#harry styles behind the album documentation

[hsonlyangelxo]

I'm still not over it.

[avatar-anna]

I feel like there has to be a time when the kids are so over being on your: they hate the moving, being woken up at ungodly hours, etc. So is there a point in the document where harry and y/n shed light on how touring is/can get to be too much for the kids?

Id love to see the kids interacting with the Pauli mitch and the rest of the band for the love on tour doc fic

Young dad!Harry x Young mom! Reader universe

Part 1 Part 2

bold and italics: camera directions, or what you would be seeing as a viewer of the documentary in person

just italics: interviewer questions, or people who are speaking off camera

Love on Tour: The Documentary, Part 3

In an interview room sits a man with long hair and a beard, The screen reads, “Mitch Rowland: guitarist and long-time friend of Harry Styles.”

“So, how long have you known Harry?”

“Forever it seems like,” Mitch says. “But a few years now.”

“And how long have you known Y/n and the kids?”

Mitch grins, as if recalling a memory. “Almost as long, but not quite.”

“Do you remember when you found out he had a family?”

“It was the most bizarre day,” Mitch says. “We were filming and recording a bunch of songs off the first album that was going to be in a documentary. No one knew at the time. I remember Y/n, Simone, and Collette being there but not really knowing why. I think I thought they were some executive’s family member who got invited to watch Harry record the songs or something like that. And H would go over every now and again to talk to Y/n, but they weren’t like, overly affectionate or anything, and obviously Y/n had her hands full with the baby. I thought he was just being nice.nBut then there was a point where the baby would not stop crying.”

Cut to Y/n’s interview.

“I was so embarrassed. It was the first time we got to do something like that. Me, Simone, and Collette, I mean. I was always so used to having to stay behind with the girls and hear about Harry’s day after the fact. But Jeff told Harry that we could come, that no one knew who we were anyway, and as long as we kept a low profile it would be fine, so I thought, why not, you know?”

Back to Mitch’s interview.

“And I could see Y/n in the corner bouncing the baby and doing whatever she could to get Collette to stop crying, and everyone was kind of aware of this young woman that no one really knew holding everything up. I was about to ask Harry if he knew Y/n, but he walked over to where she was, and they had a quick conversation before he took the baby and walked off while Y/n stayed with Simone. By that point Jeff had called for a fifteen-minute break, so everyone was splintering off but still kind of watching Harry walking around with some random woman’s baby.”

“Except it wasn’t a random baby, obviously.”

“Right, but at the time I remember giving Sarah a look. I think she put it together quicker than I did because she just kind of smiled and shook her head.”

Cut to an interview with a young woman who is introduced as, Sarah Jones: drummer and long time friend of Harry Styles.

“The baby immediately stopped crying when he picked her up,” she says like it’s obvious. “And you could tell that this was not Harry’s first time holding and comforting a baby. He looked like he’d been doing it for years. He looked completely at ease, and so did the baby.”

Back to Mitch’s interview.

“What was your initial reaction when you found out?”

“Shocked, I guess?” he says. “I didn’t really know him from One Direction, everything I knew about H was from our interactions together, and he didn’t let it slip. Not once. I remember asking him once if he was seeing anyone and he kind of just shrugged and was like, ‘I’m perfectly happy with the way my life is right now,’ which to me sounded like he was happy being single, but obviously he was raising a family when he wasn’t in the studio. I think he and Y/n would’ve just had Collette when we first met.”

Back to Harry’s interview.

“Did you plan on expanding your family after One Direction?”

Harry raises his brows at the camera. “I see were fishing for some steamy answers,” he jokes. “But honestly? Yeah. Y/n and I had a lot of long conversations about what we wanted. And I think in the back of our heads we wanted more, but weren't sure if it would be, like, allowed while I was still in the band. And we were still pretty young. I planned on taking some time off after the band, and we thought we were as ready as anyone could be. I mean, there’s no surprise like finding out your pregnant at seventeen, so…”

“What was that day recording in the studio like?”

“Collette was teething, which was why she was crying so much,” Harry explains. “And I knew that Jeff, Y/n, and I kind of had a plan for how the day would play out. There were cameras around for the album documentary, so we had to be careful, but everything was going well, but when I saw Y/n struggling, I knew I couldn’t just leave her to deal with Collette and Simone by herself when she was having a hard time. And, you know, that was my baby. Hate hearing her cry and all that.”

Then, he adds, "But before that I was over the moon that they were there. That I could show Simone what I did for work, even if it was from far away."

Back to Jeff’s interview.

“So what did you do?”

“I told everyone that Y/n was a friend of mine who was shadowing me for the day and her sitter canceled last minute. Somehow everyone bought it.”

“But how did Collette end up in the other documentary?”

“Harry and I both saw the final footage before it was released,” Jeff says. “But there was no indication that Harry was the father of the baby he was holding, and Y/n and Simone stayed out of the camera’s way. Collette was still so little, so she didn’t have any distinguishable features. It just looked like she was some random baby on set that day.”

Back to the interview with Simone, Collette, Maeve, and Julian.

“Collette, how does it feel to be in a documentary when you were just a baby?”

“I was a movie star!”

“Now we all get to be in a movie,” Maeve says. “Except for GiGi and Natalia. They’re too little.”

Back to Mitch.

“What it’s it like going on tour with Harry’s family?”

“Honestly? It’s fine. I think for obvious reasons, H has always been selective about who he travels with on tour, and not just for the sake of keeping his secrets. None of us are the ‘sex, drugs, rock and roll’ types, which helps when you’ve got little kids running around or riding on the bus with you.”

Cut to a montage of clips from Love on Tour: a rehearsal onstage with Mitch, Sarah, Pauli, Ny Oh, Harry, Simone, Collette, and the twins. Collette is on Pauli’s shoulders while Simone is sitting at the drum kit. Harry is holding Julian while Maeve clings to his leg; another clip of the Love Band on a tour bus with Simone and Collette playing a board game; Simone playing peek-a-boo with a baby boy and baby girl whose faces are blurred for privacy; Harry and Y/n asleep with all their kids on a hotel bed, a baby curled up on Harry’s chest; Mitch showing Julian how to play the guitar.

Harry’s Voiceover: Obviously it isn’t always easy traveling with five kids, one of them being a few months old. And there was the added risk with Covid and everything. There were times when we had some very…cranky children, especially the first few nights of tour when everyone was trying to get back into the swing of things and Y/n and me were trying to figure out a schedule that worked best for the kids.

Back to Y/n and Harry’s interview.

“How did you make it all work?”

“When I’m on my own, I usually just sleep on the tour bus, but a hotel room is a lot more practical when you’ve got the whole family,” Harry says.

“A suite,” Y/n says, almost dreamily. “The girls and Julian would share a room connected to ours, and Geneva would sleep with us, though by the time we woke up, there could be any number of new additions in our bed.”

“Then I would do school with Simone and Collette in the morning before I had to leave for rehearsals and take the twins with me while Y/n finished up the older girls’ schooling for the day, and then they would come meet us after. We’d have lunch together, and then Y/n would either go exploring with the kids or hang out at the venue or the hotel.”

“That was the plan we’d made, anyway,” Y/n says. “There was hardly a time where it went perfectly, but we made it work. And Sarah toured with her son, which made me feel a little less alone when Harry was off doing whatever and a little less crazy.”

Back to Sarah’s interview.

“I had one baby to look after and I was exhausted,” Sarah says. “Y/n and Harry had a baby and four other kids to look after. And Harry’s a great dad and everything and so good about doing his part, but Y/n really is a rockstar in her own right. She even helped me with my son a few times.”

Back to Harry and Y/n’s interview.

“Hear that?” Harry asks. “You’re a rockstar.”

“Oh hush,” she says to him. Then, to the camera, she says, “I don’t know a lot about music or performing, but I do know a thing or two about getting a baby to fall asleep.”

More clips of Love on Tour behind the scenes, but these seemed to be centered around Y/n. Her and Harry in the back of a tour bus while his head is in her lap as she runs a hand through his hair; Y/n in a dressing room with the Love Band laughing before they go onstage, Y/n reading to all the kids in a hotel room; driving a golf cart around a venue with Maeve, Julian, Simone, and Collette riding with her as she yells, “Thanks for the tip, Louis!” to the camera.

Back to Y/n’s solo interview.

“I tried to make it as fun as possible for them. It…Touring is not exactly Disneyland or the playground, but I did what I could. Golf carts, hotel pools, you name it. I think at one point a small slide got added to the crew’s packing list so that the kids could play when they were tired of watching rehearsals.”

“Would you have done anything differently?”

Y/n shakes her head. “No. I think going on tour as a family was the right thing for us at that time. Simone and Collette were doing full-time homeschool, and H and I would do some preschool lessons with the twins. Maybe some parents will judge me, but they’ve also never been in my position before. I know what’s best for my family, and at the start of the tour, staying together wasn’t up for debate.” 

“But you eventually went home.”

“Yes,” she says. “When it was time. Maeve and Julian were having a hard time with not having as consistent of a sleep schedule, getting everyone up and going early in the morning was difficult, but for me, the thing that bothered me the most was how isolated they were.”

“How do you mean?”

“Harry’s tour was obviously right at the start of when things were opening back up, and before that, it was just us in the house during lockdown,” Y/n says. “Not being around children your own age affects a child, and I wanted my kids to have friendships outside of each other, build social skills, that kind of thing, and they weren’t going to get that while touring with a bunch of adults.”

Back to Harry’s solo interview.

“How did you feel when Y/n and the kids went home?”

“Bummed, obviously,” Harry says, scratching at the stubble on his chin. “I agreed with Y/n when she said it was time to enroll Simone and Collette in school and find a preschool for the twins, and honestly, I didn’t want Y/n to stretch herself thin with having to homeschool the girls when she went back. She already does so much. I knew why they had to go back home, and I always want what’s best for my family, but after having them around on tour…It was an adjustment for sure.”

Back to Sarah’s interview.

“You would’ve thought Y/n had broken up with him,” she jokes. “He moped for weeks after Y/n took the kids home. He was the same as always onstage, but once a show ended, he was on the phone.”

Back to Harry’s interview.

“I never wanted to go back to the way things were before the pandemic,” he explains. “A big fear of mine was that we’d somehow end up back to that point.”

Back to Y/n’s interview.

“Did you worry about that too?”

“No, I didn’t,” she says. “I know how H felt about it, but I knew he would never make the same mistakes again, and I knew things were different this time. I wouldn't have given him a second chance if I didn't think things were actually going to change. We were on the same page for everything, and he would fly home between shows if he could swing it. He’d have to wear a mask at home the whole time, but he was willing.”

Back to Mitch’s interview.

“I think…I think he was fully aware of what he stood to lose this time around,” Mitch says. “I don’t pretend to know the inner workings of his relationship with Y/n, but I know both of them pretty well. Harry doesn’t take failure lightly and I don’t think Y/n would have let him fail a second time. And there was the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“I’m not sure I should be the one to say.”

Back to Y/n’s interview.

“I got pregnant on tour. Did H already tell you that?”

Back to Harry’s interview.

“Didn’t you say you had a baby sleeping in your bed?”

Harry looks sheepish as he thinks about his answer. He plays with his bottom lip and avoids looking at the camera. He says, “I’m not going to tell you how or where it happened. That’s my wife!”

Harry laughs along with everyone behind the camera. As they all laugh, he tries to speak over them.

“I mean, I promised to be open, but not that open! This is a family show!”

Cut to a rehearsal of the second leg of Love on Tour (2023). The camera goes up to each member of the love band to ask a very serious question.

“Were you surprised when Harry told you Y/n was pregnant?”

“Uh…no,” Elin says. 

“You could definitely tell something was up,” Ny Oh says. “Harry was calling and texting whenever he wasn’t needed. And he was sometimes a little…high strung.”

“I would’ve put money on it,” Jeff says when Pauli tells him the question as he walks by.

Sarah shrugs as she says, “Y/n told me to keep an eye on Harry before she left, and before that, you could sense this energy between her and H. Like they had this big secret.”

“Secret? Yes. Big?” Mitch shrugs. “Eh. Like Sarah said, you could just kind of tell. And when they had moments alone together, they were giggling like idiots and being all...they were all over each other when the kids weren't looking. In a PG way,” he says, adding the last part as an afterthought.

Pauli says, “I may have heard some things that I maybe shouldn’t have as I was passing a concert bathroo—

The camera cuts off mid-sentence. More behind the scene clips play.

Harry’s Voiceover: The “love” in Love on Tour is broad. When I play a show, I want my fans to feel safe and loved, even if they might not feel that way in their day-to-day lives, in that space and time, they only need to feel love. But on a personal level, all my loves were on tour with me, and while I have loved touring before, it was different having them with me, even if it was short-lived. So calling the tour “Love on Tour” just made sense. There was lots of love to go around.

Back to Harry’s interview.

“And you made love on tour,” Y/n says off-camera.

Harry hangs his head and holds it in his hands. “Jesus Christ.”

The whole room erupts into laughter, including Harry, who still won’t show his face. When he eventually does, his face is bright red.

“A family show! This is a family show!” he insists, but everyone just keeps laughing off-camera. Shaking his head, he says, “Or is it? Now if you excuse me.”

Harry takes his mic off and stands up from his chair. The camera follows his movements as he walks over to where Y/n is still laughing, even when he picks her up and puts her over his shoulder to carry her out of the room. “It was a good joke!” she says, still mic’d up. Then the audio cuts and the screen cuts out like a wink.

