As It Was - A Conversation with the Gospel and Harry Styles

Let’s take a house tour! He’s done it again – Harry Styles is defining another summer with his chart-topping single, “As It Was.” Here you’ll get a deep dive into the defining track off of Harry Styles’ album, Harry’s House.

In 2020 it was “Watermelon Sugar” – now in 2022 Styles is giving the summer soundtrack a very different vibe. Styles said of his album, “To me, it’s everything. It’s everything I’ve wanted to make.”

Home is where you are most yourself– so, as you’d hope, Harry’s House is Styles’ most personal album yet. . . but maybe not in the way you’d expect.

Art shapes culture. Culture is mirrored in music. Culture is a compilation of conversations - it is an interwoven fabric of moments, movements and things made.

As those who follow Jesus in the context of our current cultural moment, you have the unique opportunity to enter that conversation redemptively, first to understand and then to respond.

The Gospel is able to speak into every aspect and every moment of life. So let’s lean into how Jesus might talk to Harry Styles.

In this article, you’ll get to dig into:

Musical and lyrical breakdown of “As It Was”
“As It Was” in conversation with the Gospel
Suggested companion tracks

Let’s knock on the front door!

As It Was - Musical Highlights

From the unrelenting high-hat to the non-stop picked electric guitars, the song is in constant motion.

It feels as if Styles is stuck, and the music is trying to break him loose. He has crafted a mood that is half victorious, half resigned, half confessional, and he is trying to figure out which halves to keep.

Harry said that this was actually the last song written for Harry’s House. The original arrangement was a slow ballad. The finished song is brilliant in that it contrasts a droopy, melancholic melody with a quick-stepping, textured atmosphere.

Throughout the song Styles sings with an almost half-hearted, pining lilt. His energy level is akin to a tired sigh. The music beneath pulls with the pace and energy of a cord-start motor, it keeps yanking to get him out of the somber rut.

The pieces almost don’t fit - if you were to place the opening synth lead over a different chord pattern, it would feel like a sunny bop. Instead it is spacey and moody–a high falsetto chorus undergirded by droning lower harmonies.

There is a tremendously satisfying conclusion to the song – the ringing bells referred to in verse two start clanging, Harry begins singing with abandon, the synth lead resonates the major-keyed marching elements.

While the song doesn’t “land”, it does depart from the half-lit gloom the track begins in.

As It Was - Lyrical Breakdown

This is a family affair.

From the song beginning with a recording of Harry’s goddaughter calling, to confronting his relationship with his father, to the empty space left after a relationship, the song is powerfully situated at home.

Particularly, the song is Harry’s mental space in an empty house.

Styles is known as an incredibly self-aware artist. A few minutes of watching either of his interviews with Zane Lowe prove that this is no puppet pop personality.

Let’s walk through the song . . .

Verse 1

It seems as if his love has grown beyond him–she floats away, while gravity holds Harry to the ground. He aches for her to reach out and bring him too. But there are things between them, and now he’s left saying “I’m the one who will stay.”

Interestingly, the cover of the album is Harry–alone–in an upside down room. This is hardly a picture of someone in a comfortable space. Similarly, the cover art for the single is Styles in a striped jumpsuit on top of a massive white ball. Perhaps he feels trapped in a balancing game.

The visuals for the single are central for continuing the story–he and his love are in an empty room, orbiting each other on a spinning disc. They separate, reunite, chase, and always exist in relation to the other.

His world is absorbed by her–the prechorus mourns, “In this world, it’s just us.” Place these words over exultant chords, and this is a declaration of total love. But over the dusky music, this takes on the character of a lament.

Verse 2

Arguably the most direct, autobiographical lyrics of the record come from the voice of another.

In an album where Harry rarely articulates things about himself with the cutting clarity of other songwriters–like Taylor Swift–there is something powerful about this external therapy session.

Interestingly, in an album about home, this is the only song where the word “home” appears specifically in relation to Harry being at home. While “Little Freak”, “Matilda”, and “Boyfriends” all reference home, they are Harry talking about someone else and their home.

Perhaps this means this song is lyrically most reflective of how Harry feels.

