The former One Direction member gives fans a glimpse at his new song in a video interview with The Fader.
- Nov 18, 2015
AceShowbiz - Zayn Malik teases a snippet of his first solo song "Befour" in a video interview with The Fader. The song suggests a hazy, The Weeknd-influenced R&B music. In the video, the 22-year-old singer is shirtless while riding a motorcycle.
Zayn shares, "I don't feel like people really know what I'm going to give them, musically. And once they hear it, I feel like they will understand me a little bit more, and they'll understand why I did what I did, and why I left the band, and why I had to write this shit down. Because for five-not even for five years, for ten years, this album has been in my brain, and it's just been there, sat with me, needing to be out."
On leaving One Direction earlier this year, Zayn says, "I guess I just wanted to go home from the beginning. I was always thinking it. I just didn't know when I was going to do it. Then by the time I decided to go, it just felt right on that day. I woke up on that morning, if I'm being completely honest with you, and was like, 'I need to go home. I just need to be me now, because I've had enough.' I was with my little cousin at the time-we were sat in the hotel room-and I was just, 'Should I go home?' And he was like, 'If you want to go home, let's go home.' So we left."
Zayn says he couldn't express himself while he was in the band. "There was never any room for me to experiment creatively in the band," he explains, "If I would sing a hook or a verse slightly R&B, or slightly myself, it would always be recorded 50 times until there was a straight version that was pop, generic as fuck, so they could use that version. Whenever I would suggest something, it was like it didn't fit us. There was just a general conception that the management already had of what they want for the band, and I just wasn't convinced with what we were selling."
"I wasn't 100 percent behind the music," he adds, "It wasn't me. It was music that was already given to us, and we were told this is what is going to sell to these people. As much as we were the biggest, most famous boy band in the world, it felt weird. We were told to be happy about something that we weren't happy about."
When asked if rumors he cheated on Perrie Edwards affect his decision to leave 1D, Zayn explains, "The two things never really coincided in my mind. Obviously, publicly, that's the way it worked, because it worked well for the purpose. Them two stories looked good together side by side. Stories came out because we were in Thailand, and we were out and about. If we were out in Australia, if we were out in India, the same thing would have happened. It was just at a peak where the fame was intrusive and invasive. It wasn't because of that that I left-that was just a contributing factor to everything. I'd already made my mind up before that."
