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One warm night in April, my husband called me out of the bathroom. I came, dripping toothpaste, to see what all the fuss was.
The fuss was Harry Styles performing on Saturday Night Live. Styles and his band gave a fantastic life performance. Thanks to streaming video, we were were watching SNL neither on Saturday nor live, and we enjoyed the live renditions of Sign of the Times and Ever Since New York over and over.

In the weeks before the album release, we went a little Harry Styles crazy. We read his interview in Rolling Stone. We listened to an interview by the guy who interviewed Harry Styles.
Styles makes a good story. Famous pop idol from British boy band (One Direction) strikes out on his own, and has more to say when he writes and performs than anyone expected. The 23 year old’s songs show a love of the music that came before him, and strike deep emotions across a wide spectrum audience. This May finally having the whole album to experience was such a joy.
But the story doesn’t stop there.
Fast forward about two weeks after the Styles album release. I’m playing music around the house non-stop for hours and hours on end, trying to cover noise from a construction project. The music was meant, more than anything, to soothe our unnerved kitty cat and relieve his stress from the noise. I gave over curation of the household soundtrack to Google Music and my cat.
The Google Music station that calmed him the most was Reflections of a Singer-Songwriter, featuring Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon. Nothing wrong with our cat’s taste in music, but as the same songs started to repeat, I lost interest in the tracks.
Except for one. There was one song which, the more I heard it, the more I fell in love. It was a simple, heartfelt ballad. There’s nothing I can point to that makes it special, other than its sincerity and sweetness.

By the end of the day I was obsessed. I had to figure out what song this was, who wrote it, and how I could find more of their music.
The song was This Town by Niall Horan. To my great disappointment, he’d only written two songs. We went into research mode, who is this guy, Niall Horan? Why does he have so few songs?
Turns out Niall Horan is just getting started with his solo career. But he’s hardly new to the music scene. Niall Horan was a member of One Direction.
One Direction, the same boy band that launched Harry Styles.
I was surprised and delighted to learn the connection. To be honest, I’ve never listened to One Direction. I’m outside their target demographic. To encounter two new solo singer/songwriters, who speak straight to my heart, each in their unique idiom, then to find they came from the same band, makes me more than curious to dig into One Direction. I don’t know whether or not I’ll connect to their music. At the very least, I can make note of each and every one of their members, and start watching for them to appear on the solo scene!

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