Harry Styles Wonders if We’ll Ever Get It Right on Glam Rock Ballad “Sign Of The Times”

After leaving the safety net of his successful boy band, One Direction, Harry Styles returned with his first solo single, “Sign Of The Times”. The singer had entered his grown-up phase with a glam-rock ballad written from the perspective of a worried parent. And with its release, a new version of Styles was born.

You Ain’t Really Good

Styles said “Sign Of The Times” is written from a mother’s perspective. “As if a mother was giving birth to a child and there’s a complication. The mother is told, ‘The child is fine, but you’re not going to make it.’ The mother has five minutes to tell the child, ‘Go forth and conquer.’”

Just stop your crying,
It’s a sign of the times.
Welcome to the final show,
Hope you’re wearing your best clothes.
You can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky,
You look pretty good down here,
But you ain’t really good.

When the song arrived in 2017, it entered a chaotic world. Since its release, chaos feels ever present. But Styles doesn’t appear to be addressing larger political fights. Instead, he writes of a more localized, internal kindness that seems to have evaporated in an age when cruelty often gets rewarded.

If we never learn, we been here before,
Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets, the bullets?

Will We Ever Learn?

Returning to the perspective of a dying mother, she knows time is precious. Yet all around her she notices people acting like they have plenty of hours to waste. Now that she’s passed on, her perspective changes. This is her speaking from the vantage point of death.

Just stop your crying, have the time of your life,
Breaking through the atmosphere,
Things look pretty good from here.
Remember everything will be all right,
We can meet again somewhere,
Somewhere far away from here.

The piano ballad echoes the existential anxiety of “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie—artists who laid the blueprint for Styles’s glam-rock turn.

We don’t talk enough,
We should open up,
Before it’s all too much.
Will we ever learn?
We’ve been here before,
It’s just what we know.

Though the anxiety is nothing new, there’s hope in the fact that we’ve survived long enough to sing about it again. Maybe this time we’ll finally listen.

Photo by Zak Kaczmarek/Getty Images for ARIA