It's no secret that Zayn
didn't love One Direction's sound or his bandmates. "My vision didn't
necessarily always go with what was going on within the band," he says.
There was something so earnest, so wholesomely dweeby, about the whole thing.
It wasn't cool, and Zayn didn't particularly enjoy being dragged around the
world to look like an epic dork during the prime of his youth.
When he split off, in 2015,
Zayn finally got to do all the
things he hadn't been able to in One Direction: dye his hair, grow his beard,
sing about sex. But he was also introduced to a fresh army of puppeteers trying
to guide him, and he felt disoriented, adrift. The only way to ground himself
was to resist the pull of anyone's expectations and answer only to Zayn. He'd
spent five years taking direction
and had become allergic to it.
There are plenty of clichéd
expressions about how toxic and stifling freedom can
be, and Zayn experienced many of them when he went solo. "I didn't really,
like, make any friends from the band. I just didn't do it. It's not something
that I'm afraid to say. I definitely have
issues trusting people," he says. When he was living in Los Angeles,
aimless, he fell in with a crowd of industry people: "Producers,
musicians, tailors, stylists, managers. Them kind of things," he says.
"It got too crazy. I just got too much into the party scene. Just going
out all the time. And I was too distracted." So he left L.A. permanently
and moved to New York earlier this year as a way to bring himself back down to
earth.
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