🥀pull & pull at the thread🥀

“I think I deserved that,” Tomlinson says on Zoom from a hotel room in Berlin. “I wanted to create my own little world around the album, but even in the back of my mind, I was wondering, will this actually make a difference?”

It’s been nearly a year since that trip to Santa Teresa, and the 34-year-old Doncaster native has just set out on the most ambitious solo tour of his career, one that will take him to multiple arenas across Europe and the US from March through July in support of his third album, How Did I Get Here?

If the aptly-named 2020 debut, Walls, was a more-restrained Tomlinson hedging his bets on what the world might want to hear from him post-One Direction, then How Did I Get Here? is proof that those boundaries have come crashing down. Drenched in sunshine, bold guitars, and thumping synths that give way to euphoric pop hooks, it’s an album that delights in exploring the fuzzy edges and contradictions of Tomlinson’s artistry, from his sugary pop DNA, to the more jagged indie rock sounds he’s explored since.  

It makes sense that Tomlinson may have been compelled to ditch his pop priors when going solo, but as people often learn, sometimes it takes leaving home to understand what made it so special. 

Where were you when the world stopped turning? 

Whether it was with One Direction in 2015, the Spice Girls in 2000, *NSYNC in 2002, or even The Beatles in 1970, the dissolution of one’s favorite band is a moment that sticks with them. 

And as destabilizing as it might feel in your adolescence, these breakups are something we can set your clocks to. They’re a matter of when, not if. But imagine for a moment what it might feel like, not to watch it, but to be in it—to still have your violin in hand when the ship is going down. 

Tomlinson was a planner, the eldest in his family and in One Direction. He’d always looked ahead, but the end of the band wasn’t something he’d ever planned for. “It wasn’t as if I’d gone through the band imagining that one day we might break up,” he says. “I had completely romanticized the whole thing. I thought we were gonna be in the band forever. So those emotions and that comprehension was happening for me in real time.” 

He had just spent the last five years in rarefied air. Even as critics predicted a waning interest in boy bands, and the group grappled with the weight of Zayn Malik’s departure, they continued on as a supergiant in the pop galaxy. Their final album, Made in the A.M., sold 2.4 million copies by the end of 2015 (now with over 65 million sold). They had done it all, from concert films to stadium tours that took them all over the world, topping charts, and making history as they became one of the best-selling boy bands of all time. Where else is there to go from there?

“When your experience is in the context of One Direction,” Tomlinson explains, “even with the most confidence in the world, where the fuck would I even begin to place myself as a solo artist?” 

Whatever thoughts you, the critics, or the commentators may have had in those early days of the band’s “hiatus” about which member was best-poised for success, or who would claim the title of breakout star (because, of course, history dictated that there could only be one), Tomlinson had already run the numbers himself. 

Back then, at 24, he thought arenas would never be in the cards for him. He left that to his other bandmates and tried to think about what space he could carve out for himself instead. So while Malik, Niall Horan, and Harry Styles made their first entries as solo acts in 2016 and 2017, Tomlinson started writing with other artists, releasing collaborations with Steve Aoki and Bebe Rexha. 

“It was probably just a way of securing myself,” he says. “But even though it sometimes takes a lot for me to get on stage, I do love it. I love singing, I love making music. I missed it.” 

Tomlinson felt like he was treading water. He wasn’t getting what he needed from his label at the time, and the process was further complicated by a wave of unexpected tragedies and challenges in his personal life. There was the birth of his son, Freddie, in 2016, followed by his mother’s death later that year, and then the sudden death of his sister just a few years later in 2019. The making of Walls was marked by a mix of hesitation, friction, and grief. 

“It wasn’t completely by design that I took so long,” he says. “It was a turbulent time, and I was just kind of acclimatizing to my new world. I never truly felt like I had the momentum I was looking for to make a record, so I spent two or three years in sessions, and eventually built an album out of that. It’s something that I’m really proud of, but it was a stressful time in my life.”

