How Paramore's 'Brand New Eyes' Helped Me Envision A Future For Myself

NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. But this time, it's personal. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.

I left the Philippines for the San Francisco Bay Area at age 18, during the summer of 2015. The last few weeks before I departed, my mother had taken me to our church to "initiate my transfer," or to make sure the church in California knew I was coming through paperwork. The form I needed to fill out was a contract demanding me to abide by the religion's set of rules — one roughly translated to "You may not extend