One Direction – Story of My Life
Their fans are getting older, but are they 40 yet? Maybe!
[Video][Website]
[4.90]
[4]
Edward Okulicz: Second single time, so it’s Sheeran o’clock! I guess this shifts units, but it’s not even a particularly well-made non-banger. This isn’t tender, this is brittle; the words are predictable and I’m sure I could predict every note based on the one before it, so ingrained is this sort of bilge in the promo campaigns of their forebears.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I’m always surprised when boy bands seem to be able to absorb melancholy. This has a bit too much start and stop energy, but there are moments of tender detail and fantastic sadness.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Imagine every good aspect of One Direction’s music. Now forget all of it, and replace it with acoustic guitar and the MySpace poetry you winced in embarrassment at two years down the line.
[1]
Brad Shoup: The chorus is a set of rising gulps, each one more desperate than the previous. The arrangement’s highway gallop trumps the boys, which is something that should never happen.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind. *cue wind machine*
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: Woolly guitar that could be Mumfordian, though I prefer to imagine Laura Marling singing over it. The restraint endures until the chorus, which is neither big enough to shock nor soft enough to entangle. “Story of My Life” plays against this band’s type: the most charming moments here are the most frail.
[5]
Alfred Soto: “Best Song Ever” they took seriously — the acoustic arpeggios adduce their commitment to recording The Best Song Ever, beloved by generations that grew up with several British number one hits for Take That. Give ’em credit: the chorus doesn’t go for the gorge. But, c’mon, work on those lyrics. Young horny guys don’t give a shit about clouds.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: Last weekend Gary Barlow OBE, a man who has never not been 42, advised a 16-year-old X Factor contestant to “celebrate” his age, rather than playing the role of besuited balladeer before his time. One Direction are slightly older, but only slightly, and yet they seem more than happy to do similar. “Story Of My Life,” from the title down, feels more like a future comeback single than the work of a global force at their height, as if they’re already at a stage of “oh look how far we’ve come, remember the old days?” when the old days were only really two or three years ago. Perhaps that can be a long time at their age, and perhaps the nostalgia cycle for both bands and muggles is only continuing to speed up; at the very least it isn’t what the song’s about — even in the tutting and sighing sense the title, perhaps decided before the lyrics, doesn’t suit. What it’s really all about, finely crafted, sweet lament to unrequited love aside, is a decidedly unglam stomp that yes, even Barlow is currently espousing. It’s warm in a way its most likely influences rarely are, gentle and evenly flowing; not in any way exciting, but for as long as One Direction are beholden to a Quarter 4 schedule, likely the sort of thing they’ll continue pumping out. The faint recall of “Everybody In Love” in the title melody is a reminder that it could be good fortune for a lot of people for every year that they are.
[8]
Will Adams: Aw, that’s sweet.
[6]
i have literally never been so offended in my life as at the implication that harry styles doesn’t care about clouds.
it’s like you don’t even follow harry styles on instagram and occasionally scroll through his entire archive of valencia-filtered fruit-topped pinkberry orders and amusing and/or inspirational outdoor texts when you need to remind yourself that in this cold world are celestial columns of warmth like those heat vents at the bottom of the sea and if we open our hearts to them they will envelop us in their gentle and sometimes very sexually arousing embrace.
i demand to speak to the manager so that i can shove my iphone in their face and ask if they really think someone who doesn’t care about clouds would release to the internet a black and white shot of their boots with bits of tape labeled “right” and “left” and the yoda-esque caption “confused i get sometimes” isn’t someone who obviously also cares about clouds possibly as much as he cares about bananas and other nutritious yet tasty snacks.
is a clumsy foal-legged mop-headed infant sex messiah millionaire who takes the time to properly center the pink heart graffitied by a road and furthermore to a) select a filter that would bring out both the richness of the color and the stark loneliness of its isolation b) opt “yes” on the border option c) caption it “can’t love, can’t hurt” and finally d) quickly delete that caption in a fit of mysterious self-consciousness actually someone you would be surprised cared about clouds? because if so i question the institution that granted you your credentials.
obviously any rational person would frankly be more surprised if the four-nippled human equivalent of a noguchi coffee table whose universally terrible tattoos include an enormous and enormously stupid butterfly on his stomach (geddit), a cage on his ribs (GEDDIT), the Green Bay Packers logo, a matching set reading “Things I can” and “Things I can’t” that legit look like they were done by a 14-year-old for twenty bucks, and the Aquarius symbol DIDN’T care about clouds.
the thing about clouds is that not only are they a part of creation, and therefore already within the scope of things encompassed by harry styles’s love, but they are a beautiful symbol of transience, the liminal stage of the water cycle, created by the processes of life and also an integral part of what enables that circle of creation to go on, clouds are free and ever-shifting and unattached but not indifferent, clouds are rain and shade and deliriously fascinating when you’re stoned and, on the right kind of white-sky morning, the kind where the world seems so empty it passes desolation and becomes the perverse hope of knowing you can create for yourself what you will, basically an IRL instagram filter, clouds are so many things to all people, clouds drift and dissipate but never disappear, and, like, if you don’t think harry styles thinks about that at minimum four times a week, literally just get the fuck out of my face.
also i mean one time he literally instagrammed a pic of clouds http://instagram.com/p/Zf2-vdjCY3/
Oh, Alfred.
Dust. Wind. Dude.
1D always surprise me in that they seem equally as capable at portraying heart-wrenching, eye-watering, “let me crawl into a hole and die” levels of melancholy and sadness as they are at infectious unrelenting horny joy and I think Louis is the key to that, his voice seems tailor-made to be frail in that way that’s sweet but also devastating depending on context. I think the arrangement kind of lets them down here though.
Was the Laura Marling reference necessary?
Yes.
A+ understanding of Louis Tomlinson, Greer.
The Laura Marling reference was cruel and taunting, I can only imagine how good she would sound on an arrangement like this.
Lots of reader comments, no reader votes. The correct response was actually “Scott’s aside about Gary Barlow was amazing.”
Ha, thanks Brad.
I really, really like this – funny, because this sort of thing really isn’t normally my thing – but the video, that is another thing. One of the most unintentionally funny/creepy things I’ve seen in a while.
Also I’m going to use this comment to note the things that sound like bagpipes during the chorus. They, as things go, are great.