When Niall Horan\u2019s unmistakable Irish brogue rings out from the speakers of my computer, it\u2019s obvious he\u2019s in a cheery mood.<\/p>\n
The former One Direction member has recently released his fourth studio album, Dinner Party (via Capitol Records), and while a certain buoyancy has been a motif of his musical output since the start of his solo career, his latest project is on another level. (Dinner Party riffs on Horan\u2019s relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Amelia Woolley, its title inspired by the way they first met.) Consider a song like \u201cTastes So Good\u201d (on which Horan croons longingly, \u201cCan\u2019t take another breath without you \/ Can\u2019t walk down the street\u201d) or \u201cPretty\u201d (\u201cBaby,\u205fcan\u2019t you see? You\u2019re\u205fso fucking pretty\u201d), a sort of spiritual successor to One Direction\u2019s breakout single \u201cWhat Makes You Beautiful.\u201d But perhaps the most powerful moment on the album arrives with \u201cEnd of an Era,\u201d a long-gestating, bittersweet ballad that Horan rewrote following the 2024 death of his former bandmate Liam Payne.<\/p>\n
Here, Horan talks about writing love songs, his retro musical inspirations, and preparing to go on the road again.<\/p>\n
Vogue: Listening to the album, you sound so in love. Did you know that was going to be the motif right off the bat?<\/p>\n
Niall Horan: I mean, it sounds clich\u00e9, but you write from where you are. When I pick up a guitar, I say what I see. If you\u2019re going through a heartbreak, you write heartbreak-type songs; they happen naturally. And if you\u2019re doing the opposite, then you\u2019re writing love songs about the nuances of a relationship, and that just happens, too. I pick up the guitar, I play four chords. I start humming a melody. I start singing a melody. I fill in sentences with things that come to my head, and then I guess you get this kind of album. It sounds simple when I say it like that, but you have to do a bit of soul-searching and digging to go and find those lyrics.<\/p>\n
At what point during their evolution did you play these songs\u2014some of which are very vulnerable\u2014for Amelia? Do you play her new music as you\u2019re writing, or when it\u2019s all done and produced?<\/p>\n
Yeah, good question. Well, on my last album, there\u2019s songs on there about her, too, so this wasn\u2019t her first rodeo in terms of that. But no matter who you are, I guess you don\u2019t expect songs to be written about you, so I think it was a bit of a shock to the system in the first place for her, I would imagine. But I think she\u2019s pretty happy about this album. She\u2019s been taking it in her stride, in typical fashion of hers. I have a studio in the basement, and I\u2019ll go down and I\u2019ll start something, and I\u2019ll come up and I\u2019ll play it. She\u2019ll give me constructive criticism, or she\u2019ll tell me if she likes it or tell me if she doesn\u2019t like it. She\u2019s never too harsh, but she understands this is what I do: I write songs. That\u2019s how I get my emotions across, I suppose, so she gets it completely. She\u2019s very nice to me if she doesn\u2019t like a song and she\u2019s nice to me if she does like a song.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Niall Horan\u2019s unmistakable Irish brogue rings out from the speakers of my computer, it\u2019s obvious he\u2019s in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409,4813,5101],"class_list":["post-485822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}