harry styles adore you biography

• Harry Styles

The Meaning Behind Harry Styles’ Hit Love Song “Adore You”

by Lorie Liebig August 10, 2023, 6:48 pm

With the release of his second studio album  Fine Line , former One Direction member Harry Styles cemented himself as a solo artist with a vision and sound all his own. Just one week before dropping the record, the English singer/songwriter teased this new era of creative expansion with his single “Adore You.”

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The writers.

Award-winning pop songwriter Amy Allen, who co-wrote Halsey ‘s No. 1 hit “Without Me,” teamed up with Styles to help dream up songs for  Fine Line . Penned with album co-producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, “Adore You” marked the first of many musical collaborations between Allen and Styles. 

The Inspiration

In an interview with  Rolling Stone , Styles revealed that “Adore You” was penned in the spring of 2019, during the tail-end of writing sessions for the album. Although Styles has shied away from publicly sharing specifics about who or what initially sparked the song’s concept, Kid Harpoon told the outlet that the pop star was still reeling from the end of his relationship with model Camille Rowe when they entered the studio.

During his  Tiny Desk Concert  performance for NPR Music in 2020, Styles elaborated on the feelings at the song’s thematic core.

“It’s about that initial euphoria of when you start seeing someone,” he explains. “You first start sleeping with someone or just being around someone, and you have that kind of excitement about.”

[RELATED: 5 Things to Know About Harry Styles]

The passionate, genre-bending track became a huge success thanks to its experimental soundscape and heartfelt lyricism. Within each line, Styles offers raw honesty while acknowledging the fragility of a blooming relationship’s early moments.

You don’t have to say you love me I just wanna tell you somethin’ Lately, you’ve been on my mind

This confession of affection is paired with an offer of dedication, even while reiterating he doesn’t expect a pledge of commitment from the other party. Instead, Styles wants the opportunity to show just how much he cares.

I’d walk through fire for you Just let me adore you Like it’s the only thing I’ll ever do

The Reception

Following its release at the tail-end of 2019, “Adore You” became a global success for Styles. It took the top spot of  Billboard ‘s Adult Contemporary and Mainstream Top 40 in the U.S. but also became a Top 10 hit in over a dozen more countries. 

Certified double platinum by the RIAA, “Adore You” is among the biggest radio hits of 2020 and 2021. The song’s imaginative music video, set in the fictional town of Eroda, was also nominated for Best Music Video at the 2021 Grammy Awards.

(Photo by Jacopo Raule/FilmMagic)

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Harry Styles Adore You The Illustrated Biography - Fully Independent and Unofficial Hardcover – Illustrated, 31 May 2021

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His two hit albums , Harry Styles and Fine Lines have won critical acclaim and track after track has gone on to top the music charts all over the world. His single Watermelon Sugar was the sound of summer 2020.

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Harry Styles

English-born singer Harry Styles rose to fame as one of the five members of the boy band One Direction. He launched his solo career in 2016 and made his acting debut in the 2017 film 'Dunkirk.'

Who Is Harry Styles?

In 2010 Harry Styles auditioned for the UK television show The X Factor , where the judges combined him with four other young male singers to form One Direction. The boy band became a pop music sensation, delivering hits like "Best Song Ever" and "Story of My Life" through five immensely successful studio albums. Styles then made a solo splash in 2017 with his debut single, "Sign of the Times," and a self-titled album. In 2020, he received praise for his second solo album, Fine Line .

Harry Edward Styles was born on February 1, 1994, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in the West Midlands region of England. His parents, Des and Anne, divorced when he was 7 years old. He and his sister Gemma were brought up by their mother in the town of Holmes Chapel in Cheshire. His mother was later remarried, to Robin Twist.

Styles attended Holmes Chapel Comprehensive School, where he and three of his friends formed a band called White Eskimo. Styles was White Eskimo's lead singer, and the band was popular enough to win a band competition at their school. After school and on weekends, Styles worked at the W. Mandeville bakery in Holmes Chapel.

'The X Factor'

Performing as One Direction (a name reportedly suggested by Styles), the five boys became one of the most popular contenders in the X Factor finals that season. Although they finished the competition in third place, they were immediately signed to Cowell's Syco music label.

One Direction

Styles, the youngest member of One Direction, became a fan favorite for his curly hair, wide smile and sweet-yet-naughty demeanor. He sang some of the lead vocals on the band's first single, "What Makes You Beautiful," which was released in September 2011 in the United Kingdom. One Direction's debut album, Up All Night , was a best seller in both the United Kingdom and the United States the following year. In another highlight of 2012, Styles and the rest of One Direction performed at the Olympics closing ceremony in London.

