“When we wrote ‘Golden,’ we were sitting around the kitchen in the studio, and I was playing it on guitar. “That was just always going to be Track One.” It’s a blast of vintage Seventies SoCal soft rock, the kind of Laurel Canyon mellowness that suffused his first album, layered in guitars and harmonies. “That was always the first one I played to people,” he says. The first song written for Fine Line, on the second day of the sessions at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. Here is Styles’ song-by-song guide to Fine Line - along the creative and emotional journey he took while making it. You write a song that’s pretty open and honest, and you think, ‘That’s just my song,’ but then you hand it over to people, and it’s like, ‘Oh fuck!’ Until people hear them, they’re not even songs. “And I thought I was being so honest, just because there’s one line about having a wank. “I look back on the last album,” he said then, referring to his 2017 solo debut. The first time Styles played this album for me, back in June, it was a few miles away, in L.A.’s Henson Studios, the same room where his idol Carole King made Tapestry - for him, sacred ground. I feel so much freer, making this album - you get to a place where you feel happy even if the song is about the time when you weren’t that happy.” A lot changes in two years, especially after coming out of the band and just working out what life is now.
I tried to rewire what I thought about it. “The overall arc is just that I tried to redefine what success means to me. He’s refusing to follow trends or fit any formula. The music ranges from the Laurel Canyon hippie soft-rock vibe of “Canyon Moon” - Styles calls it “Crosby, Stills, and Nash on steroids” - to the R&B pulse of “Adore You.” Fine Line is a breakup album that’s often sorrowful but reflects the introspective evolution of a 25-year-old navigating the seas of having sex and feeling sad, despite Styles having spent so much of his youth in the spotlight. His life has changed in oh-so-many ways - some involving the occasional magic mushroom, others involving the even more psychedelic power of a broken heart.
And I just feel more comfortable being myself.” “Through the two years of making the record I went through a lot of personal changes - I just had the conversations with myself that you don’t always have. “I think ‘Lights Up’ came at the end of a long period of self-reflection, self-acceptance,” he says. “It all just comes down to I’m having more fun, I guess,” he says. As he sings in “Lights Up,” the single that dropped in September, he’s stepping into the light. Fine Line is the soulful, expansive, joyous pop masterpiece Styles has been reaching for ever since he blew up nearly 10 years ago, as the heartthrob of One Direction.
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