Niall Horan dropped by Apple Music’s New Music Daily on Friday (Feb. 7) to celebrate the release of his flirty new single, “No Judgement.”
The crooner chatted with Zane Lowe about his songwriting process for his upcoming sophomore album, and admitted his got a lot of ideas while backpacking in Asia. “[I was] coming up with ideas and stuff as I was away, like I always do. Kept the head down, and people were kind of like, ‘I respect you, man.’ Just being a normal person,” he explained. “Then I went back and I got bored and started writing straight away, and I felt like I wrote, like, five or six songs when I got back, and I was like, ‘Maybe I should do something with this, ’cause it feels normal.’ It feels natural. I’m not trying to write anything crazily in particular. Just, like, this is what I write, the way, the way I most naturally write.”
Later in the interview, he shouted out his former One Direction bandmate Louis Tomlinson, who found his own sound and released his debut album Walls on Jan. 31. “As everyone keeps pointing out to him for some reason, everyone else is on their second album. I mean that must be hard to listen to,” Horan said. “As we spoke about earlier, you have to go through that cycle. If you don’t know what it sounds like, you need to find it. But this is the kind of stuff that he listens to anyway, so it all makes sense.”
“And he’s got a great bulk of songs and it’s going to do well this weekend,” Horan continued. “He obviously went through a horrific time, family-wise or, life-wise, but the fact that he got to turn that on its head and, and write about it … and, you know, make it what is going to be successful album out of it as well sheds some light on it.”
Looking back fondly on his time in 1D, Horan called the memories “the most fun of all time.”
“It was that crazy and it’s very fun,” he continued. “You know, it’s just certain situations, you know, like when you couldn’t leave the hotel or you go to a city and we traveled the world but never seen it type thing. That was the part I always struggled with, because I’m not like, an indoorsy, sit-down, play video games type person. I have to go out and do something. So that’s the only part I every struggled with. My dad always says that packed suitcase never came back, you know?”
Listen to the full interview below.
