If I Could Fly was written about Harry’s relationship with music and the fans.
I was listening to MITAM earlier on a constant loop and, as One Direction music on repeat consequently always makes me, I was feeling pretty emo. The combination of If I Could Fly and Long Way Down right after each other is enough to land me in bed, staring up at the ceiling while I lament all about my past relationships and how no one will ever love me like Harry Styles Would.
I kept thinking as the music was playing about Harry’s insistence on how the meanings of songs change with the listener; everyone will get something different out of it because they all bring something new to it: their perspective.
If I Could Fly is one of those songs where right off the bat you can tell it’s gonna hurt. Harry’s echoing vocals backed by nothing but a piano, raw and honest, before transitioning seamlessly into Liam’s. It’s all so… Harry: overtly romantic and more than a little dramatic.
The lyrics tell a story of complete devotion almost to a fault, the author promising lengths and bounds to a second person subject without regards to their own limits (or maybe, even, in spite of them). The author repeatedly vows that “you” are the Only One For Them. And while it sounds a bit cliche on the surface–a man writing a song about some unknown person, telling them they’re the love of his life–it seemed so heartbreakingly honest upon first play, it was almost hard to listen to.
I couldn’t get Harry’s words out of my head. I connected to them as a writer myself and started to analyze the song deeper than just “Boy Loves Girl” or if you want to be more sexually ambiguous (as the song doesn’t use gender related pronouns), “They Love You.”
If I Could Fly is unmistakably a love song, there’s no getting around it. But the question I posed for myself was: what kind of love song?
Here is this 21 year old man, who in 2014 responded to an interview question that asked if he’d ever been in love with a concise but cute joke of “my mum” (well, at least cute for those of us who’ve never seen “Psycho”), writing and performing a song that rivals Sufjan Stevens levels of heart-wrenching no more than a year later.
And while it’s possible he could have fallen deeply in love in this time, completely out of the public eye, it doesn’t seem very likely. On the other hand, it’s possible he was writing about a romantic relationship from an outside perspective, people in his life or maybe fictional couples inspiring his songwriting. Or, maybe, just maybe, it was something a little more personal.
In the most recent interview with EW.com, Louis describes History as a song written about their experience as a band and their relationship with the fans. An idea popped into my head. What if the “you” isn’t singular, what if it’s much bigger than that, what if it’s any person who has ever supported his music or taken time out of their day to buy an album or raised money for a One Direction backed charity, what if it’s a much wider concept than just one person waiting in a hotel room bed for Harry Styles to come back and make good on his promises?
And so with this in mind, I sat down and analyzed every lyric of If I Could Fly through the lens that Harry Styles had written his most painful and gut wrenching song about…. fans.
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