First things first – when we are dealing with How Did I Get Here? Louis Tomlison‘s third album, we are dealing with modern pop music. Secondly, pop music such is a two-sided affair – on one side, it wouldn’t be called pop if it wasn’t directed to as wide audience as possible, and on the other, due to its concepts and how it is created it usually gets very skeptical reactions from music critics.
Now, Tomlinson is a modern pop artist in every sense of that term – from an X Factor talent show reject that was grouped with four other such contestants in a boy band – the hugely successful One Direction (another bone of contention with the critics) – to an immense solo career that now has him at over 2.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify and more than 10 million likes on his official Facebook page.
Then we come to the key thing about pop music – well, like with any other music genre, general or more specific, the problem or the lack of it lies in the fact that essentially, there are only two categories: good or bad; music you like or don’t like. As far as Tomlinson is concerned, and leaving his One Direction phase aside, so far as a solo artist he has not made a wrong move, and while he had a support of a wide audience from the start, he seems to be gradually gaining the favor of critics too.
The key factor there is that what Tomlinson and his team are doing is not solely trying to appeal to Spotify/TikTok crowd by sticking strictly to all the formulas modern pop abides by, but also trying to stretch these formulas in different directions while at the same time not breaking them. Musically, he involves elements that could be labeled as guitar pop, Britpop or even modern psych pop, and, unlike so many other modern pop artists, he doesn’t try to skim on the lyrics, often requiring his audience to try to decipher them as best as they can. At the same time, attention is paid to every single detail, from songwriting to arrangements and production – nothing is left loose and all is polished to as perfect as possible.
All of the above is more than evident on How Did I Get Here? You can immediately hear it in “Lemonade” – the opening track here and the first single – from the opening multi-tracked vocals that last only seconds to the carefully constructed rhythms to arrangement details and lyrics like “She got me wasted / The way she’s making me lie / Hung from her bracelet / Her lucky charm if I like / Symptoms of coming to life.”
There is a striking balance in the 12 songs here between respecting the pop formulas that strike the right chord among a wide-ranging audience and trying to introduce elements from other genres or sub-genres that might be unfamiliar to any specific individual listener. Very often, pop music albums become just a pile of possible singles and not an album itself – on this album Tomlinson and his crew resolve that problem by trying to sequence the tracks properly strategically. Ballads like “Sunflowers” and “Lucid” are strategically among the more up-tempo ones, with the latter closing the album and promising to be huge one for Tomlinson.
So, if anybody needs an answer to the question Tomlinson poses with the title How Did I Get Here?, you could say its from serious talent, careful thinking and hard work – which has all paid off.
