By the way, Louis Tomlinson's here, obviously.

Hello, hello, hello.

Yo.

So, okay.

How did I get here?

You've said that this is the record that you always deserve to make.

Yeah.

Can you explain to us what changes between faith in the future and this body work that we have today?

So like when I came out of One Direction, and I realize how cliche this is now to a degree,

but I also think I had to make these steps to get to where I got to.

But you come out of a band that one direction and you really want to prove who you are as a musician,

you know, like you want to show kind of what was maybe dumbed down a little bit when you're

in the band and you want to show who you are as an artist. And with that, the thought process is,

for me anyway, it was always to just try and find a way that was off centre that I could do that wasn't like innately pop,

that I'm going to have a more guitar-driven mix

than maybe radio would like, for example.

And I realised on this record before making it

that the bravest thing I can do is actually stare those things in the face that

I found intimidating because when you come out of a band that one direction the the intimidation

and the worry is you know that is like an amazing thing in pop so the worry is you know you're

not going to be able to replicate that kind of thing so I think that made me defy a lot of the things that have got me where I am. I'm a big fan of pop music when it's done right. I'm a big, big fan of it. And I think this record was more about, like I've joked a lot on this promo run about me joining TikTok and that being one of these things. And that's not just tongue-in-cheek me saying is, it is genuine that I want to, there's things that I've defied for a while to show who I am as an artist and probably to my detriment on occasion. So now I'm ready to embrace, you know, it's pop that got me here. And by the way, I'm a massive pop fan. I'm still talking about doing it in the right way. It's just those things are really, really scary coming out of One Direction because I didn't want to blur into the background that was pop, you know? Can you explain to me that you're a co-writer on Story of My Life, right? That song not only changes the trajectory of One Direction, it changes the

sound, but like that is, it's a folk Americana, acoustic, guitar-driven pop record. I can make the case

...