Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams is back with “Leave It Alone,” the second single from her upcoming debut solo album, Petals For Armor. It is produced by her Paramore bandmate and co-writer Taylor York and arrives with an accompanying Warren Fu-directed music video.
On the track, Williams sings about personal loss:
Don’t nobody tell me that God don’t have a sense of humor
‘Cause now that I want to live, well, everybody around me is dying
Now that I finally wanna live, the ones I love are dyin’
Becoming friends with a noose that I made
She continues by addressing her grandmother’s recent fall down a set of stairs.
You don’t remember my name somedays
Or that we’re related
It triggers my worry
Who else am I gonna lose before I am ready?
And who’s gonna lose me?
Williams spoke about the accident in an interview with Beats 1’s Zane Lowe:
She fell all the way down my mom’s stairs. “[There was] head trama. We had already said goodbye to her. The weirdest thing is that she got better, but it prolonged the grief because she’s not really here with us. She doesn’t really remember everything. Thankfully she knows who I am, she knows who my mom is… It felt like there was a lot of death at the time, people we knew… family friends.”
The fall caused Williams to think deeply about life and love. “I just thought, ‘What is the point of loving people?’” she remembered. “In the best case scenario is I fall in love, we have a life together, and then we lose one or the other. The more you love, the more you stand to lose.”
Petals For Armor is slated to arrive on May 8. Last week, Williams released the lead single, “Simmer.”
Watch the video above, and read all the lyrics to Hayley Williams' “Leave It Alone” on Genius now.
