When Niall Horan’s unmistakable Irish brogue rings out from the speakers of my computer, it’s obvious he’s in a cheery mood.
The former One Direction member has recently released his fourth studio album, Dinner Party (via Capitol Records), and while a certain buoyancy has been a motif of his musical output since the start of his solo career, his latest project is on another level. (Dinner Party riffs on Horan’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Amelia Woolley, its title inspired by the way they first met.) Consider a song like “Tastes So Good” (on which Horan croons longingly, “Can’t take another breath without you / Can’t walk down the street”) or “Pretty” (“Baby, can’t you see? You’re so fucking pretty”), a sort of spiritual successor to One Direction’s breakout single “What Makes You Beautiful.” But perhaps the most powerful moment on the album arrives with “End of an Era,” a long-gestating, bittersweet ballad that Horan rewrote following the 2024 death of his former bandmate Liam Payne.
Here, Horan talks about writing love songs, his retro musical inspirations, and preparing to go on the road again.
Vogue: Listening to the album, you sound so in love. Did you know that was going to be the motif right off the bat?
Niall Horan: I mean, it sounds cliché, but you write from where you are. When I pick up a guitar, I say what I see. If you’re going through a heartbreak, you write heartbreak-type songs; they happen naturally. And if you’re doing the opposite, then you’re writing love songs about the nuances of a relationship, and that just happens, too. I pick up the guitar, I play four chords. I start humming a melody. I start singing a melody. I fill in sentences with things that come to my head, and then I guess you get this kind of album. It sounds simple when I say it like that, but you have to do a bit of soul-searching and digging to go and find those lyrics.
At what point during their evolution did you play these songs—some of which are very vulnerable—for Amelia? Do you play her new music as you’re writing, or when it’s all done and produced?
Yeah, good question. Well, on my last album, there’s songs on there about her, too, so this wasn’t her first rodeo in terms of that. But no matter who you are, I guess you don’t expect songs to be written about you, so I think it was a bit of a shock to the system in the first place for her, I would imagine. But I think she’s pretty happy about this album. She’s been taking it in her stride, in typical fashion of hers. I have a studio in the basement, and I’ll go down and I’ll start something, and I’ll come up and I’ll play it. She’ll give me constructive criticism, or she’ll tell me if she likes it or tell me if she doesn’t like it. She’s never too harsh, but she understands this is what I do: I write songs. That’s how I get my emotions across, I suppose, so she gets it completely. She’s very nice to me if she doesn’t like a song and she’s nice to me if she does like a song.
