Hayley Williams Dives Into The Wreck
There are flowers all across Hayley Williams' Nashville house, both living and deceased: dried-up bouquets of shriveled and curled roses, hydrangeas the color of weathered paperback pages, vibrant pots of purple and white pansies thriving in the patio sun. At first, this was her therapist's idea, to surround herself with these blooms – she'd never really been a flower person, never felt too connected to those ideas of femininity and girliness tangled up with them. But Williams started to see them differently, to collect them, and keep them long past their traditional beauty had faded.
"Flowers became a simple way to remind myself of beauty and resilience, and the way we can come alive when we are taken care of," Williams tells NPR. She's home, of course, in Nashville, talking on a video call as the tail of her dog Alf pops in and out of the frame. It's been a particularly difficult few days in quarantine for the 31-year-old frontperson of Paramore and now solo artist, so today she traded her house slippers and sweats for some "real clothes." It helped a little, she thinks: a small gesture of self-care as fertilizer for the soul. "But flowers also show," she adds, staring firmly into the camera, her white-blonde hair dusting over expressive brows, "when they are not taken care of."
Flowers never lie – if you don't water them, feed them or grow them in the sun, they fail to thrive. But people can be different.