[larrytimelines]

May 2021 complete timeline

May 1 (Sat): Holivia allegedly at Soho Farmhouse

May 2 (Sun): Video “leaks” via Olivia Dexter on IG of Holivia at Soho Farmhouse the day before. (video here and here)

Picture of Holivia outside Harry’s public house in London, tho that could be from April 26th, when we got that pic of them allegedly “at brunch”. (pictures here)

Niall and Eleanor unfollow each other on IG. (link here and here)

May 3 (Mon): Crew/equipment for My Policeman filming spotted in Worthing. Harry also spotted there. (link here)

First pictures of Harry filming My Policeman in Worthing outside Brighton come out. He can be seen filming a kissing scene with Emma. (Pictures here).

More pap pics of the My Policeman set in Brighton come out. Harry can be seen in his policeman outfit filming with David Dawson. (Pictures here)

Article with pictures of Jason and his and Olivia’s kids playing at the park during the weekend comes out. (Link here)

May 4 (Tue): Pictures and videos of Harry filming My Policeman in Brighton with David Dawson come out. (Pictures here, video here)

More evidence from the Reddit Eternals leak comes out, which seems to confirm Harry will play Starfox in Marvel’s Eternals. His role will likely be a few seconds during the end credits scene. The movie comes out November 5. (link here)

May 5 (Wed): Harry is pictured filming My Policeman in Brighton. (Pictures here and here)

May 6 (Thur): Pictures of Harry filming My Policeman at the beach in Brighton come out. Later in the day the MP UA is sent a picture of Harry, David Dawson and Emma Corrin filming. (Pictures here and here)

May 7 (Fri): Pictures of Harry filming My Policeman at the beach in Brighton come out. (pictures here and video here)

Deuxmoi posts original dm saying Holivia was at Soho Farmhouse and drove a Ferrari the previous weekend. (link here)

Deuxmoi posts security cam video of Holivia from January 3 or 4 in Santa Barbara during the stunt weekend and Jeff’s wedding. Harry looks extremely uncomfortable in the video. (video here)

May 8 (Sat): Deuxmoi posts dm from same person claiming Holivia flew from Brighton to Soho Farmhouse on May 1. (link here)

May 9 (Sun): Harry filming My Policeman in Brighton. (pictures here)

May 10 (Mon): A chilly Harry is pictured on set of My Policeman in Brighton. (pictures here)

BMG announces new partnership for Louis’ new album, having him on as an independent artist. (link here and here)

May 11 (Tue): Louis confirms he’s an independent artists with BMG by retweeting a press article from Music Weekly. (screenshot here)

Harry is pictured on set of My Policeman in Brighton. (video here)

Harry attends the 2021 BRITs awards with his friend Tomo Campbell, wins Single of the Year for Watermelon Sugar and leaves immediately after. (photos and pictures here)

May 12 (Wed): Harry is seen on set of My Policeman in Brighton along with David Dawson. (video here)

May 13 (Thur): Harry and Emma Corrin are seen filming My Policeman in Brighton. Later Harry is filmed yelling out of his car window at a group of people exercising that they should “squat, squat, squat!”. (pictures and video here)

May 14 (Fri): Harry is seen filming my Policeman in Brighton with David Dawson. (pictures here)

May 15 (Sat): Outtakes from Harry’s SNL 2019 drop via HLD. (Pictures here and here)

May 16 (Sun): Pictures of Harry in DWD come out. (pictures here)

Paul Roberts posts pics of him and Harry rehearsing for TPWK mv (pictures here)

May 17 (Mon): no updates

May 18 (Tue): My Policeman filming in Brighton. Older cast is seen filming. Harry in Brighton. (video here)

May 19 (Wed): My Policeman filming in Brighton. Harry and Emma seen filming. (video here)

May 20 (Thur): My Policeman filming in Brighton. Harry is seen filming swimming scenes in the ocean. (photos here)

Harris Reed’s birthday at the Decimo restaurant at The Standard Hotel in London -> Harry does not attend.

Harry and Olivia allegedly have dinner at the Refuel Bar & Restaurant at The Soho Hotel in London. (pictures here)

Louis can be heard in a video posted on his friend’s Nizam’s IG story. Tumblr accounts report in tags they were in Newcastle. (video here)

May 21 (Fri): Picture of Holivia allegedly at dinner the previous night is spread. Deuxmoi reposts the picture on her account.

May 22 (Sat): Pictures of a couple walking in a park in London are spread by Harry IG accounts. They claim it’s Holivia. (pictures here).

May 23 (Sun): no updates

May 24 (Mon): Tweets from a girl on twitter come out where she claims the pictures of Holivia from May 22nd are in fact pictures of her friends. This information could not be verified. (screenshots here)

Deuxmoi posts a photoshopped picture of Holivia and claims “they are very serious”. Once called out for the fake picture she proceeds to throw a tantrum and shit on fans while doubling down on her “they’re very serious” comment. (screenshots here)

Briana posts picture of Freddie at the beach. Tammi posts on IG for the first time in 2 months more pictures of Freddie and Austin at the beach. Pictures are all from the same day. (pictures here)

May 25 (Tue): Eleanor posts on IG for the first time in 2 weeks. She posts a video of Louis putting a hat on Cliff. Video is at Louis’ public house in London. (video here)

Briana replies to a picture Lottie posted on her IG saying she should come to LA. Lottie replies. (screenshot here)

Video of a white boy out to dinner is spread by Harry IG accounts. Fans who took the video claim it’s Harry. They later backtrack saying they couldn’t be sure it was him, Tom Holland or a rando. Video allegedly at a restaurant in Hampstead Heath. (video here)

bts pictures of Harry on the set of Don’t Worry Darling come out. (pictures here)

Harry files documents establishing a cosmetics and perfume company currently by the name ‘Pleased As’. (screenshots and link here)

Louis tweets letting us know he was writing that day. (screenshots here)

May 26 (Wed): Eleanor posts IG story of her taking the tube (subway) close to her mom’s house. (picture here)

Olivia is papped getting coffee alone in Barnes, London (where she lives with Jason. (Pictures here, here and here).

May 27 (Thur): Article comes out about Olivia on a coffee run in Barnes. Pictures used are from the previous day. Main focus of article is Olivia’s next projects, her family and the Jason relationship timeline. Harry is only mentioned once. (article screenshot here, direct article link here)

May 28 (Fri): Robert Harvey and Paul Whalley post pictures of themselves in a studio and tag Louis in them. A person behind the microphone can be seen, speculated to be Louis. (Photos here and here)

Jamie Hartman replies to fans on Twitter saying he is not currently writing music with Louis but that he has written many songs with him that are in consideration for LT2. (screenshot here)

Ted Lasso (Jason’s show) finishes filming season 2 (screenshot here)

May 29 (Sat): Krupa Music posts an IG story with the text “won’t be long now” and tag Louis in it. The story shows Louis’ tour drums with Doncaster’s zip code and his signature smiley on a banner. In the video a man who is behind the camera says “Styles! When I start the video, don’t laugh” to which someone (cough Harry cough) who is sounds like Harry replies “Rude.” Then the same person replies “Bukkake/Bull cocky/we’re cocky/you’re cocky!” (video here and here)

Harry bumps into fans in Cheshire, likely the Manchester area (speculation). (Picture here)

May 30 (Sun): Louis is pictured on several pics at his friend’s Nizam’s wedding in Durham. Eleanor is with him, as is Oli. (Pictures here and here)

May 31 (Mon): Pictures from Saturday of Harry with fans come out. Fans don’t disclose his location. (Pictures here)

Louis is confirmed by screenwriter to be in consideration to play Jamie Vardy in his biopic. (screenshot here)

[maybeweshould]

How the therapy inspired the marketing strategy?

We were talking about H's therapy 1,5 week ago. I was talking with one of you about my theory:

H mentions therapy every time he promotes his albums. For example: that making an album is like therapy and writing lyrics is therapeutic. This time it is included in each promotional article in a specific way. Each time he emphasizes that he feels that he is more alive and that he enjoys all the moments. Plus, discovering yourself is like discovering new rooms in your home. You have to open the door to open the rooms. So what did H and his team did? Documented moments from the production of the album and put them behind a virtual door, letting fans discover those moments. They enriched them with creating their own room with decorative elements of each house and short captions on twitter... Rooms are spaces in H's mind, each one is for him a space to capture moments, to discover and to explore. It's also like a diary.

DAZED Magazine:

'[...] I’ve always found that the moments in my life which have brought me the most joy are the small ones, whether it be, you know, the end of the night under the stars or a bite of food, or sitting with your friends thinking, ‘Oh, I’m never gonna forget this.’ It’s always those moments that I find have the longest-lasting effect on me, in terms of sparking something wonderful in me. I really think that the essence of Pleasing is finding those little moments of joy and showing them to people.[...]'

BHG interview:

[...]He knew he had to commit to the reset, to the sense of a fresh start that was happening across his life. He is aware that this all sounds a bit pretentious, a bit airy-fairy, but then, who didn’t get caught up in a rush of pandemic life-improvement epiphanies? “I think everyone went through a big moment of self-reflection, a lot of navel-gazing, and I don’t know if there’s anything more navel-gazing than making an album. It’s so self-absorbed,” he said. [...]

[...]So he used lockdown to commit to being a better friend, son, brother. He pushed himself to confront things he hadn’t brought up, had many long, honest chats. And like most people who found themselves suddenly very, very inside, he thought a lot about the idea of home—about belonging, peace, sanctuary. “I realized that that home feeling isn’t something that you get from a house; it’s more of an internal thing. You realize that when you stop for a minute,” he said.

[...] Harry's House is, as you can probably guess, about home. Not just home in the sense of a physical space—though there are plenty of references to kitchens and "sitting in the garden" and "maple syrup, coffee, pancakes for two"—but also to home "in terms of a headspace or mental well-being," as Styles put it. "It sounds like the biggest, and the most fun, but it's by far the most intimate," he said of the album. [...]

[...]When Styles began therapy about five years ago, he was reluctant initially, feeling it was a music industry cliché. "I thought it meant that you were broken," he said. "I wanted to be the one who could say I didn't need it." He returned to the home theme that has underpinned our conversation, explaining that therapy has allowed him to "open up rooms in himself" that he didn't know existed, allowed him to feel things more honestly, where before he had tended to"emotionally coast." He said, "I think that accepting living, being happy, hurting in the extremes, that is the most alive you can be. Losing it crying, losing it laughing—there's no way, I don think, to feel more alive than that."

Zane Lowe interview:

[.. ]'Therapy is an example, it’s like you open a bunch of doors in your house that you didn’t know existed and then in a time when it would be easier to emotionally coast, you can no longer do that because you know the door exists and the scale is just widened. And you feel everything that’s bad so much harder and you feel the good moments so much harder' [...]

[hlupdate]

The relationship between A-list muse and lauded designer is nothing new. But few have been as serendipitous that of Harry Styles and Alessandro Michele: the pop star’s solo career coincided neatly with the designer hitting his stride as the game-changing creative director of Gucci. Theirs is a mutually beneficial partnership that has elevated the former to new echelons of style, while the latter has become something of an icon to an unexpected fandom.

Unlike the large-scale productions of recent show seasons, Michele first presented his vision for Gucci with a quietly confident collection on 19 January 2015 — reportedly pulled together in just five turbo-charged days. The collection had all the signifiers of the retro-inspired aesthetic that has since become Michele’s beat, introducing the fur-lined loafers, pussy-bow blouses and florals that still form the backbone of his work today. A 20-year-old Harry, meanwhile, was still a long-haired One Direction member set to embark on the band’s biggest ever — and as it turned out last— tour. Just as One Direction’s days were winding down, Michele was picking up speed. Gucci reported a five per cent rise in sales in the last three months of 2015, amounting to 1.1 billion Euro in the final quarter.

Stylist Harry Lambert, who had been working with Harry for a few years by then, decided it was time for the boy-bander to try something new. A floral suit – that floral suit – from Michele’s spring/summer 2016 collection would be just the ’fit for the American Music Awards in November 2015, they decided.

Looking back it was a “very bold move,” Lambert admits. Styles was the first to take one of Michele’s full menswear looks from the Gucci catwalk and wear it on the red carpet. “It was very exciting to see everyone’s responses, but also how great he looked in it,’’ Lambert told Miss Vogueof what he still views as a turning point in his client’s fashion journey. This winning suit encouraged Styles and Lambert to pull more Gucci, and Harry gave his final performance as a member of One Direction wearing a suit in the retro petal print that defined Michele’s early collections.

In fact, Gucci was just about the only thing that the 1D alum carried over to his solo career. Even his shoulder-length curls were shorn. The music videos that accompanied Styles’s eponymous number one album, released in April 2017, all incorporated Gucci, as did his appearances on the promo trail. A navy tailored coat floats through the sky in the video for “Sign Of The Times”, and he wears floral tailoring in the clip for “Kiwi”. When the time came for Harry to take his record on the road, he wore countless bespoke Gucci suits on stage. Most were floral brocade with flared trousers, and paired with pussy-bow shirting.

By June 2018, the relationship had been formalised. Styles was revealed – in a series of photos taken by Glen Luchford in the suitably English setting of a chip shop – as the face of Gucci’s tailoring campaign. Two more campaigns followed, in which Styles models the most exuberant of Michele’s creations without ever sacrificing his schoolboy cheekiness, not even with a lamb slung around his shoulders. The campaigns, two by Luchford, a third by Harmony Karine, helped to usher in a new dawn in menswear advertising.

