Liam Payne co-wrote One Direction's best album, Four.

Free letter today

Today’s letter is free, it felt weird throwing up a paywall while writing a remembrance newsletter.

This song of his from the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack is absolutely gorgeous, btw.

First of all, fuck TMZ.

It was a shock yesterday when the news came in that former One Direction member Liam Payne died from a fall off a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. Many of us learned about his death from TMZ. Unfortunately, when we clicked through to TMZ’s website we found cropped images of his dead body outside the hotel. It wasn’t just ghoulish. It was sickening to think that someone in the TMZ newsroom made the decision to not only publish photos of Payne minutes after his death, but that they also decided cropping them was the compromise here.

I’d like to conjure a classic Halsey tweet and replace Pitchfork with TMZ.

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Remembering Liam Payne and One Direction's best album, Four.

Via: Getty

There will be many tributes to Liam Payne this week and in the coming weeks. I don’t envy anyone who had to churn out content last night; I’m so glad to be off that particular brand of celebrity content beat. Others will have much to say about his struggles with substance abuse and how it affected his romantic relationships and those with his ex-bandmates. But I’d like to take a moment to remember one of the best rock albums of the 2010s… One Direction’s 2014 album Four.

To people not well-versed in One Direction lore, it might come as a surprise that Payne and Louis Tomlinson were the two bandmates who contributed the most to songwriting duties. Producer Julian Bunetta (one of the producers on Sabrina Carpenter’s excellent Short n’ Sweet), recounted to Rolling Stone in 2020 how Payne came up with the chorus to “Better Than Words” off 2013’s Midnight Memories.

At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom, and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary place-holder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words …” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta can’t remember where — Liam asked, maybe having a laugh, “What if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?”

Their first two albums were the poppy songs they’re most remembered for like “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Kiss You.” On the third album, the boys shifted toward a more mature, rock sound. On the recording of the album Four, it wasn’t just instrumentation that contributed to the album, it was the boys’ voices. Producer John Ryan said, “We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths, or drums.”

Ironically, it all sounds similar to creation of another one of my favorite albums titled Four. When Beyoncé recorded her album with the same title, it was also a sonic departure for her. Instead of the ornate pop production of her previous albums, 4 relied on Beyoncé’s heavily on her vocals as the means of production. One Direction did the same on their album, while also leaning into the real relationships they’d begun to have since their debut album. These songs were real now. They weren’t just imagined scenarios dreamed up by producers in a studio.

On the album, Payne is credited as co-writing “Steal My Girl,” “Ready to Run,” “Girl Almighty,” “Fool’s Gold,” “Night Changes,” “No Control,” “Fireproof,” “Spaces,” and “Clouds.” Los Angeles Times praised the album for ditching One Direction’s X-Factor roots and producing their “best work yet” by leaning on influences of Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys, and David Bowie. Not too bad a review of Payne’s pen game.

If I have to pick one song from Four, it’s “Clouds.” It wasn’t a single. But it’s an underrated song about growing up and looking back on your past. A lot of Directioners are doing just that today. “No, we don't, no, we don't, no, we don't ever grow up.” And sometimes that’s okay.

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More news.

The Coen Brothers are coming to Criterion in November! While the line-up doesn’t include my fave Coen Bros film Burn After Reading, it does include several other faves like Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis.

Raúl Castillo spoke to Out about the 10th anniversary of Looking. A show I personally loved and the internet hated. When asked what his character Richie and Jonathan Groff’s Patrick are up to now, Castillo said, “I think they moved to Mexico City," Castillo laughed. "They left this country. They're scared for Trump being elected.” Girl… there is no way those two are still together! Still in each other’s lives and probably still having a messy hook-up every two years? Sure. But dating? Absolutely not.

Woody Allen showed up to the magazine launch party for Feeld, the dating app that is mostly for people who want to date couples or couples who want to explore. Which made me wonder… And then I grossed myself out wondering if Woody Allen has ever had a threesome in his life.

Cynthia Erivo had an aversion to fan edits of the Wicked poster that covered her eyes to make the poster look like the traditional Broadway poster. “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your p—- green. None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.” I think this is all a bit… extra. But who in the theatre isn’t extra? The lead of the high school spring musical would go on the same rant over the PA morning announcements, so let’s give Cynthia some grace!

Besides, my favorite Erivo moment of the week comes from dueling Condé Nast descriptions of her love life. In her recent Vanity Fair profile, Erivo said: “I’m very tight-lipped with my relationships, ’cause I don’t think that my relationship is for anyone else but for me. I spend so much of my life sharing everything—whether it’s my work or my soul or my life in speeches. I think I give enough of myself that I’m allowed to keep something for me. And who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind at some point. But, I think it’s okay. It’s enough for people to know that I’m a queer person who could have relationships with men or women or neither.” Meanwhile, in a Vogue spread on Ben Platt and Noah Galvin’s wedding, Platt is quoted saying: “The love that Cynthia Erivo and Lena Waithe share is our north star. So is their style.” Nurse…