“Pills” are referenced in verse two. In the song’s music video, color is the prominent visual. Styles and his counterpart wear contrasting jumpsuits - Harry’s vibrant red and his partner’s deep blue are strongly reminiscent of the red pill and blue pill in The Matrix.

Especially since the song asks the question, “what sort of pills are you on?” the meta-question feels present - what perspective does Harry subscribe to? In The Matrix the blue pill represents naive acceptance of life–one takes the blue pill to avoid confronting unsettling realities. But this means they can never truly embrace life.

If Harry’s House is in some ways a picture of the artist’s thought life, the music video would suggest that Styles wants to choose a red-pill life. Even if he needs to confront difficulty, he doesn’t want to live in a placebo.

The question is posed for us as well.

Bridge and Chorus

But then a metamorphosis occurs–before the final chorus, Styles skips the mournful prechorus in favor of an up-tempo, low-voiced autobiographical bridge.

Where verse two felt like a therapy session, with the therapist asking questions that Styles wasn’t able to articulate answers for (shown by his continued return to the rut of the “it’s not the same as it was”), the ending of the song feels like a liberation.

He intones a low, fast-talking bridge. Lyrically, you almost sense exasperation. Like he is itching to get off of the couch, out of the mental rut.

In the music video, Styles bursts off of the spinning wheel, skips the prechorus, and inverts the mood of “as it was.” In a stroke of subtle genius, he takes the same phrase, but flips the tone on its head.

Shouting out, he switches from dour falsetto to a full voiced proclamation that things are not the same as they were, but there is hope. The unanswered bells he rang in verse two now peal triumphantly. There isn’t a concrete hope held out, but there is an open door ahead.

“As It Was” and the Gospel

How do we move forward from lost love? When we approach music from the place of faith, we can bring God’s redemptive truth to the things of “real life” (relationships, break-ups, coming to terms with pain). We believe this a perspective we can bring to even secular music!

Jesus and Scripture want us to bring every area of life to him.

So what is good, what is true, what is edifying in this record?

The song presents an incredibly adept picture of what relational loss looks like. God made us for himself–to have our life be framed and filled by a relationship with him. So in a smaller sense, our close relationships with each other are supposed to be gigantic in our life.

Our hearts look like Harry’s when a love is lost–picking up the pieces, still feeling like you exist in relation to the other, living in the reality of things not being the way they feel they should be.

Imagine verse two as a prayer for what the character wants to happen. They want to be called, told that they were not made to live alone on the floor.

The Psalms similarly are full of references to the character feeling alone and forgotten by God (i.e. Psalm 10).

When life is cracked and we feel forgotten, we can most clearly experience Jesus. Sometimes our composure is the biggest wall standing between the decent life we live by ourselves, and the abundant life we were made to live with Christ.

This is a song about getting out of the mental loop of “things are not as they were”. It is a confession. Confession is actually the paradoxical doorway to redemption (1 John 1:9).

You can imagine Jesus with the woman at the well in John 4. She dug herself into her own mental prison and couldn’t break out.

Jesus came to where she was. He confronted her broken relationships and offered her a different, new way.

Harry doesn’t seem to have an articulated hope by the end of the song. The music surges, like the hero jumping over a gap, reaching for the other side.

Jesus is the other side. And he is the hand that catches you when you are falling.

He is the one calling, saying that you aren’t alone, saying that you don’t need to live in an endless cycle of stagnated loss.

He is the one who says, “come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28-30).

If you have lost, Jesus wants to heal you.

If you are lonely, your heart was made to be filled with Christ’s love.

If you are jumping out for a new start, Christ is the sure foundation (Isaiah 33:6). He wants to be the ground beneath your feet.

Life was made to be better than it was – Jesus is making all of reality new, and will one day return to make everything fully and finally good. We would love to talk more with you about this incredible hope!

Companion Tracks for “As It Was”

If you are looking for some tracks to play alongside “As It Was”, here are some of our suggestions!

As It Was Playlist

As you go . . .

Keep the conversation going! Leave your comments below on what you agreed on, what you think we were way off on, or if you want even more!

Looking to keep branching out musically? Check out this article on our favorite Indie artists.

As musicians ourselves, we write these articles because art is a conversation. The more we lean in together, the more the beauty has a chance to multiply.

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