A year later Harry was unveiled as part of a diverse line-up in the campaign for Gucci’s Mèmoire D’une Odeur — the near century-old house’s first gender-neutral scent. Yes, he was the main event, but Styles shared the spotlight with other creatives in what became an unavoidable campaign, covering buildings, beauty counters, column inches and iPhone wallpapers across the globe. Styles has since quipped that he wears it to bed,making a bottle a necessary purchase for even half-dedicated Harry fans.

That Harry’s work with Gucci has proved so popular with his dedicated fanbase is a key component in the success of their collaborations. Though — and again, this is likely owing to Harry’s own allegiances — his followers do tend to have a keen interest in fashion compared to other fandoms, it’s down to their idol that Harries know the artistic director by his first name alone. “It is really exciting for us fans to see another facet of Harry as a creative individual, and his Gucci partnership cultivates that and gives us an even more in-depth perspective of who he is,” Nadhila, a 26-year-old fan in Indonesia told Miss Vogue.

Nadhila, who has been a part of the team behind the Twitter account @HSNewsUpdate since 2011, believes that the fluid nature of Michele’s vision has contributed to the interest in Harry’s Gucci looks. “There are no boundaries on what he might come up with, so fans are always excited to see what look [Harry] might step out in next,” she says. Styles’s efforts to be a fan-focused, ethical pop star – his motto is “treat people with kindness” – are relevant, too. “He has inspired us to be bold, unique and unafraid to experiment when it comes to fashion,” she adds. “He has shown us that there is no such thing as too feminine or too masculine, we can be both and we can be ourselves.”

Another of Harry’s biggest fan accounts, @TheHarryNews, is run by four women in their mid-twenties: Annie, Océane, Lena and Rachel. “You can really see the confidence he’s gotten from working with Gucci,” they share collectively over email. “[He’s] taking more risks and letting more of himself show… In a lot of ways we’ve seen Harry really come into his own. I think that really resonates with people, especially his fans, who get tiny pieces of [who he really is] through fashion.”

Two fans who have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of this fashion partnership are the transatlantic duo behind @HSFashionArchive. Since April 2016, London-based Lu and Washington DC-based Alex have documented every look worn by Harry in meticulous detail, all to act as “a resource for fans”. Its posts lets his followers know how they might go about procuring these items, but also sheds light on key house codes – thus enabling fans to quickly identify which of Harry’s looks are Gucci, and which aren’t. “We have noticed that fans buy the Gucci pieces that Harry has worn,” 29-year-old Alex explained. “Though some pieces are pricey, we’ve seen people buy the loafers, boots, and bags that Harry has sported over the years. Lots of our followers bought the £34 Gucci lipsticks he wore in Beauty Papers.”

The pair believes that the relationship works because Gucci is able to offer Harry such a broad spectrum of looks to choose from. “Gucci’s looks range from wearable to outrageous, so Harry’s continued partnership with Gucci guarantees both attainable style and flashy moments. There’s nothing like seeing him in a wild new outfit that we couldn’t have anticipated.” And though one might assume the scene-stealing suits are most popular with fans, according to Nadhila, they like his low-key looks best, given that “they show a more casual and intimate look into who he is as a ‘normal’ person”.

Of course, there is a notable exception: the 2019 Met Gala. For the opening evening of the “Camp: Notes On Fashion” exhibition Michele and Harry acted as co-hosts, and arrived on the pink carpet together. “After such a colourful tour wardrobe it was nice to do something a little unexpected,” Lambert told Miss Vogue of the black blouse Styles wore. “[It was about] taking traditionally feminine elements like the frills, heeled boots, sheer fabric and the pearl earring, but then rephrasing them as masculine pieces set against the high-waisted tailored trousers and his tattoos. Camp, but still Harry.” Lambert explained at the time: “We met up earlier this year to share mood boards with the Gucci team. We had pages of printed references all on the table from Alessandro, myself and Harry, then we edited them down.” Today, the @HSFashionArchive duo agree the night “was a massive deal amongst fans”.

There was the now pearl earring-wearing fashion darling of the music world, standing alongside the closest thing to a rockstar the fashion industry has at present. “I love dressing up and he loves dressing up,” Michele told The Face in 2019. “The moment I met him, I immediately understood there was something strong around him. I realised he was much more than a young singer. He was a young man, dressed in a thoughtful way, with uncombed hair and a beautiful voice. I thought he gathered within himself the feminine and the masculine.”

Since the Met, the relationship has continued to go from strength to strength. Styles wore a custom look on the cover of his second record, Fine Line, shot by Tim Walker, and Michele and Styles collaborated on a T-shirt to coincide with it, with a percentage of the sales going to the Global Fund For Women. Gucci’s high-waisted trousers, cropped blazers and dazzling shirting now takes up even more space in Styles’s wardrobe, and bring as much attention to the star as his sophomore record’s commercial and critical success.

Sightings of Styles in Gucci have become a source of comfort for fans in a turbulent 2020. From his Mary-Janes at the Brits to his oversized turquoise blazer and crochet gloves in the “Golden” video, by way of outré sunglasses and floral sunglasses in the clip for “Watermelon Sugar”, Harry’s recent sartorial choices have managed to be pleasingly familiar, while simultaneously keeping his followers on their toes.

A bit like the chicken and the egg conundrum, the question remains: is Harry very Gucci, or is Gucci very Harry? The verdict is out. But without each other, both might be missing a little something.

[stylesnews]

As advertisements to the mysterious island of 'Eroda' pop up on people's timelines, fans think they've uncovered a link to Harry styles and it's role in a cryptic tease to his upcoming album, 'Fine Line.'

Advertisements to the mysterious island of 'Eroda' have been popping up all over people's social media accounts, causing major confusion as even seriously tech savvy users have scrambled to try and work out what it means- that is, until Harry Styles fans picked up on it.

It appears the 'Lights Up' star is behind the whole thing after fans noticed crucial clues including the hints to tracks on his upcoming album, 'Fine Line', its release date, and scenic images they recognise from a village in Scotland he was filming in not so long ago.

In what could be the most genius cryptic teaser for new music yet, an entire campaign including a website, visual advert and Facebook page urging people to visit the mythical island had entire Reddit threads of people freaking out.

The advert narration says, "Do you remember the way you felt off the coast of Eroda? Seeing the way the water sparkled below."

"Feeling the rush of wind lifting you as if you were literally in the centre of the world."

"Make memories for your senses at VisitEroda.com"

Some thought it was part of an upcoming 'alternate reality video game' and others tried to connect with the domain of the site which lead them to a software company based in San Francisco.

'Reviews' of people's holiday there have began to crop up, which include teases such as 'eating lots of Watermelon' and others saying they'll be headed back there December 13th.

Many of the images of 'Eroda' seem to have been actually been taken when Harry shot a music video in a small fishing village in Scotland, St Abbs, back in August, where he also posed for snaps with fans.

'Eroda is 'adore' spelt backwards, which is the title of one of his upcoming tracks, and the website mentions 'Cherry' Street and 'Golden' way, two more unreleased tracks.

Other clues he star seems to have put into shots include, a tin of Rich Tea biscuits (which Haz has previously said he loves), and the mention of 'Erodean hairstyles [which] have become a rather bold expression of self amongst the island’s youth', as the cast of his video shoot were spotted with unique Grinch-esque hairstyles.

After the site popped up, people quickly made entire forums dedicated to trying to figure out what the fictional island was set up for including lengthy Google documents with every detail of the island and its attractions.

However, it was when a fan looked into the page further and found an affiliation to Harry's official website through the page that people started to catch on.

They wrote: "I verified a connection between @visiteroda and @Harry_Styles. The Eroda page is using a facebook pixel installed...You can only track websites you have control of. They are related."

A Twitter user who had been trying to work it out from the start confirmed the 'most plausible theory' is indeed that Harry and his team have created the fictional place for the upcoming release of 'Fine Line.'

So, it seems Harry has some seriously grand plans for this second album, and now we know there's a bigger theme going on, we can't help but wonder what he's got up his sleeve!?

[blackkudos]

Dexter Gordon

Dexter Gordon (February 27, 1923 – April 25, 1990) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. He was one of the first players of the instrument in the bebop idiom of musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. Gordon's height was 6 feet 6 inches (198 cm), so he was also known as "Long Tall Dexter" and "Sophisticated Giant". His studio and performance career spanned over 40 years.

Gordon's sound was commonly characterized as being "large" and spacious and he had a tendency to play behind the beat. He was known for humorously inserting musical quotes into his solos, with sources as diverse as popular tunes like "Happy Birthday" to the operas of Wagner. This is not unusual in common-practice jazz improvisation, but Gordon did it frequently enough to make it a hallmark of his style. One of his major influences was Lester Young. Gordon, in turn, was an early influence on John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Rollins and Coltrane then influenced Gordon's playing as he explored hard bop and modal playing during the 1960s.

Gordon was known for his genial and humorous stage presence. He was an advocate of playing to communicate with the audience. One of his idiosyncratic rituals was to recite lyrics from each ballad before playing it.

A photograph by Herman Leonard of Gordon taking a smoke break at the Royal Roost in 1948 is one of the iconic images in jazz photography. Cigarettes were a recurring theme on covers of Gordon's albums.

Gordon was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in the Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight (Warner Bros, 1986), and he won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist, for the soundtrack album The Other Side of Round Midnight (Blue Note Records, 1986). He also had a cameo role in the 1990 film Awakenings. In 2019, Gordon's album Go (Blue Note, 1962) was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Life and career

Early life

Dexter Keith Gordon was born on February 27, 1923 in Los Angeles, California. His father, Dr. Frank Gordon, was one of the first African American doctors in Los Angeles who arrived in 1918 after graduating from Howard Medical School in Washington, D.C. Among his patients were Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. Dexter's mother, Gwendolyn Baker, was the daughter of Captain Edward Baker, one of the five African American Medal of Honor recipients in the Spanish–American War. Gordon played clarinet from the age of 13, before switching to saxophone (initially alto, then tenor) at 15. While still at school, he played in bands with such contemporaries as Chico Hamilton and Buddy Collette.

Between December 1940 and 1943, Gordon was a member of Lionel Hampton's band, playing in a saxophone section alongside Illinois Jacquet and Marshal Royal. During 1944 he was featured in the Fletcher Henderson band, followed by the Louis Armstrong band, before joining Billy Eckstine. The 1942–44 musicians' strike curtailed the recording of the Hampton, Henderson, and Armstrong bands; however, they were recorded on V-Discs produced by the Army for broadcast and distribution among overseas troops. In 1943 he was featured, alongside Harry "Sweets" Edison, in recordings under Nat Cole for a small label not affected by the strike.

Bebop era recordings

By late 1944, Gordon was resident in New York, a regular at bebop jam sessions, and a featured soloist in the Billy Eckstine big band (If That's The Way You Feel, I Want To Talk About You, Blowin' the Blues Away, Opus X, I'll Wait And Pray, The Real Thing Happened To Me, Lonesome Lover Blues, I Love the Rhythm in a Riff). During early 1945 he was featured on recordings by Dizzy Gillespie (Blue 'n' Boogie, Groovin' High) and Sir Charles Thompson (Takin' Off, If I Had You, 20th Century Blues, The Street Beat). In late 1945 he was recording under his own name for the Savoy label. His Savoy recordings during 1945-46 included Blow Mr. Dexter, Dexter's Deck, Dexter's Minor Mad, Long Tall Dexter, Dexter Rides Again, I Can't Escape From You, and Dexter Digs In. He returned to Los Angeles in late 1946 and in 1947 was leading sessions for Ross Russell's Dial label (Mischievous Lady, Lullaby in Rhythm, The Chase, Iridescence, It's the Talk of the Town, Bikini, A Ghost of a Chance, Sweet and Lovely). After his return to Los Angeles, he became known for his saxophone duels with fellow tenorman Wardell Gray, which were a popular concert attraction documented in recordings made between 1947 and 1952 (The Hunt, Move, The Chase, The Steeplechase).  The Hunt gained literary fame from its mention in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which also contains descriptions of wild tenormen jamming in Los Angeles. Cherokee, Byas a Drink, and Disorder at the Border are other live recordings of the Gray/Gordon duo from the same concert as The Hunt. In December 1947, Gordon recorded again with the Savoy label (Settin' the Pace, So Easy, Dexter's Riff, Dextrose, Dexter's Mood, Index, Dextivity, Wee Dot, Lion Roars). Through the mid-to-late 1940s he continued to work as a sideman on sessions led by Russell Jacquet, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Ralph Burns, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Gerry Mulligan, Wynonie Harris, Leo Parker, and Tadd Dameron.

The 1950s

During the 1950s, Gordon's recorded output and live appearances declined as heroin addiction and legal troubles took their toll. Gordon made a concert appearance with Wardell Gray in February 1952 (The Chase, The Steeplechase, Take the A Train, Robbins Nest, Stardust) and appeared as a sideman in a session led by Gray in June 1952 (The Rubiyat, Jungle Jungle Jump, Citizen's Bop, My Kinda Love). After an incarceration at Chino Prison during 1953-55, he recorded the albums Daddy Plays the Horn and Dexter Blows Hot and Cool in 1955 and played as a sideman on the Stan Levey album, This Time the Drum's on Me. The latter part of the decade saw him in and out of prison until his final release from Folsom Prison in 1959. He was one of the initial sax players for the Onzy Matthews big band in 1959, along with Curtis Amy. Gordon continued to champion Matthews' band after he left Los Angeles for New York, but left for Europe before getting a chance to record with that band. He recorded The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon in 1960. His recordings from the mid-1950s onward document a meander into a smooth West Coast style that lacked the impact of his bebop era recordings or his subsequent Blue Note recordings.

