Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, “Kiwi”; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single “As It Was,” his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken. His audience has a reputation for ferocity, and the reputation is totally justified. At last summer’s show at Madison Square Garden, the floor was wobbling during “Kiwi”— I’ve been seeing shows there since the 1980s, but I’d never seen that happen before. (The only other time? His second night.) His bandmates admit they feared for their lives, but Harry relished it. “To me, the greatest thing about the tour was that the room became the show,” he says. “It’s not just me.” He sips his tea. “I’m just a boy, standing in front of a room, asking them to bear with him.” Through it, he started to process parts of himself he hadn’t figured out before. “So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analysing them properly. I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face. Not like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ but more like, ‘What is it that makes me feel this way?’”

It’s changed how he approaches his songs. “For me, it doesn’t mean I’ll sit down and be like, ‘This is what I have for dinner, and this is where I eat every day, and this is what I do before I go to bed,’” he says. “But I will tell you that I can be really pathetic when I’m jealous. Feeling happier than I’ve ever been, sadder than I’ve ever been, feeling sorry for myself, being mad at myself, being petty and pitiful — it feels really different to share that.”Styles didn’t get to play live again until last fall, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first Number One hit in Fine Line’s “Watermelon Sugar,” a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realize he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it. Pre-pandemic talks between Styles and the Darling team didn’t make it far; he was, after all, due on a global tour for most of 2020. Instead, Shia LaBeouf won the role, but by the end of that summer, Wilde had reportedly booted the actor for poor on-set behaviour. I can’t claim to know her that well,” Styles says. “It’s one of those things where if you listen to her music, you feel like you know her very well. And then you realize that you don’t. But it was definitely really special to meet her. It’s one of those, for me, where you meet people like that and just realize how important songs are.” Styles noticed that “Watermelon Sugar”— the mega-hit from his 2019 album, Fine Line— seemed to be connecting with his tiniest fans first. “Sometimes you’ll meet people and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, can you meet my child? They’re a massive fan,’ and the child’s like 18 months old. This person’s a massive fan?” Styles says. “And I remember someone coming up to me at a party with their son, who was really small, and he started singing ‘Watermelon Sugar,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”

A friend gave him Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. “It was the first book, maybe ever, where all I wanted to do all day was read this,” he says. “I had a very Murakami birthday because I ended up staying in Tokyo on my own. I had grilled fish and miso soup for breakfast, then I went to this cafe. I sat and drank tea and read for five hours.” It was in a London studio in late 2014 that Styles first brought up the idea of One Direction taking a break. “I didn’t want to exhaust our fan base,” he explains. “If you’re shortsighted, you can think, ‘Let’s just keep touring,’ but we all thought too much of the group than to let that happen. You realize you’re exhausted and you don’t want to drain people’s belief in you.” Family,” answers Ben Winston. “It comes from his mom, Anne. She brought him and his sister up incredibly well. Harry would choose boring over exciting … There is more chance of me going to Mars next week than there is of Harry having some sort of addiction.” But Stevie has something else she wants to share. She tells the stadium crowd, “I’d like to dedicate this to my little muse, Harry Styles, who brought his mother tonight. Her name is Anne. And I think you did a really good job raising Harry, Anne. Because he’s really a gentleman, sweet and talented, and, boy, that appeals to me. So all of you, this is for you.” Your computer may be infected with malware or spyware that makes automated requests to our server and causes problems.

Harry Styles on the Cover of Rolling Stone

And while he may be everywhere in 2022, Styles is, at the moment, literally right in front of me, sitting in an armchair of a hotel business suite in Hamburg, Germany, on a sweaty June afternoon. After a dip in the Irish Sea this morning, he flew into town and is now enjoying a day off in the middle of his first European tour since 2018. The videos kept coming. “‘Watermelon Sugar’ was probably the most amount of videos I’d had from friends sending me pictures of their kids singing it, like videos of them just dancing around,” Styles says. “It wasn’t a single when we put [it] out. It was just like, ‘OK, interesting … this is a high volume of videos of small children singing the song.’” Taken from theOctober/November 2022issueof Rolling Stone UK. Buy it online now.Available on UK newsstandsfrom24 August. In This Article: Adore You’ is the poppiest song on the album,” he says of the latest single. “This time I really felt so much less afraid to write fun pop songs. It had to do with the whole thing of being on tour and feeling accepted. I listen to stuff like Harry Nilsson and Paul Simon and Van Morrison, and I think, well, Van Morrison has ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and Nilsson has ‘Coconut.’ Bowie has ‘Let’s Dance.’ The fun stuff is important.” “Lights Up”

Styles’ solo shows at Wembley were a reunion of sorts: He had friends and family from all parts of his life and career in the audience on both nights. His mom, Anne Twist, sister Gemma, friends, and his team all danced in the stands next to Wilde and her two young children. Even former bandmate Niall Horan swung by, smiling through “What Makes You Beautiful.”

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In February, he spent his 25th birthday sitting by himself in a Tokyo cafe, reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. “I love Murakami,” he says. “He’s one of my favorites. Reading didn’t really used to be my thing. I had such a short attention span. But I was dating someone who gave me some books; I felt like I had to read them because she’d think I was a dummy if I didn’t read them.”

He’s found a vague balance through compartmentalisation. “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he explains, perhaps preemptively. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.” Because of these traits, Styles was crowned the new “king of pop” in the Rolling Stones U.K. October/November issue of this year, which was published in August. This new title brought a lot of scrutiny to Styles’ name.Like a true tousled-haired prince, Styles invites me to attend a concert with him by the philharmonic in Hamburg, eight hours before his own show.