If by any chance “Misery Business” is one of your favorite songs from Paramore’s lengthy discography, then you better prepare yourself because it’s going to be a long time before you hear the song live again. On Friday (Sept. 7), the Tennessee-founded band took the stage at the inaugural Paramore Art + Friends Festival in Nashville. During their set, frontwoman Hayley Williams made a massive decree in front of a packed house; the band was going to stop including “Misery Business” on their set lists going forward.
“Tonight, we’re playing this song for the last time for a really long time,” Williams begins to tell the cheering crowd. “This is a choice that we’ve made because we feel that we should. We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while.”
This isn’t the first time Williams has addressed the song and the “once a whore you’re nothing more / I’m sorry that will never change” lyric; something she wrote when she was 17 years old.
During a sit down interview last year with Track 7, the singer explained how there was a sudden surge of backlash about the song and its lyrics in an effort to invalidate her feministic outlook.
“The thing that annoyed me was that I had already done so much soul-searching about it, years before anyone else had decided there was an issue. When the article began circulating, I sort of had to go and rehash everything in front of everybody,” she explained to the online publication.
“It was important, however, for me to show humility in that moment. I was a 17-year-old kid when I wrote the lyrics in question and if I can somehow exemplify what it means to grow up, get information, and become any shade of ‘woke,’ then that’s a-okay with me.”
And “woke” she has been for some time now. Watch Paramore give “Misery Business” its swan song above.