Styles went on to enjoy immense success with his bandmates, One Direction following Up All Night with Take Me Home (2012), Midnight Memories (2013) and Four (2014), all debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The group's final album, Made in the A.M. , just missed the cut by arriving at No. 2 in 2015, before the band split for a lengthy hiatus.

Solo Albums: 'Harry Styles,' 'Fine Line'

Styles made a successful solo entry in 2017 with the epic single "Sign of the Times," his accompanying self-titled album debuting in the familiar No. 1 spot. Fans then waited another two years for his next single, which came in October 2019 with the soulful "Lights Up." His sophomore solo album, Fine Line , contained his first No. 1 single, "Watermelon Sugar." That year he was also nominated for three Grammy awards.

After appearing in concert documentaries with One Direction, Styles made his feature film debut in Christopher Nolan 's 2017 war thriller Dunkirk , as an Allied soldier named Alex.

Personal Life

Known as "the flirt" of One Direction, Styles' romantic relationships were followed obsessively by the press and fans as he rose to fame. In 2011 he began dating television presenter Caroline Flack, whom he met when he was competing on The X Factor and she was hosting its companion show, The Xtra Factor . The difference in their ages—Styles was 17 at the time, and Flack was 32—became the subject of discussion.

Styles was then romantically linked to photographer Sarah-Louise Colivet, models Emma Ostilly and Cara Delevingne, and singers Lily Halpern and Rita Ora. His most-publicized relationship of 2012 was a two-month liaison with pop star Taylor Swift , the experience allegedly fueling a couple of Swift's songs. Styles later dated French model Camille Rowe.

The singer opened up about Swift and his romantic life during a March 2020 interview with Howard Stern , calling it "flattering" to be the subject of someone else's songs, and also described his recent encounter with muggers on Valentine's Day.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Harry
• Birth Year: 1994
• Birth date: February 1, 1994
• Birth City: Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English-born singer Harry Styles rose to fame as one of the five members of the boy band One Direction. He launched his solo career in 2016 and made his acting debut in the 2017 film 'Dunkirk.'
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Holmes Chapel Comprehensive School

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Product Identifiers

• Publisher Sona Books
• ISBN-10 1912918684
• ISBN-13 9781912918683
• eBay Product ID (ePID) 24050394495

Product Key Features

• Book Title Harry Styles: Adore You : the Illustrated Biography
• Author Carolyn Mchugh
• Format Hardcover
• Language English
• Topic History & Criticism, Printed Music / Artist Specific, Individual Composer & Musician
• Publication Year 2022
• Genre Music
• Number of Pages 112 Pages
• Item Length 10.5in
• Item Height 0.5in
• Item Width 8.2in
• Item Weight 22 Oz

Additional Product Features

• Lc Classification Number Ml420
• Target Audience Trade
• Dewey Decimal 782.42164092
• Dewey Edition 23
• Illustrated Yes

Carolyn Keene Hardcover Illustrated Fiction Illustrated Books

Carolyn keene hardcover illustrated fiction books, carolyn hart hardcover illustrated fiction books, biographies & true stories hardcover illustrated nonfiction illustrated books, carolyn hart hardcover illustrated fiction signed books, harry harrison hardcover illustrated fiction books.

How Amy Allen Dropped Out of Nursing School, Moved to L.A. and Quickly Became the Hit Songwriter Behind ‘Espresso,’ ‘Greedy,’ ‘Without Me’ and More

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

• How Amy Allen Dropped Out of Nursing School, Moved to L.A. and Quickly Became the Hit Songwriter Behind ‘Espresso,’ ‘Greedy,’ ‘Without Me’ and More 10 hours ago
• Childish Gambino’s Brilliant ‘Atavista’ Finally Gets Its Day in the Sun: Album Review 11 hours ago
• Childish Gambino Announces ‘New World Tour’ Dates, Drops New Version of ‘3.15.20’ Album and Video 2 days ago

When any artist, even a Drake or Taylor Swift, has three major hits in under three months, it’s a big headline. When a songwriter reaches that same milestone, it takes an article like this to make people notice.