The decade saw Gordon's first entry into the world of drama. He appeared as a member (uncredited) of Art Hazzard's band in the 1950 film Young Man with a Horn. He appeared in an uncredited and overdubbed role as a member of a prison band in the movie Unchained, filmed inside Chino. Gordon was a saxophonist performing Freddie Redd's music for the Los Angeles production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection in 1960, replacing Jackie McLean. He contributed two compositions, Ernie's Tune and I Want More to the score and later recorded them for his album Dexter Calling.

New York renaissance

Gordon signed to Blue Note Records in 1961. He initially commuted from Los Angeles to New York to record, but took up residence when he regained the cabaret card that allowed him to perform where alcohol was served. The Jazz Gallery hosted his first New York performance in twelve years. The Blue Note association was to produce a steady flow of albums for several years, some of which gained iconic status. His New York renaissance was marked by Doin' Allright, Dexter Calling..., Go!, and A Swingin' Affair. The first two were recorded over three days in May 1961 with Freddie Hubbard, Horace Parlan, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, George Tucker, Al Harewood, and Philly Joe Jones. The last two were recorded in August 1962, with a rhythm section that featured Blue Note regulars Sonny Clark, Butch Warren and Billy Higgins. Of the two Go! was an expressed favorite. The albums showed his assimilation of the hard bop and modal styles that had developed during his years on the west coast, and the influence of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, whom he had influenced before. The stay in New York turned out to be short lived, as Gordon got offers for engagements in England, then Europe, that resulted in a fourteen-year stay. Soon after recording A Swingin' Affair, he was gone.

Years in Europe

Over the next 14 years in Europe, living mainly in Paris and Copenhagen, Gordon played regularly with fellow expatriates or visiting players, such as Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Kenny Drew, Horace Parlan and Billy Higgins. Blue Note's German-born Francis Wolff supervised Gordon's later sessions for the label on his visits to Europe. The pairing of Gordon with Drew turned out to be one of the classic matchups between a horn player and a pianist, much like Miles Davis with Red Garland or John Coltrane with McCoy Tyner.

From this period come Our Man in Paris, One Flight Up, Gettin' Around, and Clubhouse. Our Man in Paris was a Blue Note session recorded in Paris in 1963 with backup consisting of pianist Powell, drummer Kenny Clarke, and French bassist Pierre Michelot. One Flight Up, recorded in Paris in 1964 with trumpeter Donald Byrd, pianist Kenny Drew, drummer Art Taylor, and Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, features an extended solo by Gordon on the track "Tanya".

Gordon also visited the US occasionally for further recording dates. Gettin' Around was recorded for Blue Note during a visit in May 1965, as was the album Clubhouse which remained unreleased until 1979.

Gordon found Europe in the 1960s a much easier place to live, saying that he experienced less racism and greater respect for jazz musicians. He also stated that on his visits to the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he found the political and social strife disturbing. While in Copenhagen, Gordon and Drew's trio appeared onscreen in Ole Ege's theatrically released hardcore pornographic film Pornografi (1971), for which they composed and performed the score.

He switched from Blue Note to Prestige Records (1965–73) but stayed very much in the hard-bop idiom, making classic bop albums like  The Tower of Power! and More Power! (1969) with James Moody, Barry Harris, Buster Williams, and Albert "Tootie" Heath; The Panther! (1970) with Tommy Flanagan, Larry Ridley, and Alan Dawson;  The Jumpin' Blues(1970) with Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, and Roy Brooks; The Chase! (1970) with Gene Ammons, Jodie Christian, John Young, Cleveland Eaton, Rufus Reid, Wilbur Campbell, Steve McCall, and Vi Redd; and Tangerine (1972) with Thad Jones, Freddie Hubbard, and Hank Jones. Some of the Prestige albums were recorded during visits back to North America while he was still living in Europe; others were made in Europe, including live sets from the Montreux Jazz Festival.

In addition to the recordings Gordon did under his major label contracts, live recordings by European labels and live video from his European period are available. The Danish label SteepleChase released live dates from his mid-1960s tenure at the Montmartre Jazzhus. The video was released under the  Jazz Icons series.

Less well known than the Blue Note albums, but of similar quality, are the albums he recorded during the 1970s for SteepleChase (Something Different, Bouncin' With Dex, Biting the Apple, The Apartment, Stable Mable, The Shadow of Your Smile and others). They again feature American sidemen, but also such Europeans as Spanish pianist Tete Montoliu and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.

Homecoming

Gordon finally returned to the United States for good in 1976. He appeared with Woody Shaw, Ronnie Mathews, Stafford James, and Louis Hayes, for a gig at the Village Vanguard in New York that was dubbed his "homecoming." It was recorded and released by Columbia Records under that title. He noted: "There was so much love and elation; sometimes it was a little eerie at the Vanguard. After the last set they'd turn on the lights and nobody would move." In addition to the Homecoming album, a series of live albums was released by Blue Note from his stands at Keystone Corner in San Francisco during 1978 and 1979. They featured Gordon, George Cables, Rufus Reid, and Eddie Gladden. He recorded the studio albums Sophisticated Giant with an eleven piece big band in 1977 and Manhattan Symphonie with the Live at Keystone Corner crew in 1978. The sensation of Gordon's return, renewed promotion of the classic jazz catalogs of the Savoy and Blue Note record labels, and the continued efforts of Art Blakey through 1970s and early 1980s, have been credited with reviving interest in swinging, melodic, acoustically-based classic jazz sounds after the Fusion jazz era that saw an emphasis on electronic sounds and contemporary pop influences.

Musician Emeritus

In 1978 and 1980, Gordon was the DownBeat Musician of the Year and in 1980 he was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame. The US Government honored him with a Congressional Commendation, a Dexter Gordon Day in Washington DC, and a National Endowment for the Arts award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1986, he was named a member and officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters by the Ministry of Culture in France.

During the 1980s, Gordon was weakened by emphysema. He remained a popular attraction at concerts and festivals, although his live appearances and recording dates would soon become infrequent.

Gordon's most memorable works from the decade were not in music but in film. He starred in the 1986 movie Round Midnight as "Dale Turner", an expatriate jazz musician in Paris during the late 1950s based loosely on Lester Young and Bud Powell. That portrayal earned him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor. In addition, he had a non-speaking role in the 1990 film Awakenings, which was posthumously released. Before that last film was released he made a guest appearance on the Michael Mann series Crime Story.

Soundtrack performances from Round Midnight were released as the albums Round Midnight and The Other Side of Round Midnight, featuring original music by Herbie Hancock as well as playing by Gordon. The latter was the last recording released under Gordon's name. He was a sideman on Tony Bennett's 1987 album, Berlin.

Death and postmortem

Gordon died of kidney failure and cancer of the larynx in Philadelphia, on April 25, 1990, at the age of 67.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Dexter Gordon among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Family

Gordon's maternal grandfather was Captain Edward L. Baker, who received the Medal of Honor during the Spanish–American War, while serving with the 10th Cavalry Regiment (also known as the Buffalo Soldiers).

Gordon's father, Dr. Frank Gordon, M.D., was one of the first prominent African-American physicians and a graduate of Howard University.

Dexter Gordon had a total of six children, from the oldest to the youngest: Robin Gordon (Los Angeles), California, James Canales (Los Angeles), Deidre (Dee Dee) Gordon (Los Angeles), Mikael Gordon-Solfors (Stockholm), Morten Gordon (Copenhagen) and Benjamin Dexter Gordon (Copenhagen), and seven grandchildren, Raina Moore Trider (Brooklyn), Jared Johnson (Los Angeles), and Matthew Johnson (Los Angeles), Maya Canales (San Francisco) and Jared Canales (San Francisco), Dexter Gordon Bogs (Copenhagen), Dexter Minou Flipper Gordon-Marberger (Stockholm).

When he lived in Denmark, Gordon became friends with the family of the future Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and subsequently became Lars's godfather.

Gordon was also survived by his widow Maxine Gordon and her son Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III.

Instruments and mouthpieces

The earliest photographs of Gordon as a player show him with a Conn 30M "Connqueror" and an Otto Link mouthpiece. In a 1962 interview with the British journalist Les Tomkins, he did not refer to the specific model of mouthpiece but stated that it was made for him personally. He stated that it was stolen around 1952. The famous smoke break photo from 1948 shows him with a Conn 10M and a Dukoff mouthpiece, which he played until 1965. In the Tomkins interview he referred to his mouthpiece as a medium-chambered piece with a #5* (.080" under the Dukoff system) tip opening. He bought a Selmer Mark VI from Ben Webster after his 10M went missing in transit. In a Down Beat magazine interview from 1977, he referred to his current mouthpiece as an Otto Link with a #8 (.110" under the Otto Link system) tip opening.

[onedirectionfanfics]

The Shamrock Social Club by @harryonstage​

Somehow you land a consultation with Harry Styles, one of the most renowned tattoo artists on the west coast. He agrees to design your first tattoo and ink it on you himself, but over the course of your sessions together, mischief ensues… 

This month’s featured story, The Shamrock Social Club, brought together avid Tumblr fic readers and Twitter stans alike in excitement and anticipation for each update. It tells the story of a girl determined to get a tattoo and her wildly attractive tattoo artist, Harry—fondly known as “tattoorry” among readers. Check out our amazing interview with the brilliant author behind this masterpiece below!

***

How long have you been writing for?

God, as long as I can remember. I have memories of being in middle school, feverishly writing stories in my composition notebook when I was supposed to be paying attention to the lesson. I was conjuring up elaborate worlds and characters long before I ever planned on sharing them with anybody—before I even realized what I was doing.

Do you have certain habits or rituals you have to do while writing?

A lot of my followers joke about this, but I do a lot of writing in the bath. I turn off all my notifications and commit not to check my texts for awhile, and I cannot write without a giant warm beverage, usually coffee or rooibos tea with honey. I put rainstorm sounds on my bluetooth speaker. The thesaurus app and google dictionary are open at all times. Also, part of the creative process definitely happens long before I ever actually sit down to write—I’m constantly jotting stuff down in the notes app on my phone if I’m out and about when I think of a line to work into a scene later. I have all these sticky notes with like cryptic, half-baked ideas all over my desk at work… I’ll pick one up and all it says is like “The clicks a skateboard makes rolling down the sidewalk” or “The feeling of having an orange peel beneath your fingernails.” And I refuse to throw them away, even if I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. I think most people who write do that to some degree, though.

The ever famous question: how did you come up with this idea?

Honestly I was on tumblr and saw a collage of women with dragon and snake tattoos. I began thinking about the type of person who would want that symbol on them forever, and why. Minutes later, I wrote that “Tattoo You, 1981” blurb on my masterlist—of course named after the Rolling Stones album released that year—and then that became the preliminary blueprint for what is now The Shamrock Social Club. I literally thought it was going to be a one shot at most, but here we are nearly fifty-two thousand words later.

Throughout your writing in this fic, you show a great deal of knowledge about the process of getting a tattoo. Is this from experience or something you learned from researching?

Both! I have a few tattoos. One of them is a stick-and-poke. It’s been awhile since I got my last one though, so I had to refresh myself on the aftercare process. I called the actual Shamrock Social Club a few times to gauge what a master tattoo artist there would charge for something as large as the snake. I also wanted to be sure it was possible for an artist to fill in a tattoo as they work through the outline the way Harry does in the story. The researching process of a fic writer is so funny to me… I wish my readers could see me alone in my room at 2:00 AM eating dry cereal, deeply invested in a fifteen minute Youtube video comparing different types of tattoo inks.

When does a story go from an idea in your mind to paper? Is there a process you go through before writing it out, or do you just get straight in it?

I have so much respect for the writers who can just like, wing it. I personally need to have a story mapped out in bullet points beginning to end before I even open up a new document on my computer. That way, I get more time to sit with it and meditate on how close to reality it seems, and it helps me finagle the order of events and decide if there’s any room for improvement. Also, if I think of a detail or subplot that’s not in my original outline, it’s easier to pop it in and visualize how it synthetically fits with the story.

In all four parts (51k words), not once do you give a name for the main character or call her ‘Y/N’. Was this a difficult task? What was the reason for it?

This is a hot topic right now in the fan fiction community! Sometimes it’s difficult, but I think it helped make the prose in this story more seamless to read. As someone who has written original characters as well as self-insert fics, I think a strong enough writer can make a character feel personable and unique and real without an elaborate backstory, and I don’t feel that it takes anything integral away from the creative process for me. If you can get an audience to root for a protagonist in a couple of chapters through their choices, dialogue, hopes, and motivations alone, to me that’s a much more successful story… I deeply respect writers who are like “write for yourself, not for others!” but that notion doesn’t really keep me up at night. To me, it’s obvious that I’m writing for myself if I’m writing at all, and I’m very comfortable with that fact. Imagine that you’re in school for creative writing and your professor gives you an exercise with a few simple parameters… it’s a bit like that. I still only write about exactly what I want, but undergoing the challenge of writing for an audience has 100% made me a better, more versatile writer. To me that does not feel like a loss, or a compromise. Plus, I think it’s such an interesting way to engage with a story—you are explicitly the protagonist, actively steering your own trajectory with every choice you make.

