This Is Why Tour

Lore & Background

By the time *After All* dropped, Paramore had already weathered a lineup split, a multi-year hiatus, and the enormous spectacle of the After La La Tour. The This Is Why Tour was the band's way of resetting the dial. They stripped the stage to essentials: a drum kit, two guitar amps, a bass rig, and a vocal chain. No LED walls, no video package. The songs—'This Is Why,' 'Till The End,' 'Rose Colored'—were arranged to sit in the same pocket as their 2005 demo tapes, where a feedback swell could still make a kid in the front row grab his friend's arm.

The choice to book theaters and mid-size clubs rather than arenas was both practical and philosophical. Hayley has spoken in interviews about how the band's identity was forged in 400-cap rooms, and that the intimacy of those spaces made the emotional songs on *After All* feel less like a performance and more like a conversation. Taylor's guitar work, which had grown more layered and textural over the years, benefited from the natural reverb of a smaller room; Zac's drumming, crisp and percussive, filled the space without needing a wall of monitors.

For the fanbase, the tour occupied a particular emotional slot. It wasn't the Riot! Tour's chaotic energy or the After La La Tour's cinematic scale. It was the quiet, aching middle—songs about leaving, staying, and the reasons you do both—delivered at a volume where you could hear the breath before a chorus. Many attendees described it as the Paramore show they'd been waiting for since the band first started playing empty rooms in Franklin, Tennessee.

In Their Own Story

The house lights dimmed to a warm amber, and for a beat the only sound was the low hum of a tube amp warming up. Then a kick drum, soft as a heartbeat, and the room of maybe six hundred people went still. Hayley stood at the mic, not quite singing yet, just letting the silence sit. Taylor's guitar picked up a clean, ringing arpeggio that bounced off the bare brick wall behind the stage and came back to you in the third row. You could see the condensation on the mic grille. You could see Zac's fingers on the snare, the slight tilt of his head as he found the groove. And when the first line of 'This Is Why' finally came, it wasn't a wall of sound. It was a voice, close and a little rough, filling the room the way a hand fills a cup—slowly, completely, enough. Someone two rows ahead you was crying. You didn't look away. You didn't need to. The whole room was breathing together, and the song was doing what it was supposed to do: telling you, in plain words, why you were still here.

Reader's Guide

The This Is Why Tour ran through 2018 across North America, touching cities from the coasts to the Midwest in a circuit of theaters, mid-size clubs, and small arenas—nowhere near the stadium scale of the band's earlier runs.

The stage production was deliberately lean. A straightforward drum riser, a pair of guitar amps, a bass stack, and a vocal chain. No video screens, no pyro, no elaborate set changes. The lighting was warm and minimal, keeping the focus on the four musicians and the natural acoustics of each room. The setlist leaned heavily into *After All* material, with 'This Is Why' and 'Till The End' anchoring the set, bookended by deeper cuts and a few fan-favorite older tracks to keep the timeline alive.

What made the tour land so well was the scale. In rooms where the front row was six feet from the kick drum, the emotional songs on *After All* hit differently. The band played with a looseness that read as genuine rather than performed—Taylor's guitar swells filling the natural reverb of the space, Zac's drumming tight and conversational, Hayley's vocal delivery intimate enough that audience members in the pit could hear the breath between phrases. For fans who had followed the band since the mid-2000s, it felt less like a concert and more like the show they'd been waiting for: small, honest, and close enough to reach out and touch.

Did You Know?

• The tour's name comes directly from the track 'This Is Why,' a single from the 2017 album After All, making the band's own songwriting the thread that tied the whole run together.
• After the massive After La La Tour the year before, This Is Why was a conscious step back to the club-and-theater scale that defined Paramore's early career in the mid-2000s.
• Zac Farro, who had left the band in 2011 and returned in 2015, played the full drum kit on this tour, giving the live sound the tight, four-piece feel fans associated with the band's earliest shows.
• The intimate venue sizes meant the band's natural room acoustics—rather than a production-heavy sound system—carried much of the emotional weight, a stark contrast to the LED-wall spectacle of their arena tours.