It don’t get much better than this. Seventy two and sunny with a slight breeze blowing through Taylors Point and I’ve got my headphones on with my Alt Rock Autumn playlist blaring.
The past few days of the series have been mostly dedicated to the 90’s and early 2000’s so I thought that I’d buck the trend for today and sprinkle some more modern alt rock hits throughout the rest of the month.
For October 13th we’ll be looking at a huge hit from the pop rock/ alt rock group Paramore who just make music that is fun to listen too. They don’t have the same complexity of bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Counting Crows, but their music just makes for a good time.
Still Into You came out in 2013 on Paramore’s fourth studio album titled after the band, Paramore. The banger is the ninth track on the album and battles with Ain’t It Fun as the top song from the album.
Paramore actually debuted Still Into You at South by Southwest in Texas in March of 2013 and then released the song days later on March 14th, 2013.
The song received mixed feelings on 2013 charts. It topped out at number one on the UK Rock and Metal chart and sixth on the U.S. Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart. It also hit number five in Australia and number six in Ireland.
While it charted well in those countries, Still Into You was one hundred and eighty ninth in France, one hundred and forty sixth in South Korea, and sixty in Belgium.
Some countries may not have loved the jam, but the ones that did, really loved it. It was double platinum in America and Australia, platinum in the UK, and gold in Canada.
Many music critics called the song “catchy” and “fun”, agreeing with my earlier sentiments.
Paramore did take a bit of a different approach when composing the song. They used more skeletal guitar that resembled an alternative dance sound. The band went away from their typical heavy guitar riff sound for Still Into You, but replaced that sound with heavy backup drums.
Some songs that I’ve covered in past articles have had deep meanings that took some digging like Mr. Jones, One Headlight, and Scar Tissue but, Still Into You is a clear as day love song and the bands lead vocalist Hayley Williams confirmed that in interviews following the songs release.
If you do a little detective work you learn that Williams is singing about her relationship with musician Chad Gilbert and how her feelings have never changed since the two first met. They married in 2016 and are still together to this day!
Wait, they got divorced in 2017.
Safe to say that Hayley Williams Still Isn’t Into Chad.
In an interview with Spin, Williams said that "'Still Into You' is definitely a love song. It's definitely happy. But to me anyway — and obviously I wrote it so maybe I'm biased, but — it's not a sappy love song. ... We've never done that before, and honestly I don't have a whole lot of experience writing love songs, or anyways lyrics that are like this."
Reading how this was the bands first love song and Williams didn’t have experience writing a love song is another reason I write that the song is more simple than those I’ve covered this month. Still a banger, but not an insane amount of depth.
Still Into You is a great fit for autumn as long as you have the type of weather I’m currently living with, seventy and sunny. If you’re driving with the windows down, the songs drums with skeletal guitar just hits different.