Was the character ‘AJ’ inspired by anyone you know in real life, AJ?

Guilty as charged. I do tend to Stan Lee myself and my friends into my fics. Aijia, Iz, Steph, Ellen… all of those characters are based on my actual friends. It started out as a joke—I literally just needed a name for the roommate character, but someone suggested I name her AJ and I was like… why not? I love having fun that costs nothing and hurts nobody! Annie and I wrote ourselves into Under the Same Roof, too.

This fic very delicately tells the story of a girl who’s been sexually abused in the past in some way and is on a determined mission to self-healing. A topic not many will brave, but you did. Why?

This is such a good question. Honestly I was on the fence at first. As I was drafting the first installment, Nobody Fucks with a Snake, I knew I wanted Harry’s character to turn her away from the shop at first before he decided to take a chance on her, but I needed a reason why. Like, I needed him to see a glimmer of something in her, and simply him being attracted to her didn’t feel compelling enough to me. I thought it would be really meaningful and it would raise the stakes a little if Harry saw this like… tenacity and determination in her. One of my favorite scenes in the whole story is that pivotal moment in his office when we see Harry really start to understand the gravity of her predicament and how much this snake means to her. He’s so affected by her vulnerability, and it speaks volumes about both of them.

In the drafting process, I was talking with my friend Tanvi who also writes fic, and she wanted to know if there was some reason why Harry’s character feels such a strong urge to help this young woman, and why he goes to such great lengths to respect consent throughout the story. Like, does he have a loved one who was sexually assaulted? Is this a more personal issue for him? I considered this, but truthfully, I thought this story would be so much more poignant and effective if there like, wasn’t some special reason. Consent is necessary. Sexual assault is inexcusable and wrong. It is as simple and as complicated as that.

What was it like writing on an issue that makes a lot of people uncomfortable (but is still so important)? Did you feel like you had a responsibility to fulfil?

As a writer, it’s an enormous responsibility to parse trauma and heaviness and sorrow in a way that doesn’t glorify the pain, especially if you have a younger audience. Most of my readers are in their twenties, like me. I read something recently about how it’s true that writers shouldn’t cover topics such as sexual trauma, eating disorders, or major depression as to avoid romanticizing any of these terrible, life-altering experiences, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to people who have been through these hardships and turn to art or writing as an outlet.

I have an eating disorder. It’s something I talk about openly on my blog—as an aside, you should definitely browse my recovery tag! Through fic, I’ve written about what it’s like to have an ED. I’ve also used fic to write about having a stalker, and in The Shamrock Social Club, of course I write about the complex relationship one has with sex and romance and dating in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted. I write to focus on the triumphs instead of the pain, and I always try to make these experiences awkward, ugly, and honestly gross when they need to be. Without divulging too much of myself online, I’m well equipped to know what all of those hardships feel like. In fact, I’ve read many stories, fan fiction and novels alike, that portray eating disorders, stalkers, and surviving sexual assault in a really misleading light, and I wanted to create something I felt like accurately represented how insidious and terrifying all of that actually is. Most of all, for me, writing this story was so much more about the main character overcoming her strife, and finally feeling like she has agency and control over her own body again. At its core, the Shamrock Social Club is really just the story of a fiercely determined young woman on her own path to healing, who happens to meet a boy along the way. The writing process was very, very cathartic.

Your story got popular not only on Tumblr but across Twitter as well in a short period of time—an amazing accomplishment. How did you react to your (well-deserving) popularity?

Jesus, the memes that have been born out of this story on twitter and tumblr are… beyond hilarious. And trust me, nobody lurks on twitter more than me. I don’t know if I would use the word “popular” about this story or even about myself though. To put things in perspective, suddenly being under a magnifying glass is still super strange and new to me. I literally had about 500 followers for most of the eight years I’ve been on tumblr until the end of 2018, which is when I started posting fic. I think about this all the time, I could write a dissertation on how baffling it is that people suddenly seem to give me heaps of attention and put me on this pedestal when deep down I know who I am and I know how tumblr works and I know it’s just as likely that people could be sending messages and giving praise to literally anyone else. Everybody has something to offer, I just got lucky. In the grand scheme of things, this story has only reached a very small pocket of the internet and there really isn’t anything about me that makes me more special than anyone else, I’m just a person who had a few people’s attention for a little while because I wrote a story. I’m very proud and grateful to have people reading my writing and it isn’t lost on me how fortunate I am that anyone does in the first place.

The one thing I will say though, is that it’s profoundly moving to me the amount of sexual assault survivors who have come forward in the wake of this story. Anonymously or not, people have been so open, and have shared so much of themselves with me. It’s amazing how alone you can be made to feel when you don’t have an example of someone who has been through the same struggle as you and come out the other side, even if it’s a fictional character, and I think this story ended up meaning a lot more to people than I ever expected it to. I can’t wrap my brain around how special it is that something I wrote could offer some small comfort to another person who has survived something so awful. The response this story has gotten blows me out of the water to this day.

Who came up with the name ’tattoorry’?

Honestly I don’t remember but “tattoorry” is shorthand for “tattoo artist Harry.”

Lastly, anything you’d like to say to anyone who read your fic?

Thank you for reading my writing. On principal, I think that if you find something that makes you happy and it’s not hurting anyone, then that’s worth celebrating. The people who have engaged with this story made into into something so much bigger and more special than I could’ve ever accomplished on my own. 

Thank you very much, this was a lot of fun!

***

Thank you, AJ, for your time and dedication to these questions! Check out more of her work here! 

***If you would like to send in recommendations for next months featured story, please do so here.

[tswiftisgay]

Out of the Woods is about the pain of bearding 💔

Out of the Woods was written and produced by Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff, released as a promotional single prior, and then again on the album 1989. The song is believed to have been written in October 2013. It was the final music video released for the 1989 era.  

I would like to argue that OOTW is a song both about bearding with Harry Styles and dating Dianna. It is a mirror image of I Know Places. Let’s dive in.

1.   First, let’s look at the song within context.

It follows Style on the album, which describes an on and off relationship: “When we go crashing down, we come back every time/ 'Cause we never go out of style.“ This is similar to how the Out of the Woods relationship is described: “We were built to fall apart /Then fall back together.” I Wish You Would, How to Get the Girl, and All You Had to Do Was Stay all play with this theme as well. In this way, Out of the Woods fits into the larger themes and narrative of the album.

Another song on 1989, I Know Places talks about running and hiding to protect a relationship. This sense of paranoia and fear is only present in one other song on the album--Out of the Woods.

2.    Now let’s discuss the inspiration behind OOTW as understood by the GP and Kaylor fans.

GP: It’s about Harry Styles as make clear by references to last December, a snowmobile accident, wearing his necklace, paper airplanes, and the thematic similarities to Style, which is also about him.

The main problem with this take is that Haylor was a joint PR bearding relationship. (See this timeline and search my blog for the haylor hashtag if this is still not clear to you.)

However, if you still aren’t sold that Haylor was fake, these lyrics don’t seem to match with the narrative for their split: “Remember when we couldn't take the heat / I walked out, I said, I'm setting you free.” They supposedly split because Harry was flirting with other girls. How did that have anything to do with heat or pressure?

Plus Taylor’s own explanation for the album changed a lot. Despite implying that Style is about him in her first 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, she later distanced herself from that interpretation. In fact, her overall narrative focus shifted during her album promo, making it unclear which Taylor to believe.

Kaylors: It’s about Dianna with whom Taylor had a tense on/off relationship while bearding with Harry. Taylor dropped clues linking the song to Harry to appease her het fans, as she did in many songs.

The problem with this take is that it is more than just a clue. Taylor spends an entire verse describing a snowmobile accident. Taylor makes repeated and extremely specific references to Harry and their public relationship.

Some may argue it was all a metaphor. Paper airplanes are certainly a powerful metaphor for something fragile, but your necklace hanging from my neck is pretty clear cut. Others may say that there was another similar experience she was actually alluding to, like how she later carefully set up Calvin stunts to mimic actual Karlie moments. But unlike a stunt photo or quote, an injury is hard to fake. In fact, Harry tried to hide his injury when he was being papped. Fans only know about it because of the photos leaked from a party he attended later with friends.  

3.   Another less popular analysis reads this as a song about bearding with Harry. 

“This is a pretty obvious closet metaphor. Are we in the clear? Are we safe? Did it work? Did we fool the world again? Is our mutual secret still hidden?

“So while the marketing is exploitative and icky as usual, the song itself could possibly be the one honest introspective statement we’ve ever gotten on the Haylor debacle.” from @at-your-liberty ‘s post (Also see this post.)

Please note that Jack Antonoff has been a co-writer and producer on some of Taylor’s most intimate, personal, and queer songs on her last two albums. You Are in Love, Dress, Call It What You Want, and New Years Day, are the most obvious examples. I would argue Out of the Woods is another one.

I think given the absolute plethora of lines pointing to Harry this is a very logical analysis. I also agree that the theme of fear and running match perfectly with the process of bearding.

4.   I would like to posit that this song is actually about two different people simultaneously. 

Taylor has a knack for creating songs with layered meanings. White Horse is ostensibly about a failed relationship but also about a loss of innocence—or even about accepting the loss of a heterosexual fairytale. This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is ostensibly about Kanye West and feuds, but as many of us have noticed it also unmistakably correlates with her relationship with fans. There are countless more examples, especially when you look at the real inspiration behind many of her songs.

In the case of OOTW, Taylor did not need to be vague about it because her topic was more or less Harry Styles, even if not in the way her general audience would expect. Haylor was one of Taylor and Harry’s most intense and public beards. (Hiddleswift being the only thing to compete with it.) There were pictures and articles released almost every day of December 2012. At the time Taylor is had rekindled her relationship with Dianna, while Harry was dating Louis Tomlinson, who was notably a complete wreck during and after the stunt. Louis consistently spoke of Taylor with disdain and jealousy.

So she wrote retrospectively about navigating a public fauxmance and a real romance, reflecting on how bearding is a painful, emotionally taxing activity. 

Looking at the Lyrics

Looking at it now

It all seems so simple

It was a simple plan, like any other bearding arrangement, but it didn’t end up being simple for them.

Her relationship with Dianna was also simple or straightforward in the sense that they both liked the other. But being queer was deemed potentially destructive to their careers, which is when things stop being simple.

We were lying on your couch

I remember

You took a Polaroid of us

Dianna, Harry, and Taylor are all well known for using polaroid cameras. There are Polaroid photos of Swiftgron. I think it is notable that Taylor and Harry were both close friends with Ed Sheeran. ( Ed was even present at many of their stunts.) It is very likely that they met in social circles—and maybe even took a Polaroid together--before doing the stunt. 

Then discovered

The rest of the world was black and white

But we were in screaming color

Screaming color is both a good and bad thing here. It is describing something beautiful and real--real feelings between Taylor and D--but it is also describing how rainbows stand out too much, something Taylor and Harry both had in common as they dove into a bearding commitment. They both had something to hide.

And I remember thinking

Are we out of the woods yet?

Are we in the clear yet? In the clear yet, good

The chorus is where Taylor describes the feeling of trying to convince the public that Harry and she are involved—and both straight—while trying to improve or hold onto what remained of her relationship with D. Taylor had been bearding heavily in 2012, first with Connor Kennedy and then with Harry. This was taxing on her relationship with D, which noticeably fell apart around the time she started bearding with Kennedy, rekindled but then disappeared until after Taylor and Harry split. (See this Swiftgron timeline for more info.) She was just trying to succeed and make it through to the other side of her bearding arrangements.

Looking at it now

Last December (last December)

 This is a pointed reference to December 2012 when Haylor was “official” and inseparable.

We were built to fall apart

Then fall back together 

As noted in the bearding analysis linked above, they were built. This implies some forethought while the phrasing removes the agency from the “we” themselves. They were constructed to fall apart when the contract ran out. This also mirrors the D storyline of on and off relationships.

Your necklace hanging from my neck

Again a pointed reference to Harry Styles, with whom she supposedly shared a paper airplane necklace. (In reality, they were not the same necklace, just similar.)

The night we couldn't quite forget

When we decided to move the furniture so we could dance

This is very reminiscent of their night out after 1D’s first Madison Square Garden performance when they did karaoke and danced around in what was an otherwise packed area. They both went back to Taylor’s hotel late at night, the beginning of an extensive series of pap shots of them entering and leaving Taylor’s hotel.

However, the line also seems to be a metaphor for the whole performance of bearding. Neither Taylor nor Harry had ever taken bearding so far as to heavily imply that they were sexually involved. They couldn’t quite forget it no matter how much they wanted to because it was so well documented.

Baby, like we stood a chance

Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying

Paper airplanes is a reference to their shared necklace, but it is also a metaphor for something that can go far but is fragile. Both Harry and Taylor’s reputation and fame was a paper airplane at that point, with Taylor breaking into pop music and Harry breaking into the American music world while trying to hide their true selves. Trying to sell the Haylor stunt and distract from other narratives was perilous, and in the end they didn’t really stand a chance. The media mocked their intense relationship, some even calling it out as a PR set up. But more importantly, both of them failed to hold it together.

CHORUS 

Remember when you hit the brakes too soon

Twenty stitches in a hospital room

When you started crying baby, I did too

But when the sun came up I was looking at you

This references the snowmobile accident on their ski trip and Harry’s injury, but it is also about both of them reaching their breaking point with pretending. They were both crying, hurting, and suddenly looking at each other clearly. They saw how horrible the situation was for both of them and their respective relationships. Harry had been away from his band and bf for most of December, creating strained and painful interactions even visible in interviews. Taylor and D did not appear to be on good terms either.