Popular on Variety

“Amy is a once-in-a-lifetime writer and friend — it all comes to her very naturally and effortlessly,” Sabrina Carpenter, who is a frequent co-star in Allen’s Instagram feed, tells Variety. “She’s super versatile: She can wear any hat and yet it still feels authentic. I’ve learned a lot from her and admire what an incredible collaborator she is.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Amy Allen (@amyallen)

They’re also remarkably versatile: Some are ballads based around acoustic guitar, some revolve around a bassline (her first instrument); some seem driven by a melody that was probably sung into a phone (she holds up her iPhone and scrolls through countless voice notes, most without titles). Some sound like pop songs, some could be country songs, the majestic “Unsatisfied” and her latest solo single, “Girl With a Problem,” wouldn’t have been out of place on Boygenius’ album. Like the best songwriters, she understands the value of directness and going with what feels right.

“Sometimes we’ll be writing and someone will say, ‘It should go straight to the chorus here,’ and in my brain I’m like, ‘But we need a pre-chorus!’ — you know, following the ABCs of songwriting. But I’ve really been trying over the last couple of years to deconstruct some of those — that you don’t need to pull out all the tricks all the time. It can actually make the song more interesting.”

Her sound is the product of hours and hours spent in the car with her parents and two older sisters, driving from their home in rural Maine to school and sporting events. “Our school was 45 minutes away in Portland,” she recalls, “and my dad is the biggest classic-rock fan, so since I was little, I spent hours every day listening to music in the car with him and my sisters.”

It wasn’t long before the singalongs in the car turned into a middle-school band called No U-Turn, formed by Allen’s middle sister Ashley with a couple of friends. “I was eight and such a big fan of the band, I was always watching them practice and work on songs at home,” Allen recalls. “And then one day, she said, ‘We need a bass player.’ I was like ‘I’m ready, let’s go!’ I’d never played an instrument in my life, but my parents saved up and got me a little electric bass and I started learning Tom Petty and Rolling Stones songs. I was in that band until I was 11 or 12.”

She convinced her parents to let her transfer to the prestigious Berklee School of Music and was accepted on the strength of auditioning an original song, accompanying herself on guitar. While at the school she formed a band called Amy and the Engine that toured the Northeast, and she credits a challenging songwriting class led by former “American Idol” judge Kara DioGuardi with some useful combat training.

“I think that class was my first window of insight into what it’s like to write competitive pop songs,” she says. “Charlie Puth had been in that class before me, Sam Fischer was in that class — I think we all look back like, ‘We got our asses kicked.’ The rest of my classes at Berklee were very much, ‘Here’s the structure, here’s the form,’ but Kara’s class was, ‘This is your title, go write it and bring it back and we’re all going to listen,’ It was a very healthy competitive atmosphere, knowing we were going to hear each other’s songs, and she was very direct and honest with us about them. Until then, my songs were still very sacred and private, but I think that lit a fire under me.”

After graduating, she moved to New York with her band and met with labels, but had a change of heart about being an artist. “I just knew that I hadn’t gotten to the level that I wanted to be at,” she says. “And being the lead singer and kind of the figurehead of the band was so much time and energy that I felt like I was doing a lot of business work and I didn’t have enough time to put into getting better at writing songs, which is what mattered to me the most. And then I met Scott Harris, who changed my life forever.”

She began working with Harris — who has written hits for Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, the Chainsmokers, Justin Bieber and others — moved to L.A., signed with Artist Partner Group, met her current manager/Warner Chappell A&R, Gabz Landman, and launched her career as a professional songwriter by writing hits for Halsey and Selena Gomez, all within a matter of months. She hasn’t stopped since.

Allen credits her years fronting bands with giving her a strong foundation not only as a songwriter and singer, but also in understanding artists. “I do think being in bands and writing for myself and playing all those shows gives me a way to connect with all of the people I work with,” she says. “I get what it feels like to sing to an audience and want to connect with them.”

One way to fix that, of course, is to put out your own album: Allen is as talented and expressive a singer as most of the artists she’s worked with, her honeyed voice making her often-sharp lyrics even more striking: The opening line of “A Woman’s World,” the opening track on her excellent 2021 EP, is “Can you imagine tits on Mount Rushmore?” While that EP, titled “Aww!,” was pop-leaning, her forthcoming debut album is softer and more of a piece — and yes, she’d been saving its songs for herself.

“I’ve been gathering them for the past four years or so,” she says. “I didn’t really think about it as an album until maybe six months ago. Some of them are quite old, and they’re just songs that I couldn’t imagine anyone singing except for me. That’s the deciding factor — they just feel so personal. And,” she acknowledges, “I didn’t want to give them away.”

