We Had It, Pure Magic
“Something that we all felt like we had to do for ourselves, for anyone who’s lost anyone, for the fans, for anyone that knew Liam,” the musician told Rolling Stone about the Dinner Party single
Niall Horan holds onto the good times with a tight grip on his new single, “End of an Era.” The musician initially wrote the record with the intention of “looking back on the past with nostalgia, being happy with what you had, excited for what’s going to happen,” he recently told Rolling Stone, but returned to it with a new perspective following the death of his One Direction bandmate Liam Payne.
In the first verse, Horan sings, “Time passes so fast that I couldn’t tell you goodbye.” He uses the song as a way to say what he couldn’t before. “Careless times, yeah, we sure had some/Naive eyes, yeah, we sure looked young/Tears fall down like the future comes/Slowly, and then all at once,” he sings. “Feels like letting go of/Things we’re not supposed to/One breath and it’s over/The end of an era.”
Horan wrote “End of an Era” alongside songwriters John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, who were staple collaborators across One Direction’s last three albums. “John and Julian lived next door to Liam for a long time, and we all grew up together,” Horan said. “For the three of us, it was actually quite a crazy experience to have to write a song like that, because you don’t ever expect to … Just a very weird experience for us all, but something that we all felt like we had to do for ourselves, for anyone who’s lost anyone, for the fans, for anyone that knew Liam. It felt like the right thing to do and something that we wanted to do — just terrible that we had to.”