I believe the last two lines also reference clearly seeing D again and realizing that bearding wasn’t worth losing their relationship.

Remember when we couldn't take the heat

I walked out, I said, I'm setting you free

The pressure of trying to sell their fake relationship is too much. Taylor decides to agree to end the stunt earlier than intended, setting Harry free.

But the monsters turned out to be just trees

When the sun came up you were looking at me

Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. The fear of being locked into bearding, spending all their time together, and continuing the lie turned out to be just trees. They were able to navigate the PR narrative so they could leave the relationship but still milk it for press and inspiration. Harry is looking at Taylor and seeing her not as a captor but as someone sharing his situation. There is a lot of empathy in these lines. 

Again, I think those lines also read as D looking back at Taylor and understanding her situation.

Ultimately, Taylor and Harry are able to get out of the woods/bearding and back to their real selves and real relationships. 

Last but not least: The fact that I Know Places and OOTW are the only songs with the theme of fear on 1989 is very interesting to me. In my opinion, IKP is about hiding and protecting the real relationship while OOTW is about selling and getting through extremely public (as Haylor was amazingly well documented) bearding. If we ever wondered if Taylor was able to hide relationships, we know from IKP she can but doesn’t choose to with Harry. 

I Know Places is about running, hiding, and trying to protect a secret relationship.

Out of the Woods is about being extremely public and constantly acting to sell a fauxmance.

They are two sides of the same story.

[charitabledirection]

🌸Harry Styles: two years from the release of his first solo album, two years of supporting charities🌸

May 12th, 2019: Today is the anniversary of the release of Harry Styles’ first solo album “Harry Styles”. Many have talked about what this album means musically and what Harry has done professionally since its release, including being the host of the Met Gala a little less than a week ago. 

What we want to remind you of is Harry’s charity work in the last two years. The number of charities and organizations Harry has supported in the last two years is simply astounding! Harry supported 59 local charities during his solo tour, giving much-needed help to small grassroots charities and organizations that work within each community to better the lives of its most disadvantaged members. But Harry’s charitable work did not stop there, for example, releasing a special edition rainbow t-shirt to support GLSEN (article), donating his signature Gucci loafers to support the LGBT mental health charity London Friend (article), and meeting children through Rays of Sunshine (article).

We have been writing articles to document Harry’s charity work and to highlight what the charities he chose to support do, as we believe they really show what Harry cares about and has decided to stand behind. 

Visit our website for more content.

[caveatauditor]

Best albums of 2018

A marvelous year! Just because Drake albums are long and boring doesn’t mean the album is dead, you know.

1. Bali Baby, Baylor Swift

This 8-song EP, a fusion of SoundCloud rap, emo confessional, and glitzy synthpop, rocks harder and weirder than anything I heard all year. The spiky synthesizers, bent guitars, drum crunches, scratchy screeches, Bali’s garbled wails, and plastic bubblegum surface combine several modes of abrasion, as the Atlanta rapper hides a harrowing breakup saga beneath bucketloads of noise and the crackling electricity sets her bleeding heart ablaze. “Candy” and “Electrical” are neon new wave ballads distorted into fragility through harshness. Whenever she gets a handle on something, the beat goes squelch and sends her reeling. Oh, to be loud, obnoxious, and heartbroken. She’s been putting out fire with gasoline.

2. Ariana Grande, Sweetener

“Snuggle jams,” tweeted Austin Brown. We all needed snuggles this year! Although “Thank U, Next” and Thank U, Next have somewhat eclipsed the confectionary sugarbomb Instagram’s newly crowned Most Followed Woman released six months earlier, said sugarbomb continues to sparkle. Tired of flaunting her multioctave voice, Ariana leans into her breathy lower register and discovers her capacity for play. Tired of secondhand funk pastiche, Pharrell invents a sunny electrobouncy sound that abounds with pattering percussion, thwocks, squiggles, splashes of electronic color. Contextualized by the devastating, mournful grace of “Breathin” and “No Tears Left to Cry”, her joy feels urgent, beautiful, earned. Behold an album of exquisitely honeyed lightness. I love Sweetener because it’s the musical equivalent of booping someone on the nose.

3. BTS, Love Yourself: Tear

Because they both flatter and subvert even the most boring aspects of contemporary American pop, they broke through in America where countless Korean stars couldn’t, although that didn’t stop BoA and Girls Generation from trying. (I hope we haven’t forgotten BoA’s excellent self-titled English-language album, which includes the funniest Britney impersonations ever recorded.) Slow, moody, blank--these adjectives don’t quite describe BTS, thankfully, but they have reclaimed a rather empty pop style as a site for cognitively dissonant structural innovations, and thus offer hope that said pop style needn’t be so empty. Dense and streamlined simultaneously, stuffing all sorts of wacky noises into what Anglophone hitmakers have defined as a spare, echoey sonic template, these tracks are hard to wrap your ear around at first, but what noises! I could listen to the plinky little drumclicks in “Anpanman” forever.

4. Jonghyun, Poet Artist

“Take the Dive” and “Only One You Need” should play like standard romantic invitations and instead break a cold sweat in sheer terror. On “Hashtag” he’s content to whisper as long as the electric piano matches the beat in his head. “I’m So Curious” coaxes him into a sublimely cozy erotic space. The lightest and most delicate of pop-R&B exercises, shivering beneath an immaculately chilly surface, Jonghyun’s second and final album is beautiful and makes me sad. Rest in peace. 

5. J Balvin, Vibras

The year’s solidest and bounciest Latin trap album is more sweetly melodic than the genre’s norm, but also harsher, which is disorienting. These beats, assembling lumbering, mechanical tanks out of looped vocal samples, clinky xylophones, keyboard scramble, and Balvin’s dreamy drone, are impossible to play in the background; I’ve tried. Maybe those blessed souls who can multitask with music on would feel differently, but every time I play this album I get sucked in, paralyzed by the chopped-up airhorns in “Ambiente”, the guitar strummed through a wind tunnel in “Brillo” (a duet with Rosalia!), the drums beeping in “Ahora”, the angel of death moaning inarticulately throughout “Cuando Tu Quieras”. If I also don’t understand how the hell clubgoers can dance to this music, please understand my bewilderment as admiration.

6. Playboi Carti, Die Lit

The debut was sufficiently spare to retain a semblance of pop functionality; this one’s a shoegaze record, the sound of rap abstracted into a gorgeous blur. The average Carti song is a single giant, repeated, woozy keyboard hook, glitching and jittering around the edges, a transmission from the hazy corner of the subconscious where bliss keels over into numbness and the senses conflate. The rapping is minimal; he chooses his sounds phonetically, not semantically, and gladly disappears beneath the relentless aqueous whoosh. Lyrics, guest features, tempo changes, coherent thoughts--if these things exist, they get swept up too. After years of hearing people moan on the radio about washing pain away with stimulants and such, here’s what it means to be insensate. Although the album wanders a little toward the end, who cares when it’s all one hypnotic song?

7. US Girls, In a Poem Unlimited

The music on this remarkable art-pop document assembles a creepy rubberoid disco groove from shards of glass, sleek rhythm guitar, controlled blasts of distortion, sordid saxophone; Meghan Remy treats white funk as industrial noise. The lyrics compile situation after situation in which women are abused, including a song where St. Peter rapes the narrator before letting her into heaven. Is this what “dialectic” means?

8. Haru Nemuri, Harutosyura

So raucous in the way it arranges sugary keyboard splashes, so catchy in the way it explodes with carefully timed bursts of electric noise, Haru Nemuri’s debut confounds categories. The Japanese noise-pop eccentric crams all the sounds she loves--raw guitars, bubbly synthesizers, anguished screams, conspicuous digital edits--into a glitchy hall of mirrors. For fans of certain video game soundtracks and experimental classical compositions, this is the music you’ve been imagining your whole life; for ordinary pop fans it’s merely the wackiest of syntheses. Either way, Harutosyura is gloriously loud, burning with a fierce rock grandiosity that’s unexpected, hence awesome. When “Harutosyura” gets artificially sped up into a chipmunked vacuum, pauses a moment, and comes back rocking harder than ever, she spirals ever closer to infinite refraction.

9. Erin Lee, Love Song

This strange album comprises ten instrumental pieces for unaccompanied acoustic guitar, plucking out pastoral melodies with a vaguely Mediterranean flavor, like music that might appear in a historical romantic drama featuring sailors, grapes, wine, and such. One could reasonably dismiss this music, but I can’t stop playing it--as with film scores and Snail’s House albums, there are certain qualities that make an instrumental melody intrinsically sentimental, and I’d love to know what they are. In the calmly strummed “My Hometown Harbor”, the sun sets over the water, the boats dock, shouts ring out from the pub several blocks down, and there’s danger in the air. 

10. Ashley Monroe, Sparrow

“I’m good at leaving,” Ashley Monroe once sang, and these restless songs about departure and existential longing translate the impulse behind Joni Mitchell’s Hejira into country music, where it belongs. Country is the ideal genre for confessions of solitude and rootlessness because it’s supposed to imply rootedness, tradition, community; the juxtaposition conveys a sense of profound rupture. Monroe’s velvet moan and Dave Cobb’s theatrical string arrangements are exemplary bedmates. Hidden beneath a soft, warm glow lies the year’s loneliest album.

11. Gazelle Twin, Pastoral

When I first heard this crunchy slab of avant-dance music, the shrieks and chalkboard scratches and keyboards used as percussive elements jarred; it took several listens to notice that some of the scratches are digitally altered harpsichords, that flutes and sleigh bells adorn the otherwise turbulent tracks, and that Elizabeth Bernholz’s artificially growled lyrics repurpose quotes from Blake and English folk songs into angry social commentary. The segue between “Dance of the Peddlers” and “Hobby Horse” still terrifies me. If the idea of an ironic, politically-minded fusion of electronic dissonance, English folk, and classical music sounds mannered and absurd, you’re not wrong, but that idea’s musical realization is a whirlwind of rage and menace.

12. Amnesia Scanner, Another Life

This Finnish, Berlin-based pair of electronica producers have scored gallery openings and reportedly have many thoughts about technology and modern life, so I don’t doubt they have their avant-credentials in order. What I’m certain of is that these are the funniest EDM squelches I’ve heard in ages--distorted drops, vocoded shrieks, percussive jackhammers, digitally mediated farts and belches, not to mention outrageously catchy hooks. If the hyperactive musical splatter is intended to convey the sensory overload of our modern dystopian age, it also satisfies my own longing for music that bristles with noises, kitsch, stimulus.

13. Ski Mask the Slump God, Stokeley

In 2009, the Albuquerque emo-rap group Brokencyde combined maximalist crunk with bloodcurdling screamo choruses, and were widely panned as a record low point in pop music history. “Even if I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother’s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment,” claimed one NME review. A decade later, the same exact music is now considered the surreal, groundbreaking, SoundCloud-warped future. Be careful who you mock, lest their ghost come back to haunt you.

14. Rosalia, El Mal Querer

Rosalia’s flamenco-R&B uses cool, exact technological control, sparse electrobeats and syncopated handclaps, to modulate a ferocious natural force, i.e. her singing. A modern adaptation of the anonymous 13th-century novel Flamenca, El Mal Querer is a wild exercise in vocal melodrama, especially because she’s always messing with her voice electronically. Layering her sighs over each other in the endless echo chamber that is “Pienso En Tu Mira”, looping a single note into an isolated stutter in “De Aqui No Sales”, showing off her melisma in “Reniego”, she understands how expression must be filtered through media and is inevitably distorted.

15. Noname, Room 25

The Chicago rapper’s fluttery jazz beats, wispy strings, woodwinds, and hushed rhymes are so calm and thoughtful the music sounds more like slam poetry with accompaniment than any conventional style of rap. By describing love, sadness, police violence, and the banality of daily life in the same cautiously awestruck tone, she depicts an internal resilience that comes into being through the act of aspiration. I love how slight this album is--her modest quietude is a splash of cold water in the face.

16. Sunmi, Warning

The former Wonder Girl refashions herself as a defiant siren-heroine, insisting “Get away out of my face” over electrobeats that crest and surge with military efficiency. Although the singles from this 7-song EP got the attention, her most exquisitely sheathed stiletto is “Curve”, whose bent jazz piano complements a chorus of staccato whispers that should sound inviting and instead exude menace. 

17. Hailu Mergia, Lala Belu

After several reissues of his ‘80s music by Awesome Tapes From Africa, here’s the Ethiopian jazz keyboardist’s first album in forever, looking back on a genre of retro-futurist cocktail music whose benevolent visions of a utopian clubland didn’t come to pass, for how could they, but are ready to be reclaimed. Over relaxed drum shuffles, friendly plinky piano, billowing organ, Mergia coaxes weird noises from skewed, accordionesque synthesizers and dreams about parties where such music could play.

18. Haruru Inu Love Dog Tenshi, Lost Lost Dust Dream

The next time you hear someone complain about SoundCloud rap, please direct them to this eerie, plaintive, whispered exercise in polished incongruence. “I’m Dreaming” captures the moment when you’re still asleep but trying to wake up, straining to clear the clouds from your brain.

