants their child to go through anything tough they’ve been through or really go through anything heart breaking in general, so I believe all her references and her caption was a call to how hurt her mom was for her when she watched Hayley go through everything. Because it’s true, nothing hurts like a mother and how they will do anything necessary to protect their kids, no matter what.
The day after Hayley made those posts, her mom made a post on her own Instagram about peter pan being a hero, now maybe I’m just Charlie Daying this at this point but maybe it ties into never wanting to grow up, and in relation this 'Petals for Armor', not wanting to see Hayley grow up because growing up is painful and she doesn’t want to see Hayley in anymore pain."
The line that follows is:
"Mmm, and if my child needed protection From a fucker like that man I'd sooner gut him 'Cause nothing cuts like a mother"
And I don't have many addition thoughts to add on this line but I do feel it still calls back to Hayley now knowing everything she went through was NOT okay and she would never allow that to happen to a possible future child.
those are all the lyrics I had analyzed prior to the "Simmer" release. Hayley had mentioned in her BBC Radio 1 interview she was just angry during her time off the road with Paramore and she was encouraged to write about how she was feeling since she was a fan of bottling up emotion.
Photo by Lindsey Brynes
"Petals for Armor" comes out May 8th, 2020, Hayley mentioned she will be taking this on tour and will at least have Joey Howard (touring bass player for Paramore, Bass player in Halfnoise, co-writer on "Simmer") in addition to Paramore crew with her. "Simmer" is available on all streaming services and you can watch the video here