Harry Styles reveals the inspiration behind his new music. The band changed my life, gave me everything.” Styles remains a One D advocate: “I love the band, and would never rule out anything in the future.
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Fans were traumatized by the band’s decision, but were let down easy with a series of final bows, including a tour that ran through October. You realize you’re exhausted and you don’t want to drain people’s belief in you.”Īfter much discussion, the band mutually agreed to a hiatus, which was announced in August 2015 (Zayn Malik had abruptly left One D several months earlier). “If you’re shortsighted, you can think, ‘Let’s just keep touring,’ but we all thought too much of the group than to let that happen. “I didn’t want to exhaust our fan base,” he explains. It was in a London studio in late 2014 that Styles first brought up the idea of One Direction taking a break. But as he recounts the events leading up to his year out of the spotlight, the layers begin to slip away. Today, Styles is a game but careful custodian of his words, sometimes silently consulting the tablecloth before answering. Often in the past there was another One D member to vector questions into a charmingly evasive display of band camaraderie. He’s here to do something he hasn’t done much of in his young career: an extended one-on-one interview. We arrive at a crowded diner, and Styles cuts through the room holding a black notebook jammed with papers and artifacts from his album, looking like a college student searching for a quiet place to study. As we weave through traffic today, the album no one has heard is burning a hole in his iPhone. Drake and Rihanna have recorded there, and it’s where Styles produced the bulk of his new LP, which is due out May 12th.
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He’s full of stories about the two-month recording session last fall at Geejam, a studio and compound built into a mountainside near Port Antonio, a remote section of Jamaica.
I hadn’t done that before.” There isn’t a yellow light he doesn’t run as he speaks excitedly about the band he’s put together under the tutelage of producer Jeff Bhasker (The Rolling Stones, Kanye West, “Uptown Funk”). The number-one thing was I wanted to be honest. “I wanted to write my stories, things that happened to me. “I didn’t want to write ‘stories,’ ” he says. Styles’ car stereo pumps a mix of country and obscure classic rock. He’s lived here off and on for the past few years, always returning to London. “Honest,” he says, a year later, driving through midcity Los Angeles in a dusty black Range Rover. (He quotes the Clash’s Paul Simonon: “Pink is the only true rock & roll colour.”) Many of the details would change over the coming year – including the title, which would end up as Harry Styles – but one word stuck in his head. A bold single-color cover to match the working title: Pink. A song cycle about women and relationships. What would a solo Harry Styles sound like? A plan came into focus. For Styles, it was a search for a new identity that began on that bench overlooking London. For many, 2016 was a year of lost musical heroes and a toxic new world order. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here)īut at the height of One D–mania, Styles took a step back.