19. Camp Cope, How to Socialise and Make Friends

With hundreds of lo-fi Bandcamp mixtapes bouncing around out there, I can’t explain why one guitar band moves me rather than another, but there’s an emotional rawness to this album that rivets. Partially it’s the rhythm guitar sound, which skips along with syncopated flatness and resilience. Partially it’s the sharpness of Georgia Maq’s voice, and the way she uses drawn-out vowels to focus and redirect her sustained roars. Partially it’s the songwriting, which finds an antidote to the world’s grossness in friendship, community, quiet moments of kindness. If you’re exhausted and fed up after a lifetime of taking shit, venting your feelings to the simple clunk of loud guitar music is a pleasure precisely because it’s simple and clunky. “Get it all out/put it in a song,” she insists, endorsing and providing a cathartic fury.

20. Bhad Bhabie, 15

Danielle Bregoli’s ebullient chirps are joyfully defiant only insofar as defiance is a front for insecurity. Aggressive trap beats turned covertly melancholy long ago, but in this context the sadness is unmistakable. Everyone is a public figure in the age of social media, so her anxiety over existing in the public sphere is at once quotidian and heightened. This album is scarier than anyone expected.

[terrie01]

Putting these behind a "read more" because this got waaaaay longer than I intended.

I dream of vampires. I dream of god. I dream of no vampires. I dream of no god. I dream of nothing. And yet that too is still my dream. - Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Here's the thing about being a spy: sometimes all you have are your lies.  - Ally Carter, United We Spy

When spies aren't in sewer tunnels, they're usually crawling through air ducts. I'm not sure exactly why this is. It makes you kind of wonder: Are spies just frustrated maintenance men? - M.T. Anderson, Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger

This was how people disappeared from history, wasn't it? They weren't erased, they were explained away. - Kate Atkinson, Transcription

[A]n Assassin without style, everyone agreed, was just a highly paid arrogant thug. - Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

A short while later, as I stare down at the bodies of the six men I have just killed, I cannot help but wonder: Do I love killing? - Robin LaFevers, Dark Triumph

How to throw assassins off balance: cry in front of them. - Leah Cypress, Death Sworn

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. - Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. - Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident. - Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history. - Gregory Maguire, Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there. - Joanne Harris, The Gospel of Loki

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. - Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters." - Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. - Muriel Rukeyzer, The Speed of Darkness

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. - Joan Didion, The White Album

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be. - Diogenes, The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1937) by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power. - John Brunner, The Atlantic Abomination

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. - N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

--perhaps monsters were misunderstood gods; deities with plans too grand for humans; a phantom of evil that drank from the roots of good. - Roshani Chokshi, The Silvered Serpents

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not? - Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair. - Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time. - Dianna Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air

History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse. - Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

Loki (the god of being a needless prick all the time) - Cory O'Brien, Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes

Please!" yelled Loki. "I am not being noble! - Joanne Harris, Runemarks

Dionysus the god of drinking so hard you wake up with TWO hangovers and then they FIGHT. - Cory O'Brien, Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes

“But I rather thought--I mean, I heard you'd killed Balder the Fair." "I never did," snapped Loki crossly. "Well, no one ever proved I did. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Besides, he was supposed to be invulnerable. Was it my fault that he wasn't?” - Joanne Harris, Runemarks

Only Loki stood at the sides and laughed, a laughter more deadly to the self-important gods than any sword or spear. No wonder they had chained him. - M.D. Lachlan, Wolfsangel

You are only limited by your imagination. - Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

If the multiverse turns out to be the best explanation of the fundamental physical constants, it would not be the first time we have been flabbergasted by worlds beyond our noses. - Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. - Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

Strange as it may sound, if you think of me as a monster, but I can love most passionately. I do not think of myself as evil. - Christopher Pike, The Last Vampire

Does Hallmark make a “Sorry I tried to drink your blood and touched you in a vaguely inappropriate manner” card? - Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs

You know," he said, "every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames. - Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam

This club is for members only. But once you join, membership lasts for an eternity. - Ellen Schreiber, The Coffin Club

Magic is just science that we don’t know yet. - Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends

Contrary to popular myth, werewolves myth, werewolves are born, not made. No matter how many times they bite someone, that person will not turn, though they will probably bleed profusely and will definitely be annoyed. - Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs

Because all the monsters have been let out of their cages tonight, no matter what court they belong to. So I may roam wherever I wish until the dawn. - Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

Real fairytales end in blood or tears. - Luna Lindsey, Emerald City Dreamer

A faery’s home, usually shared with others, was often called a haunt, though grander ones might be called a court. There were other fae whose homes were fortresses, caves, dens, or lairs.

You didn’t want to go home with anyone who lived in a lair. - Molly Ringle, Lava Red Feather Blue

And even though preternaturals routinely preyed on humans when they were alone or in small groups, everyone sane understood that humans in large numbers were both paranoid and extremely dangerous. Even a single lucky human could slay a mighty dragon. As time passed into the modern era their weapons and technology made them even more deadly. - A.E. Lowen, Faerie Rising

Aight, y'all. I have a request.

One of the things I have to come up with when I'm writing RPG books are chapter quotes. The chapter quote comes at the head of a given chapter in a book and serves as a summary of the mood or contents of a chapter. Like this, from Trinity: Assassins -

I am pretty good at finding these, and often end up supplying quotes to coworkers as well, but! I want to extend and expand my collection of quotes and add in some lesser-known stuff, because it's my opportunity to shine a little light on people's good words.

A few requirements, because I gotta follow a style guide:

Must be from a published work with a title. Like, I don't want pithy quotes from a random Tumblr post, cool as they may be.

Must be attributable to a first and last name, not a username, so unless there's a first and last name on that AO3 story, please no.

Short and sweet. A sentence, maybe two. I can't use a whole paragraph.

No song quotes, period, full stop. I'm not allowed. Plays, books, poems, good. Songs, no.

What I'm specifically looking for are quotes on the following topics:

Spies or Assassins, James Bond, spy tropes

History, especially the manipulation of public opinion or history

Storytelling, the importance of stories, the stories we tell ourselves

Mythmaking, the concept of stories or roles being alive/having the ability to affect people and the world, tropes in fiction and reality

Cooperation or building things as a team

Gods, children of Gods, godhood, becoming divine,

fate or destiny but especially how much it sucks to be pushed around by Fate/destiny/Wyrd

Specific gods/mythic beings (especially Norse gods, but really any pantheon you can think of) and their antics

What we owe to each other, community-building, trust, safety through preparation

Multiverses, alternate realities, worlds outside the known world, liminal spaces

Dogs

Technology and magic, especially where they overlap or cannot be distinguished from each other, and our belief in both

Dreams: traveling inside of them, dreams as another level of existence, dreamcrafting, the power of fae/wizards/ghosts/etc in dreams

Fae, psychics, wizards, vampires, etc.

If you have a cool quote you think I should keep in my quote vault for future use, and it isn't something coming from a Big Name Author*, please stick it in a reply or a reblog of this post with the attributon (name and title) for the quote. I'll be keeping this thread around for whenever I need to grab a chapter quote or give someone else ideas. Obviously, putting a quote on the post is no guarantee it'll get used by me or anyone else, but hopefully people will also check the notes for delightful bon mots which inspire them to check out the works in question.

Please keep the notes of this post relatively clean so it remains a good reference post. 💗

*for the purposes of this post, a Big Name Author is one your mom has probably at least heard of - Ernest Hemingway, Steven King, James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, etc. If the author has a Tumblr, they probably don't count as a Big Name. Spiders Neal is an outlier etc etc. Definitely would love more quotes from marginalized authors - it's easy to find a quote from a middle-aged white man on whatever concept - and from currently-writing authors. The point of this is to be able to give attention to awesome people who might sell an extra book or two from being quoted.

If you don't want to see me reblogging this with whatever cool-ass thing people have put on it this time, mute "chapter quotes post".

[wellthatwasaletdown]

"'Cal went from a terrific job with a variety of music acts to selling out for Harry Styles ' ??? He was One Direction's photographer for three years. He never worked for Harry. Harry has only had Helene Panbrum and various local photographers who worked in the area he was playing concerts at. They took pictures for one night only."

That's not true. He did work for Harry before Helene. He did the photography for Harry's Behind the Album book before Helene came on board as the tour photographer. He documented the recording of his first album.

***

Maybe he didn't want to go on a tour again, maybe he wanted to be more stationary for the sake of his family.

[freenewstoday]

New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2020/11/16/one-direction-harry-styles-wont-apologise-for-loving-his-time-in-the-band/

One Direction: Harry Styles won't 'apologise' for 'loving' his time in the band

One Direction broke the hearts of fans in 2016 when they announced they would be bringing their incredible journey as a band to an end. 1D originally got together in 2010’s version of The X-Factor – where they came third, behind winner Matt Cardle. After that, the team spent five years at the top of the charts, touring the world. 2015 saw the tragic news arrive that Zayn Malik was leaving the team, citing “stress” and wanting to live a “normal 22-year-old” life.

After the band’s split, each of the former members went on to create their own successful solo careers.

Harry Styles has arguably been one of the most successful members of the band, as he has sold just under two million albums to date.

While rumours of a One Direction reunion have been floating around all year, no word has yet been revealed on if the former team will be returning to stage.

In a recent interview Styles touched upon working with the boys, and how he thinks about his time with them.

READ MORE: One Direction: Louis Tomlinson ‘noticed’ Zayn Malik wasn’t happy before exit

First speaking out about going solo after being in a hugely successful band, Styles explained: “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologise for being in it.”

Despite this, the 26-year-old revealed that he looked back fondly on his time in One Direction.

Harry continued: “I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in.

“I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.”

Fine Line was released in December of last year, and was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2020 Brit Awards.

It also sold well over one million copies, placing itself at 491 in Rolling Stones’ 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Recently, Niall Horan spoke out about writing new music – but now how his fans might expect.

On releasing new music in the near future, Horan explained in a recent interview: “I’d like to release stuff next year, I doubt it would be this year, and just kind of writing some bits getting in the studio when I can here.”

On the topic of new music, Horan said: “I went through a stage of writing absolute, toxic, toxic stuff.

“I’m looking forward to kind of getting into the room with some people and recording some stuff. Hopefully I’ll have something next year at some point.

“I would like to come back with a bang. I don’t know if I’d like to just throw a song out in the middle of this.”

READ THE ORIGINAL VOGUE REPORT HERE

if(typeof utag_data.ads.fb_pixel!=="undefined"&&utag_data.ads.fb_pixel==!0)!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod?n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments);if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window,document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');fbq('init','568781449942811');fbq('track','PageView') Source

[ferryboatpeak]

notes from the masonic

hi, hello, here is my biased mitch-centric complete report from the first night of Harry Styles Live In Concert, aka the Treat People With Kindness Tour. Fair warning, I’m just going to stream of consciousness this out. I’ll stick a jump in there somewhere.

As previously documented, my seat was pretty much parallel to the pink scrim on stage left, which was an awesome spot because I could see the band as soon as they came out, while they were still behind the scrim. Mitch was closest to me! He was wearing the red velvet suit from the Late Late Show! Clare had on some gorgeous flowy blue patterned dress. They all came out first, and then Harry a moment later, and it was just light enough to be able to see that he was in some kind of suit that looked an awful lot like the Gucci suit from the AMAs which was VERY EXCITING TO ME.

They sang “tell me something I don’t already know” a capella or mostly a capella a couple of times and then the scrim dropped and the lights went up and I found out that instead of screaming I mostly cover my mouth and whimper in a high-pitched kind of a way. The rose-patterned suit looked FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC. Mitch and Harry kept gesturing to the sound guy to turn something up during esny and Two Ghosts. (They kept doing that for almost the whole show, but more at the beginning.)

After Two Ghosts Harry talked a bit. “My job for the next hour and change is to entertain you” was my favorite quote. And look, for all of the hours and hours of interviews and footage I have watched of Harry Styles, his speaking voice in person is deeper and richer and just MORE than I was prepared for. (Sorry if everybody else noticed this years ago, it was pretty amazing to me.)

Then Carolina, and he was having such a good time. Then he talked again and asked for the house lights to be brought up so he could see the audience. This is when he said, “Thank you for being here. Thank you for popping my cherry, as it were.”

I don’t remember whether he still played guitar during Stockholm Syndrome, but he definitely did his little shuffle-y backwards dance because that’s what I wrote down. This is probably an opportune moment to note that Mitch does absolutely nothing performative, it’s actually kind of amazing to watch how completely he closes himself off, I don’t think he even looked out at the audience once. It’s apparently a personal choice rather than a band-wide effort to keep the focus on Harry, because on the other side of the stage Adam is moving around and dancing and emoting.

When the intro to Only Angel started, Harry very deliberately walked back to the drum platform and took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and then he PRANCED HIS ASS OFF and it was everything I’ve ever dreamed of, especially the part where he got his mike cord caught on the mike stand and tangled up, which was exactly the clumsy idiot moment you’re hoping for in a complete evening of Harry Styles. I don’t know why anyone gave him a microphone with a cord in the first place, but I am grateful.

You already know that somebody threw a rainbow flag on stage during Woman and he waved it around briefly, and then he put it back on the drum platform, and a moment later he went back and got it and draped it over the mic stand.

Mitch sounded great on Meet Me In The Hallway and that’s all I wrote down about that. We got a little bit more typically rambling Harry stage patter after that -- I didn’t write down the key quote, but I’m pretty sure it was, “I’m glad all of you are here. If you weren’t here, that would mean that nobody bought a ticket.”

Mitch took his jacket off at this point and dude is TINY, which should not be a surprise to me given how frequently I mention my fondness for his scrawny shoulders, but in a tailored shirt and suit pants it’s very noticeable that there is nothing to him.

