When you reach the Harry Styles level of celebrity wattage, you can pretty much do as you please. For less pure souls that can mean drug and alcohol excess, lavishing millions on nonsense or just becoming a renowned a**hole to everyone around you.
For Harry, it’s more about picking and choosing what press you want to do to promote your forthcoming album, which explains how it was Better Homes & Garden magazine ended up landing a major scoop about the meaning of his new album titles – and a frankly gorgeous photo shoot – with the 28-year-old.
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The magazine – which for the uninitiated, focuses on homes and gardens and how to make them better – ran a cover interview with Styles in which he revealed the meaning behind the name Harry’s Home.
“Home feeling isn’t something that you get from a house,” he told the magazine. “It’s more of an internal thing. You realise that when you stop for a minute.”
That minute, of course, was pandemic-shaped like it was for the rest of us. The impact on Harry’s music has been, he says, to make album three his “most intimate yet” and full of wholesome lyrics about “sitting in the garden” and “maple syrup, coffee, pancakes for two.” As we say, we no major signs of a young star falling off the rails here.
Elsewhere in the interview, Style tells writer Lou Stoppard that he has been reflecting on his time in One Direction and the impact this had on him – particularly the relentless media attention on his sexuality.
“For a long time, it felt like the only thing that was mine was my sex life,” he said.
“I felt so ashamed about it, ashamed at the idea of people even knowing that I was having sex, let alone who with. At the time, there were still the kiss-and-tell things. Working out who I could trust was stressful. But I think I got to a place where I was like, ‘Why do I feel ashamed? I’m a 26-year-old man who’s single’; it’s, like, yes, I have sex.”
Talking about his sexuality he added: “I’ve been really open with it with my friends, but that’s my personal experience; it’s mine.
“The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.”
With Harry’s House and a couple of extremely interesting film projects on the way, including gay drama My Policeman and starring in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling alongside Florence Pugh, there is every chance Harry Styles is set to reach another level of stardom in 2022 – one as by critical acclaim as the adoration of a generation of pop fans. It’s something he sounds typically, almost disappointedly level-headed about.
“Finally, it doesn’t feel like my life is over if this album isn’t a commercial success,” he said. “I just want to make stuff that is right, that is fun, in terms of the process, that I can be proud of for a long time, that my friends can be proud of, that my family can be proud of, that my kids will be proud of one day.”
To read the interview in full and pour over photos of Harry lying in a pond, serving breakfast in a pair of high heels and falling over (handsomely) in a field, check out the full piece on the Better Homes and Gardens website.
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