Each night during his 30-show run at Madison Square Garden, Harry Styles posed the same string of questions to his audience through “Season 2 Weight Loss,”from his fourth album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally: “Do you love me now? Do you? Do you? Do I
let you down?”
The song occupies one of the darkest moments in the set, and not just for its anxious interrogations — beyond red and blue strobes, the stage is largely devoid of light throughout its four-minute duration. It also finds Styles at this most physically distant. He spends almost the entirety of the performance in the center of the stage, away from the perimeter he otherwise treats as a combination dancefloor-treadmill-playground. And yet, it’s the most illuminating part of the show.
Styles mirrors the pounding percussion of the song with full-bodied thrashing. He stumbles frantically, but never falls. In front of 20,000 people, he takes “dance like no one’s watching” to the extreme, mostly because he knows everyone is. It’s fitting for a record so preoccupied with the tension of performance, not solely from the perspective of an artist, but a person who wants so badly to show up without dissolving the dissonance between who they are and who people believe them to be. In that regard, “Season 2 Weight Loss” is perhaps the most important song Styles has ever released.
Styles has spoken before about carrying the weight of pressure and emotional expectations that often compound what he might already be feeling. It’s an extension of the central conflict within “Season 2 Weight Loss,” in that particular moment where he sings, “It’s kind of sad, but there’s something I know/Too many things for you to analyze.” He seems to be thinking, perhaps now more than ever, about what pieces of himself shape how we understand, or in some cases misunderstand, who he is. It’s become more important as he continues to reconfigure his relationship with stardom.
Styles’ questions about devotion and doubt landed differently on Saturday, which marked the last show of the residency after 10 weeks. Madison Square Garden is the smallest room he’ll play on the Together, Together tour, which is otherwise solely booked in stadiums with three and four times the capacity. An audience of this size is considered an intimate one for him now. Watching him pull an enclosed room into his dizzying trance one last time brought an added urgency to the song — it even transcended the fact that he walked onto the stage dressed as a rat, then changed into a shirt that read, “I Am A Rat.”
During the penultimate residency show, Styles recreated the outfit he wore to his audition for The X Factor when he was 16 years old, which was 16 years ago. He did so surrounded by his band members, who were dressed as different versions of him from throughout his career. Styles’ existentialism rubbed off on the fans, who anxiously awaited what he might have in store for the final night — what he might say, what he might sing, how he might say goodbye to this moment.
“I’m going to venture back to the safety of my mic stand because I’m feeling vulnerable and I’m not sure what to do with my hands,” Styles said after New York Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson presented him with a bannercommemorating his 30-night run on Saturday night. The praise from the crowd washed over Styles as he cried. He prolonged the night for as long as he reasonably could, closing out the show with an extended dance mix of “Aperture,” during which he danced around the stage while scarfing down pizza slices. The moment felt endless. If only it could have been.
Back in September, Styles wrote a letter to his fans that sent them into crisis mode. “Being an artist is the only life I’ve ever known really, I have been doing this since I was 16 years old, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world to still be sharing these moments with you,” he said, noting he would be expanding the Together, Together tour into next year. “After that, I don’t know what comes next for me, but I know that I’m excited to find out.” Fans poured over every word and every possible interpretation seemed to lead back to the same thing.
“If I go away, and grow, and change my relationship with this idea of feeling like I have to show up as this version of myself — will you take me as that?” Styles said in an interview with Zane Lowe. “Or are you taking me because I show up as this version of myself that you’ve desired from me in some way?” This tension has always existed for Styles, but the song revels in the confidence of having built such a strong connection to his audience that he can deploy this level of communication, even when it feels slightly anxious and confrontational, without fracturing that.
His last tour, Love on Tour, may have cemented this honest relationship as a possibility for him. “I think it was a realization that these shows felt like a culmination of so many people’s support,” Styles recently told Thom Yorke as part of Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians.He was talking about the overwhelming finale of the tour, which ran for 169 shows across nearly two years. “I felt supported, in a way that’s more than like, ‘We’re here because we want to hear this song that you’ve done.’ It just felt like, ‘We’re here because we believe in what you’re doing.’ That’s why I found it so emotional.”
When he retreats for long stretches of time, Styles returns with albums that are reflective of the self-interrogation he completed during those periods. Now, all he’s asking is for everyone else to do the same — sit with that discomfort and what it reveals when allowed to settle. “You’ve got to sit yourself down sometimes,” he sings. When he’s standing in the center of the stage, singing these words and pleading for answers, it’s when Styles feels the closest. “Season 2 Weight Loss” isn’t as overtly emotional as something like “Carla’s Song,” which he reconfigured as a beautiful piano ballad for the New York run, but it is the most vulnerable moment in the show.
Styles spoke each night during the residency about having had the honor of performing at the Garden for the first time at 18 years old. He’s spent nearly half of his life being welcomed into that room with open arms, first with One Direction, then over and over again on his own. And yet in all those years, Styles has never put on a show as absorbing and certain as the Together, Together set he brought to New York. His other tours, in support of his first three studio albums, felt like watching someone become who they were always meant to be.
There was an evident effort on display in those days — the custom couture suits on the first tour, the outsized showmanship on the second, his solo rendition of “What Makes You Beautiful” across them both. Styles was in the beginning stages of building his legacy in a way that felt lucky to witness in real-time. This time was different. Now, he’s living in it. Walking out of Madison Square Garden on Saturday, it was overwhelmingly clear this show wasn’t just about watching something special take shape. It reaped the rewards of leading with what felt most inarguably true — that none of us are exempt from the changes time brings, but we are responsible for how we spend it.
If we chose to spend that time together, in rooms like these, it’s worth following the advice Styles offers on “Season 2 Weight Loss”: “Let light come in once in a while.”
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