Even with Faith in the Future in 2022, Tomlinson was still holding himself back. He had made progress getting past some of the hang-ups that plagued him on Walls, but there was still a nagging reluctance eating at him. As much as he loved pop music, there was a knee-jerk reaction in the years after One Direction to avoid it as much as possible. He felt compelled to show people that he could do something else, a desire that perhaps stemmed from the fact that, along with Liam Payne, Tomlinson had been credited as one of the band’s primary songwriters. 

As part of a band, the album-making process was a massive undertaking that took into account layers of stakeholders, decision makers, and the voices and tastes of multiple members. Within One Direction, Tomlinson says he felt more freedom to take risks, because they were all shouldering the weight of those big swings. As a solo act, the calculus felt different. 

“I think I’d been putting myself in a box,” he says. “With the previous two records, I had a smaller color palette, and it’s not that I don’t have a deep love for those songs — this album wouldn’t be here without them — but this was the first record where I felt confident enough to take a risk.” 

In Santa Teresa, he found his center again. Alongside producer Nicolas Rebscher, and writers Jamie Scott, David Sneddon, and Theo Hutchcraft, Tomlinson learned to trust his gut, creating tracks like the unabashedly lovesick hit “Lemonade,” and the radiant “On Fire.” 

Then came “Sunflowers,” a hazy, tripped-out vibe that Tomlinson credits with opening up the possibilities of what the album could be. “I think years ago, if you had played me that song, I might have thought it was too cool for me,” he says with a wry laugh. “But once it happens authentically, it feels really good, and it just makes you excited to create more.” 

With each new track, the momentum built, and a vision emerged. It was almost cinematic, Tomlinson says, the way they were sketching out a journey. The laid back honesty of psychedelic tracks like “Lazy,” and “Sunflowers,” melted into the pulsing highs of “Palaces,” an anthemic song about a love whose gravity feels all-consuming. Its chorus is Tomlinson at his best: a little bit rocker, a little bit 1D, and unburdened by doubt. 

But every album needs contours—areas of shade that make the light feel brighter—and Tomlinson finds them in songs like “Imposter,” and “Dark To Light.” On the latter, he sings, “It’s over before it ends / Why doesn’t anybody tell you that? … I wish you could / See how you look / in my eyes / One more time / Would it make a difference?” 

Loss is a thorny emotion. Its edges are sharp and difficult to hold, and no matter how familiar it becomes, it’s never easy to face. So while Tomlinson says he doesn’t always reach for music to process his emotions, it’s impossible for his feelings not to seep into what he makes. 

“If you’re writing something, everything else feels unimportant by comparison,” he says about grief. “I think it’s an itch that you owe it to yourself to scratch, because the process is massively therapeutic. It just feels wrong, in a way, writing about anything else until you’ve expressed that.”

Processing those emotions is made more complicated by the fact that he’s also a public figure, one who’s had his life analyzed and picked apart on a massive scale since he was 18. Still, he tries not to let that stop him from being himself. Often, he’s found that the songs are transformed when he performs them live, and they take on an identity of their own when they land with people in a crowd.

“I’ve always been a pretty honest, autobiographical writer,” he says. “I’m aware when I write about these things that I’m potentially inviting a kind of intrusion into my own personal feelings. Sometimes that’s tough, truthfully, but it’s also a form of therapy to perform these songs and go through that experience collectively. It feels like there’s a universal feeling of looking after each other in those spaces.”

In life, Tomlinson has always been the type to see the glass half full. But as a songwriter, he’s excited by the spectrum of emotion, the good and the bad, the weightless rush of falling for someone and the crushing weight of losing them, too. 

Now, he’s excited to see how those ups and downs play out for the fans on tour. Normally, he’s not really one for bells and whistles, massive fireworks or lasers. He likes to keep things classic, and just have the focus be on the music. But because the album pushed him out of his comfort zone, he wanted to create a tour that would do the same. 

“This is the most expectation I’ve put on myself, tour-wise,” he says. “It’s a reflection of how ambitious I’m feeling at the moment, and I’m really, really proud of it.”

Chatting from Berlin, he reflects on the title, How Did I Get Here? and remarks that the resulting album is more of a statement, than a question. “I could procrastinate forever about how I got here, or why, and with those questions come more difficult ones like, do I deserve to be here? Am I worthy enough?”