Harry Styles soundtracks a relationship gone awry in the music video for his latest single, “Coming Up Roses.” The singer doesn’t try to deliver any lectures on love — the song deals with the impermanence of it — but he does come ready to lead some hopeless and hopeful romantics in a waltz. Step forward with your left, sideways with your right, bring them together, reverse and repeat.
The ballad marks the fourth single release from Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, the fourth studio album from Styles, released in March. “Coming Up Roses” follows the Jersey club-inspired “Aperture,” the classic pop of “American Girls,” and the sweat-drenched “Dance No More.”
“I think it was just where I felt like I was at in my life, and the music that I was experiencing,” Styles said of the album during his conversation with Thom Yorke for Rolling Stone‘s Musicians on Musicians series. “I wanted to meld the parts of my life together. I’d started going out dancing a lot more. I really didn’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, I’m listening to this music — this is where I’m at,’ but then I go in the studio and say, ‘Well, I have to make this sort of music instead.'”
“Coming Up Roses” started as an earnest, though short-lived, attempt at writing a Christmas song, Styles told Zane Lowe earlier this year. “That lasted two lines,” he said. “I started it and then it kind of just wrote itself and I was like, oh, this has nothing to do with Christmas. For me, it is a love song about how special something can be, and not everything has to last forever in order for it to be special.”It’s been perplexing, then, to see people getting engaged to “Coming Up Roses” during Styles’ 30-night run of shows at Madison Square Garden. One of the couples in the video got engaged at the Oct. 7 show while Styles played “Coming Up Roses” on piano. The only thing is he was facing the opposite side of the stage from where their seats were, so when the arena erupted in cheers, he was left craning his neck to see what all the commotion was about without interrupting the song — did something happen, or did everyone suddenly get really excited about the idea of hangover chasing?The Together, Together residency will conclude this week with one last Wednesday show and back-to-back Halloween concerts on Friday and Saturday. Best of luck to the happy couples.
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