“I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he says, mirroring the “Harry, you’re no good alone” lyric from “As It Was.” After Italy, Styles visited friends in France, then returned to work, eventually posting up at Real World Studios near Bath, England. He credits his stream of roommates - friends, collaborators - with keeping him together during this time. He visited the Trevi Fountain one day, likely wearing his short-lived pandemic mustache, and was greeted with just four other people instead of the usual throngs that surround the historic site: “I felt like every day you’d say, ‘Weird time, isn’t it?’ Then go, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking insane!’ ” Later, he drove down to Italy in his late stepdad’s car with a friend, listening to the jazz CDs left behind. When flying became an option, Styles came home to London. He took inspiration from Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 LP, Hosono House, which he first heard when he lived in Japan years ago, and treated the songs like they were an internal monologue, traversing a day in his life. “It just felt like sitting at home doing nothing might feel better if we all move in together and try to make some music.” Before they knew it, they were making Harry’s House, a revelatory statement that happens to be his most radio-friendly album to date. “We didn’t really know what we were going in for,” he says. Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio, Shangri-La, was available, so Styles moved in with longtime producers and co-writers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. They’d “go for walks, cook dinner, wash the lettuce, all that kind of stuff,” he says, until he decided to use his downtime productively and began writing new material. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it.Īs the pandemic deepened, Styles ended up back in Los Angeles, where he keeps a home, and moved in with three friends. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first Number One hit in Fine Line’s “Watermelon Sugar,” a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realize he’s singing about cunnilingus. Styles didn’t get to play live again until last fall, but something funny happened in the interim.
Photographed by Amanda Fordyce for Rolling Stone.
Love on Tour, the name for his current trek, was supposed to launch in the spring of 2020, a few months after Styles released his second album, Fine Line. Of course it wasn’t meant to take him this long to get back to places like Hamburg, where he’ll play for more than 50,000 fans tomorrow night at Volksparkstadion, a local football stadium. They always used to come and visit when I was a kid, and the only word in English knew was ‘lemonade.’ I didn’t know if she actually wanted lemonade or was trying to say ‘Give me some water please!’ ” “He married a German lady, so I have a German cousin. “My great uncle lives here,” Styles says of Hamburg. (Back in New York, after surprising fans at a Spotify event for his new album, he asked me my thoughts on David Crosby’s most recent album, which he loved.) But he’s still as affable and charming as ever, remembering details from small talk we had in all the other cities where I had been (professionally) stalking him, and proving earnestly curious about how I was going to spend my time in Hamburg and how magazine deadlines work. He’s a bit more Zen, even stoic, than he once was that goofy, class-clown energy he exuded when the world first fell in love with him in One Direction 12 years ago has naturally diminished. He maintains eye contact as his thoughts unfurl in his often slow, British drawl. Styles is a kind of millennial anomaly: He plugs his phone in across the room, never once sneaking a glance for a rogue notification. I kind of felt like, ‘All right, I’ve seen how crazy it can get.’ And I think there was something about it where I was … not terrified, but I just needed a minute. “After One Direction, I didn’t expect to ever experience anything new. “We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he tells me, two months later. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced.
#STONE EDGE ORDER MANAGER SKIN#
The crowd that May night covered Long Island’s UBS Arena in feathers and glitter and tears - a ritualistic skin shedding of sorts whenever Styles comes to town.įans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, “Kiwi” instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single “As It Was,” his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. It wasn’t just any show it was the first time he performed his third and soon-to-be-biggest album, Harry’s House, in its entirety. On a Friday night in New York, Harry Styles put on a show.
0 kommentar(er)
