by Lauren Dame
Arts, Style, and Beauty Editor
The following story was written by a student on the staff of The Jaguar Times as part of Hilliard Bradley High School’s Journalism Production course.
On Saturday, September 18th, I went to a long awaited tour date of Harry Styles’s Love on Tour. The concert was held at the Capital One Arena, right in the capital of the United States. At 8:00 PM, opener Jenny Lewis performed, and about an hour later, Styles popped up in the middle of the stage. His set lasted an hour and a half, singing 17 of his own songs, and ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ by the well known band that he was formerly in, One Direction.
One thing that I have not been able to get out of my head is how fast the night went. What was a few hours felt like a few minutes. Everyone knows the idiom “time flies by when you’re having fun,” and this situation fits perfectly. I had the time of my life, and this was something that I had been waiting for since purchasing the tickets on a presale date of November 2019.
When COVID hit, the live performance industry was affected drastically. Because of this, I had high expectations for Harry Styles as his concert was the first concert that I planned to attend after 18 months of dealing with a pandemic. This is an event that I had been looking forward to for two entire years, and it did not disappoint.
Styles had a great voice live, most songs being better than studio versions. He had great charisma with the crowd, interacting with fans in the pit and making people laugh the entire show. It was easy to tell that he was born to perform, he had so much fun with it and made it so that the entire arena could have an amazing experience.
My friend and I had seats in the nosebleeds (which were still very expensive), but we could still see everything. Before the concert, I was worried that I wouldn’t get to actually see him, but the big screens above the stage and the area that we were in enhanced the experience. While the tickets were expensive, they were completely worth it.
After following Harry Styles closely on social media over the past couple of years, I knew what he was capable of at a live show, and everything that I could have expected out of the night happened. He sang with passion, he made people laugh, and he danced around on the stage almost every single song. He was full of life. Performing is so much more than a job to him, and he made that very clear. For most concerts, visuals and light shows are needed for people to find it cool and remember it. All that this concert needed was Harry Styles and his extremely talented band.
One of the reasons Harry Styles is such an icon in the present day is because of how accepting he is. He isn’t the only artist that preaches to be who you are, of course, but it’s when artists are making fans feel safe at live shows when you can really feel how much they accept every single fan for who they are. At one point during the show, Styles picked up a pride flag, a bisexual flag, and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ flag that fans had thrown onto the stage and ran around waving them around. The arena roared with cheer and that was the moment that made the night perfect. I will remember it for the rest of my life.
Every song was beautifully sung. My favorite song of the night was Sunflower Vol. 6 because he sang it so well. The opening song of his set, Golden, was also one to remember because the energy in the arena went from 0 to 100. It was unreal. He closed with Kiwi, leaving the stage with fans in the arena (including me) going absolutely crazy.
Even someone that isn’t a huge fan of Harry Styles would have an incredible time at this concert. If you can get your hands on tickets for this tour, your life will change. Expectations were more than exceeded, and I am going to try very hard to get my hands on tickets sometime in the future.