One Direction Collaborator Breaks Down Group’s New Songs
Julian Bunetta has been a longtime friend of and co-writer for One Direction and remains one of their closest musical allies. Since the boy band’s second album, Take Me Home, he’s gone from writing the songs for them to writing with the band and watching them grow along the way.
Along with discussing his history with the pop group with Rolling Stone, Bunetta also broke down several tracks from the band’s upcoming album, Made in the A.M. “I’ve had moments with all these songs,” Bunetta says. “All of them are good in different contexts. You’re not going to put ‘Walking in the Wind’ on in a party. You’re not going to put on ‘Never Enough’ when you wanna just sulk. They all have their place and their time.”
“Hey Angel”
“[A couple weeks ago] I played the demo of [this song] for some friends, and if you could’ve heard what it was compared to what it is now, you would be very surprised. The demo was this danky little version with bad-attitude singing not done by the band. This one is very special to me.”
“Perfect”
“That one took a long time, just because it was written over a couple different continents. It started as one thing and ended up where it is. Good driving song.”
“End of the Day”
“Here’s a little fact about ‘End of the Day’: It was written during Four, at the end of [the sessions for] Four. But it was not the same ‘End of the Day’ as we know it. It was just a little bit of the melody; it was some of the verse lyrics and some of the chorus melody. It was written at the very, very end of Four, but there was no way it was ever going to get there, and it survived through a year of scrutiny. We re-worked the lyric and re-wrote it. That one was our link to the past. Good chorus.”
“If I Could Fly”
“I remember when Harry first played it to me. That one I didn’t write, but I remember when I first heard it. We were in Westlake Studio for a week. I kept asking why he wanted to call it ‘If I Could Fly.’ It’s a great song, so it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, does it?”
“Never Enough”
“‘Never Enough’ had an interesting life. It has a Stevie Wonder horn riff, and we’ve spent many nights in hotel rooms dancing to that one.”