Take Me Home Found One Direction Rewriting The Boy-Band Script

Welcome to New Retro Week, a celebration of the hugest artists, hits, and cultural moments that made 2012 a seminal year in pop. MTV News is looking back to be able to see what lies ahead: These essays showcase how today’s blueprint was laid a decade ago. Step into our time machine.


By Larisha Paul


There was no blueprint for One Direction. Before their formation in 2010, the landscape of competing boy bands whose mere name evoked thousands of screaming fans was barren. Predecessors like Backstreet Men and NSYNC were either past their peak or already damaged up — and none of these had been unexpectedly thrown with each other on a singing competition show. While in their stint on The X Factor (U.K.), Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and Liam Payne were tasked with performing covers week soon after week while learning about how to perform in a crowd that shared the spotlight, rather than crafting individual sounds as solo artists like they had hoped as soon as auditioning. All of the while, they attracted a crowd of millions in a matter of months.


Simon Cowell, who orchestrated One Direction’s formation, signed the categorize to Syco Records and set them — or more accurately, a crew of pop producers and songwriters — to work on their debut album, 2011’s Up All Night. The anticipation was high, and so they had to get it right. Songs for the album had been sourced from big hitters like Kelly Clarkson, Jamie Scott, Steve Mac, and more, yet its trajectory-changing hit “What Makes You Beautiful” came from Savan Kotecha, Rami Yacoub, and Carl Falk. The trio had a history of working with boy bands, with credits for Backstreet Men, Westlife, and NSYNC bolstering their resumes. However there was no formula for capturing that lightning-in-a-bottle moment that would elevate them into the upper echelons of pop history.


“From the initial song, you can tell that it was going. It was working. We were sort of excited to [say]: OK, so let's do it again,” Falk tells MTV News on Zoom from the same studio in Sweden where One Direction recorded their earliest hits. “Let's not lose the DNA of the sort or the DNA that we thought we were still molding. We had something.”


The label saw it, also, inviting those producers and writers back for album number two, Take Me Home, in 2012. While in the making of that record, Horan, Styles, Payne, Tomlinson, and Malik’s curiosity about the production and writing process grew as they learned to play instruments and allocate melodies of their own, contributing to the band’s budding, guitar-based pop sound. This was all new to them, also it can have been fleeting, nevertheless the possibility to be in the studio with the largest hitmakers brought with it a chance to study the craft of pop musicianship, setting the stage both for One Direction’s work on their remaining albums as a musical group and, viewed 10 years soon following the album’s release, for each member’s subsequent solo records soon after they split up in 2016.


“We wanted to involve them just because you just be habitually recording one guy for several hours and the other ones play FIFA or watch Netflix,” Yacoub explains of the Take Me Home sessions. “To have a more creative environment, we had a number of studios and we had them begin writing stuff and just sort of getting the hang of it.” Around the same time, Yacoub and Falk had signed Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, two songwriters from a music school in Sweden. While the former pair worked on polishing songs like lead single “Live While We’re Young,” the latter locked down with One Direction to try their hand at crafting a hit. “I think that kicked off their hunger to write songs themselves,” Yacoub says.


“You can tell they wanted to explore that whole thing of not just sitting, to do something else than just vocals,” Falk says. “[We told them] feel free to try whichever. And so they come in like, ‘Yeah, I think we have a chorus.’” It was the hook for “Kiss You,” the gold-certified third single from Take Me Home. Kotecha, who'd been linked with One Direction since working as a vocal coach on The X Factor, helped to bring the song across the finish line, yet it marked Fogelmark and Nedler’s first writing credits on the album. Their next two came on the boy band-core cuts “Last First Kiss” and “Back for You,” where Horan, Styles, Payne, Tomlinson, and Malik each scored writing credits of their own. Of the five Take Me Home songs with One Direction co-writing credits, three came under the guidance of Falk, Yacoub, and Kotecha, including “Still the One.”