As for her own process, “It’s different all the time,” she says. “A lot of the stuff that’s going to be on my album I did mostly at home by myself, and then I’d bring it in and hone in with the producer. But when I write with other artists … I think a lot of songwriters have different takes on this, but a lot of songwriters will have a list of like running titles, or have a plan of the day. I am notoriously bad at doing that. Like, if somebody just says a title out of thin air, it feels like I’m trying to do a Sudoku puzzle.

Instead, “I have to really talk to the artist and see what’s going on in their life, and then kind of organically somehow stumble into something. I wish I was a little more prepared to go into sessions, but I think what I love most about songwriting with other people is the one-on-one time of talking and seeing what the artist is going through at that moment, or what they feel like they can vent about for the longest time,” she lifts her hands expansively, “and then pulling the song out of that.”

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Critic’s Notebook

Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction? The Answer Is Complicated

The filmmakers do more to align star and character than the novel did. But somehow that doesn’t make the movie indebted to the musician.

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By Esther Zuckerman

Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:

In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.

Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.

Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.

Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.

So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.

Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.

“Inspired is a strong word,” Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to” and thinking it was “art.” After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020 , “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity — in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.”

She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd , whose “After” series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise . (It’s a path that might be familiar to fans of “Fifty Shades,” which started as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, unlike “The Idea of You,” the “After” series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan told The New York Times then: “The way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.”

On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced “The Idea of You” as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt “emotionally attached” to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,” she said. “But to me that next step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.

The novel, it’s worth noting, does more to distinguish between Harry and Hayes than the movie does. In Lee’s version, Hayes is a boy from a posh upbringing who put together August Moon himself. In the film, which was adapted by the director Michael Showalter and his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt, Hayes is cast in the group after auditioning, not unlike the way Styles was on the British version of “The X Factor” before being selected for One Direction. (That said, the book features considerable discussion of Hayes’s dimples, which feels like a direct reference to Styles’s looks.)

But while these changes align the Hayes onscreen with the Harry of reality, they surprisingly don’t make the movie indebted to Styles. Rather, they just make it more grounded than Lee’s novel, which sometimes comes across as a list of detailed descriptions of the furnishings of luxury hotels along with copious sex scenes.

The film understands that the fantasy of a Harry Styles type is a potent one. Styles has earned the affection of millions not just because he’s attractive and has a nice singing voice and ambitious glam-rock style. There is an idea perpetuated by his fandom that he’s accepting and, most of all, kind. (He even recorded a song, released after the “Idea of You” novel, called “Treat People With Kindness.”) That kindness is filtered through the new film.

As the movie opens, Solène, divorced and on the verge of turning 40, steps in when her ex (Reid Scott) has last-minute plans that prevent him from taking their teenage daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), to Coachella. Izzy (a middle schooler in the novel, but aged up here) is no longer enamored with August Moon and is now into female singer-songwriter types, but her rich, inattentive dad has paid for a meet-and-greet with the band.

Solène then meets cute with Hayes when she accidentally wanders into his trailer, thinking it’s a public restroom. He’s charmed and starts to pursue her by visiting her gallery in the reliably hip Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he looks upon her with wonder as she explains the art to him.

Hayes, as played by Galitzine, is something of a perfect man. He’s handsome. (Duh.) He’s talented. The August Moon of the film has its own songs , which means that those crushing on Hayes don’t have to imagine him singing One Direction tunes, and in any case Hayes wants to pursue a deeper kind of musicianship. He’s persistent without being aggressive, charming without being saccharine. Yes, he’s younger than Solène — aged up from 20 to 24 in the film — but he doesn’t fetishize her age. He’s just entranced by her smarts and beauty.

Galitzine seems to understand that a movie like this works only if the audience can see how in love he is with Solène, and to accomplish that he cedes the floor to Hathaway. While the Solène of the book namedrops designer clothes, Hathaway makes her earthy, someone in a period of re-evaluation after having a child too young with an ultimately disappointing husband. Her caution in embarking on a tryst with Hayes is met with a dose of self-deprecation that doesn’t feel forced. You see her bloom in Galitzine’s gaze and also her pain when she realizes that a relationship in the public eye is going to take a toll on her daughter.

By the end it doesn’t really matter whether Hayes is based on Harry Styles because the cute boy isn’t really the point anyway. It’s how that cute boy makes the heroine feel. And if she’s in love, then so are we.

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