Of course the covers were awesome, Just a Little Bit of Your Love and then wmyb, which Harry sang like he thoroughly enjoyed it, and wmyb went pretty much straight into Kiwi. He pranced and posed with his hand on his hip and flung water around and went down on his knees and it was everything you could hope for from Kiwi (except for the lack of a romper of course).

They took the briefest of breaks after that and then just Mitch and Harry came back out for From the Dining Table. Here is the ONE SHINING HITCH MOMENT from tonight: Mitch briefly touching Harry’s hip as he passed Harry to get over to his spot. This is it, this is the entire reason I came to this show, because nobody else in the world would have NOTICED, let alone CARED ENOUGH TO REPORT this single moment of casual intimacy that was probably just Mitch making sure Harry wasn’t going to bump into him but SO WHAT it is my hitch moment and I CLAIM IT.

After ftdt Harry introduced the band. He introduced Adam, then Clare, then Sarah by name only, then he said, “How many of you enjoyed the album? It would not be the same without the man to my left,” and introduced Mitch. (OK so I guess that was another pretty nice hitch moment.) Mitch gave a reluctant half-wave, just kind of halfway unclenching his fingers for a moment, still not looking at the audience. Note that Kid Harpoon was not in evidence, even though he’s traveling with them.

Then they did The Chain, then finished with Sign of the Times (Harry did the nice dragging triplet on the last “stop your crying, it’s a sign . of . the times” that he usually does live).

The only other thing I have to note about this show is this: You know the moment at the end of the Where We Are DVD, where Harry says something directly into the camera for “the audience at home” or some such and you realize that it should not have worked at all but somehow you absolutely believe he was talking directly to you? It’s like that when he waves up at your section of the balcony. Even though you know he’s not looking directly at you and couldn’t see you even if he was, you are still positively compelled to wave back as if he has personally connected with you. He’s fucking magic.

[thestylesproject]

#47 The Interior Designer (Harry Styles)

Word Count: 2560

Summary: A girl with a cheating boyfriend and a new client. 

---

“And, you know I don’t know why she was so mean, I did everything on that list. It’s just me she picks on every time. Riley, she didn’t even finish-” I was cut between my upset rant, with my tears falling down my eyes.

“Look, Victoria, do we have to this right now?” He looked at me like I had spilt coffee over all his papers.

“What? My crying?” I asked, feeling so upset with what happened at work today.

“Yeah, this complaining! Why don’t you go and talk to Noah or something?” He said, going back to his computer.  

“Noah, is not my boyfriend you are, and I want to talk to you-” I said, wiping my tears.

“Victoria!” He yelled. “I have four people on call waiting to talk to me once I finish this document. I swear I have better things to do that hear you crib here. Please go do some work and leave me alone!”

I flinched as he yelled at me, and looked away from his face. Looking everywhere but him, embarrassed and slowly going numb, I picked up the coffee mugs in front of me and walked to the kitchen. “No wonder she gets shit at work,” I heard him mutter. I frowned at his words, filling water in the cups, feeling this was not needed.

---

“You know, I told you to leave him! He ticks all the ‘don’t touch this human” signs on my list!” Brittany explained sucking on her straw.

“Don’t touch this human?” I asked.

“Yeah! He has no time. He wakes up and looks at his phone. His phone is always ringing. He doesn’t listen to you, talk to you, be with you. He knows the important dates of his clients than you! These are all signs of running Victoria!”

“I don’t know what to do! He wasn’t always like this! And I have been with him forever. Like forever Brit, how can I just leave him?” I explained. “It’s his job, you know. He wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t! And you were talking about dates? I was reading online that couples who live together don’t really have to go on dates to keep their relationship alive!”

“Does he? Does he live with you?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Brittany…” my phone pinged. “Oh look,” I said reading the message, “He wants to take me out tonight!” She gulped her drink and came close to read the message.

“No, he is ordering you.” She said. “There is no ‘will you?’ ‘would you” or even –”

“But, it is something. It is an effort. I knew something good will happen,” I smiled to myself, and she smiled.

I dressed in a really nice black dress that accentuated my curves. Looking in the mirror, I smiled to myself. It was a long time since we went out and I wanted to make myself look the best for him. “Are you ready, Victoria?” I heard his voice call out from downstairs. I took a deep breath and walked down the stairs, making sure to make him see my legs, but his eyes stayed glued to his phone. “Let’s go.” He didn’t look at me even once, but I still tried to keep my hopes up. A dinner date was a good attempt and, I was going to give him that. “Sit in the car.”

I saw a bouquet in the back seat and frowned. If it was for me, shouldn’t he give it? I didn’t say anything as he started driving. He switched off the music in a minute of it playing, talking loudly to his clients on his Bluetooth. I sighed and looked outside. We pulled into a huge mansion, and I knew this was not a dinner date. “You bought me to a party?” I looked at him in shock and disappointment.

“Take the bouquet out,” He ordered still typing away on his phone, “and Vic, please. On your best behaviour today? This is an important party for me,” Best behaviour? What did he mean by that? When was I not on my best behaviour? I handed him the bouquet, and he kept the phone away, before fixing it and walking away leaving me behind to follow him.

Kisses, hi’s and hello’s took place as soon as we walked in. A lot of how have you been, I hope you’re well, come enjoy as people danced on the floor to soft music, and then, held glasses of wine or champagne talking to each other in small groups. I saw as different women came and kissed his cheek and he kissed their cheek back, asking them about their work. Did he know about mine? He introduced me once, and then left me to talk to more people. Feeling abandoned like a little child and trying not to pout, I walked towards the bar.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.

“Whisky please, a little water and ice, thank you.”

I sat there was a long time, sipping my glass with my back straight, phone on the side for it wasn’t very proper, trying to locate where my boyfriend was and failing. Sighing, I asked for another drink.

“Long night?” I heard a deep voice ask, as I looked up. I knew who he was. He was everywhere these days. His album has just released.

“It’s getting longer than how I expected it to be,” I said, taking another sip.

“Oh same, I came here with my manager and he is well managing. It’s not a lot of fun when you just have to show your face from faraway,” He said and I chuckled. “Are these parties always this boring with slow music and pretentious conversations?”

“Yes, always,” I said. He smiled and sat down next to me. “So, who are you here with?” he asked.

“That guy,” I said finally finding him.

“Mr Douchebag?” He said, and I frowned. “I didn’t see you as the type?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.

“No, I mean. Why are you here with him?” He asked again.

“I am his girlfriend,” I said, trying not to take offence.

“What? Since when?” He laughed.

“Since 5 years, what do you mean by all this?” I asked, trying to figure out what was happening.

“Woah. My god. I am sorry, I am Harry,” he said, pushing his hand forward.

“Victoria,” I said, shaking his hand. “Why did you call him a douche bag?”

“Umm, that is a story for another day. What do you do Victoria?” He said, trying to change the topic.

“How do you know him?” I asked, staring into his eyes.

“Umm, he has been to many of my parties,” he said. “Your drink is over, let’s get you another?” He asked the bartender to make my drink.

“He has?” I hadn’t heard of any of these parties. I had heard nothing. I thought he only worked all the time…like me.

“Yeah, known him for quite some time.Anyway, you didn’t answer my question…Victoria? Victoria?” He pulled me out of my thoughts.

“I’m an interior designer,” I told him.

“Oh, that’s nice! That’s great. I have awful taste in furniture though, I have never designed any of my houses. I sold my old one because it felt to impersonal and shifted again, and I am literally now living in an almost empty house cause I don’t know how to just make it personal, you know?” He explained.

“Yeah, but you need to get a designer and then spend time with them, so they know how you are and then, be absolutely involved in the process of buying and installing and designing to get that personal touch and favor,” I told him since, I faced cases like these on a daily basis. I’m going to quit my firm though, start my own designing,” I said, thinking loudly now.

“Oh then, can I be your first customer?” He asked.

“You're very nice,” I smiled.

“No really, I am serious. Please don’t let me search for people. I hate it. Please design my house?” He looked like he really meant it.

“Okay, so here, give me your phone?” I took it, “I’m putting my number in with my name and designation. Contact me when you are absolutely sober, and we’ll talk?”

“Splendid.”  

Harry and I just talked for the evening, until it was time to leave. “I’ll call you, designer.” I looked back and smiled at this goofy look on his face. The ride back home was suffocating. I was suffocating. I knew I had to break up, but we had been together forever. And, relationships aren’t made in a day. You have to work on them and keep working on them.

He left in two days for a business trip. In these two days, we had said four sentences to each other. Harry and I, on the other hand, had met two times and he kept chatting with me for some reason. I didn’t mind it. I needed a friend. This week was quite hectic as I left my job, and signed my new papers for opening my own firm. Everything was ready since I was planning it for a long time, and Brittany threw a small party with my closest friends to celebrate it as well. My boyfriend knew nothing about it. Now, I didn’t even have anything to tell him.

“Just leave him, bro!” Mike said, whining, quite drunk now. “He is like this Airbnb person living in your house.”

“It is our house, you know.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t live in it? Does he buy veggies and those wine glasses and those cheerios? No. He does not. He paid for half the price, and that is it. Kick him out!” He said, imitating the kick with his legs.

“Mikey, calm down, here have some water,” I said, bringing it to his face.

“Brit, Oscar…tell her that I AM RIGHT!” He yelled, and everyone cheered.

I met Harry for lunch, the next day, “So, where do I sign to go into this intense procedure with you?” He asked, taking a long sip on his coffee.

“Here,” I took the page out. “Are you sure you want me to do this? You haven’t seen all my work yet?”

“I have enough. And you designed Nick’s house, and I love it so, yeah…there we go,” He said signing it. “I’m free for the next two months before I get busy again. I’d like to do this! And! And! I am your first client! So, cheers to that!” he giggled, and we almost banged our coffee cups.

The long designing procedure started the next day. It was my first project with my company name, and it was a huge one. I wanted to give my best to it. I spent time in his house, working on each floor and then talking to him. I wanted to know him properly, his tastes, his dislikes to be able to come on a nice theme for his house. I could see Harry enjoyed it. I like to know that he enjoyed everything that was new to him. My boyfriend wasn’t back yet, and the only conversation I had with him was a guy who came from his office to collect a few files. It had been three weeks now, and I was almost done with the theme. We had set a budget, even though Harry was pretty lenient with it and we went looking for things on the list.

“I like this,” He said looking at a ceiling attached sofa chair. “I’d like to put to in the balcony,” he said.

“Near the trees, the opposite side, first floor? I guess, it’ll look nice there and a perfect spot to sit as well because of the sunlight?” I asked.

“Yes, perfect!” He nodded.

We looked around more, picking up a lot of things that we liked. He wanted to go room by room so, he could individually pay attention to it so, it took a longer process, but I didn’t mind it. I was absolutely enjoying my work with no politics being played like my previous workplace. I was at his house, setting up the master bedroom when my phone rang. It was Oscar, but he cut the call. He then sent a picture. It was my boyfriend…I sat down. He was on the beach with a girl, lying on the sand with him. I read his message.

Was here off work after a meeting. Saw him and wanted to go say hi, until I saw her. I’m sorry Ria. I had a chat with the girl as well, just to confirm when he left for a while. They have been seeing each other for quite some time. Five months…I’m sorry.

My legs failing to hold my weight, had me sitting on the bed, just looking at the pictures. “Hey, do you want to have lunch from this nice Italian place, I know?” Harry walked in. “What happened?” He asked, as my tears just fell. Five years for this guy. Two years before that and this is what it led to. Harry sat on his knees in front of me and took my phone from my hands. “I’m sorry Victoria…”

“Why did you call him a douchebag?” I asked.

“What? Umm…Victoria…it doesn’t matter now.”

“Just tell me, Harry!”

He closed his eyes, “He had a reputation. And, I saw it at work. He came to each of my parties with a different woman, and then Jeff knows him. He told me how he went on these holidays and Jeff once went with him –”

“You knew?” I stood up, looking at him with accusatory eyes. “You knew he was cheating on me?” He nodded, still on his knees. “And you didn’t tell me! In these three weeks, when I told you how sad my relationship was making me, you didn’t say anything?”

“Vic, I –”

“Don’t call me that! I hate that name!”

“Ria, I didn’t know what to say! I saw you at the party, and you were so beautiful. And your eyes were so innocent and full of love, and when you told me that it was for five years, I didn’t want to see your heart crushed.”

“It had been crushing for years, Harry! I thought you were my friend! I treated you like my friend! A friend tells!”

“I didn’t know what to say, Ria!”

“Say that Victoria, Wake up! He is cheating on you! He came to my parties with different women every time!” I yelled.

“Victoria, he is cheating on you. He came to my parties with different women every time,” Harry repeated. I could see the guilt in his eyes.

“I know that now, you – you –” I couldn’t even curse. I knew he was not to blame. But, my world was crushed now. “I have to leave. I am taking a break for a few days. Please don’t contact me.”

“Ria, I’m really sorry.” He said, coming forward and holding my hand, while I just looked at him with defeated eyes.

---

PART 2

Please tell me if you liked it and what do you think about it! It will mean a lot. Thank you so much! 

Comments?

Masterlist

Copyright ©theStylesproject 2017: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS WORK CONTAINS MATERIAL PROTECTED UNDER INTERNATIONAL AND FEDERAL COPYRIGHT LAWS AND TREATIES. NO PART OF THIS WORK MAYBE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM theStylesproject.