Following their global breakout in 2012, One Direction noticed themselves rewriting the script for boy bands to come — and so they couldn’t have been in better hands. “It’s a different craft to write songs for bands like this,” Falk says, highlighting the collaborative union he’d formed with Yacoub and Kotecha. “We had all done that. We all knew what it takes.” As soon as they all had an organic knack for pop — excelling at recording and comping vocals along with crafting exhilarating melodies and chord progressions — they had the added element of Max Martin-taught expertise by means of the Yacoub and Kotecha. The former’s earliest credits appeared on Britney Spears’s “…Baby, One More Time,” NSYNC’s “It’s Gonna Be Me,” and the Backstreet Boys’s “Larger Than Life.” Falk had even pulled production inspiration directly from the three artists, speeding up piano stabs from the NSYNC hit to mold “Kiss You.”


The intensity of the two boy bands’s fanbases were similar, with some 4,000 young girls showing up to the studio at one point. However indoors, the action was much less hectic. Horan would spend nearly day-to-day learning One Direction’s songs on guitar under Falk’s guidance, while Payne studied the creation process from a seat next to the computer monitor and Styles formed a bond with the producers through his interest in songwriting. While in the creation of Take Me Home, the puzzle pieces slid into place as each member came to better understand his role in the musical group. “‘Kiss You’ was actually the initial song that Niall noticed his way of singing,” Falk recalls. “We attempted to try different people, and then he just went for it and did it with a little bit of a raspy rock voice, like, that’s your thing.” Tomlinson had the same eureka moment on “Change My Mind.”


Yacoub recently reconnected with Horan to work on his upcoming third studio album. “He walked in, and I was like, dude, you’re a gentleman right now. I met him as soon as he was a boy. He couldn’t even play the guitar as soon as we began working with each other … Right now he’s excellent at guitar and his vocals have enhanced 10 times over. And I could tell, from even the times in One Direction, he really wanted it.” Once Falk teamed up with Payne earlier this year for the single “Sunshine,” it marked their first time working with each other since Take Me Residence, too. A decade ago, songs were being brought to them marked distorted guitars and also a palette of signature sounds influenced by Bon Jovi, the Beach Males, Mumford & Sons, and more. Right now, the band’s former members can walk into a studio with a clear understanding of their own musical visions.


On his first two solo albums, 2017’s Flicker and 2020’s Heartbreak Weather, Horan build onto those formative early studio lessons, forming his individual artsy identity by embracing his singer-songwriter roots. A student of R&B at heart, Malik noticed himself in teamwork with the likes of Kehlani and Timbaland across his records 2016’s Mind of Mine and 2018’s Icarus Falls, bringing to fruition the vision he left One Direction to fulfill. For Tomlinson and Payne, it took several years to lock in a clear sonic aesthetic. The former’s 2020 debut Walls carved out a space in indie rock and Britpop, while the latter’s 2019 release LP1 straddled the lines of pop and R&B through major collaborations with Quavo, Zedd, and more. Meanwhile, Styles ultimately became the breakout star of One Direction – something Falk recalls half-jokingly predicting early on. The pop-meets-Laurel Canyon folk-rock sound introduced on his 2017 solo debut Harry Styles built the structure that later informed its Grammy-nominated follow up Fine Line, shared in 2019.


“I do remember as soon as One Direction blew up that people were just reaching out, back and forth, beginning boy bands, and reaching out to me,” Yacoub mentioned with a laugh. “I didn’t jump on any. I don’t think any musical group came close. I mean, they were so big.” Take Me House debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in November 2012 with 540,000 units moved in its beginning week. It sold more than 1.4 million records in an individual month and has since been certified 3x platinum additionally to yielding two platinum singles. The band’s indefinite hiatus started much less than four full years later, however the legacy of One Direction’s reign lives on through their endeavors as solo artists and the fans still supporting it all.


“It's even more impactful to be able to see it right now than once we were in the middle of it. There were no Grammy nominations, know. You could tell it was working because everywhere they went, the crowd was insane. Fans were everywhere,” Falk says. “As recognition, it feels like that's come at a later stage almost. Like, shit, how big was this musical group? And those songs that are still going to be played in I don't know how several years. Their legacy is astonishing, although it was hard to know that any time while they were actually a band.”