There is a tense that pop loves above all others, and it is the present. “Right Now” announces it in the title, a plain two-word demand for attention that sounds like a hand tapping you on the shoulder. The song comes from Midnight Memories, the 2013 album on which One Direction turned their gaze toward the strange, tiring, exhilarating business of living on tour. It is a track about being somewhere wonderful and wishing someone else could be there too. That small contradiction, joy with a hole in it, is what gives the song its quiet ache. It never became a headline single, but it may be one of the most honest things the group ever recorded.
The Tense Pop Loves Best
Pop is a music of now. A novel can wander through the centuries and a symphony can take forty minutes to make its point, but a pop song has about three minutes to make you feel something immediately. That is why so many of the greatest ones are built around the present tense, the moment of dancing, kissing, driving, leaving. Van Halen understood the power of the word when they called a song “Right Now” in 1991 and set it to a piano, a pile of guitars and a stirring call to stop waiting. One Direction came at the same idea from a different angle. They were not telling anyone to act. They were describing what it feels like when the present moment arrives so thick and fast that you cannot quite believe it.
It helps to think about where the group were in 2013. They had gone, in about three years, from nervous hopefuls on a television talent show to the biggest pop act on the planet, and their lives had become a blur of airports, hotel corridors, arenas and stadiums. Time behaves strangely under those conditions. Days lose their names, cities lose their outlines, and the only reliable thing is the show that begins at eight o’clock. In that context, the word now takes on a special weight. It is the only part of the day that feels solid. Everything before it is a memory and everything after it is a schedule. That is not a complaint, exactly, but it is not far from one.
Life on the Road
According to the song’s credits, “Right Now” was written by Harry Styles, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson together with Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic frontman whose hit-making hand has touched everything from Beyoncé’s “Halo” to a long list of radio staples. Tedder is credited with the music, and you can hear his taste for the big, widescreen pop gesture. The lyric, meanwhile, comes straight from the experience of the road. This was the band writing about their own lives, a habit that grew stronger on Midnight Memories, which was in large part an album about the nights they spent on tour. The record is full of hotel rooms, late-night streets and the odd, dizzy sense of living inside a travelling circus.
The opening scene of the song is a city at nightfall. The lights go down, the evening seems to call, and voices drift up from the street. There is a sense that home is a very long way off and not about to come closer. Yet the narrator is not alone, and that is one of the song’s subtler ideas. In a band of five, solitude is practically impossible. You travel together, eat together, sleep a few feet from each other. And still loneliness finds a way in, because the person you would like to see is not one of the other four people on the bus. It is a lovely paradox, and the lyric states it without fuss.
Wish You Were Here
The heart of the song is a simple double statement. Right now, the narrator loves the feeling of where he is, and right now he wishes somebody else were there to share it. Everything around him is new, the thrill is real, and yet the thrill is incomplete. Pop has circled this emotion for decades. Pink Floyd gave it a famous title in “Wish You Were Here”, and every holiday postcard in history has carried the same message in smaller handwriting. What makes One Direction’s version fresh is the scale of the setting. The postcard is being written from the middle of a worldwide phenomenon, and still the sentiment is the oldest and humblest one there is. Success, it turns out, does not abolish homesickness.
There is also a sense of wonder in the lyric that is easy to miss. The narrator keeps coming back to the idea that everything is new. For a young man whose horizons had been small only a few years earlier, that is simply a fact. Every city, every crowd and every skyline is a first. The song captures the odd mixture of giddiness and vertigo that comes with seeing the world too quickly. He admits he cannot fight the feeling, and he says it returns every night, as if the thrill and the longing had become part of the daily routine. It is a very modern kind of romance, conducted at a distance and kept alive by imagination.
A Moment That Cannot Be Kept
The song also lets the narrator say that he could do this forever. It is the oldest wish in pop, and it carries a quiet admission inside it. Nobody says they could do something forever unless they suspect they cannot. The very phrase right now is a clue, because it implies a later in which things will be different. Hearing the song years afterwards, with the knowledge that the group would begin an indefinite break in 2016, gives the wish a different colour. What felt like a boast in 2013 now feels like a gentle form of prayer. The band were living in the moment, and the moment, as it always does, passed.
So what does “Right Now” mean? It is a love song written from a moving vehicle, a postcard from the middle of the biggest adventure of a young man’s life. It says that the present is dazzling, that dazzle is not enough without the right person nearby, and that the best moments are the ones you cannot hold. There is no big twist and no clever trick. The song simply stands in the moment and reports honestly on what it sees, which is a rarer skill than it sounds. In a catalogue crowded with bigger singles, it offers something smaller and truer, the feeling of a person lying awake in a strange city and thinking about home. It is modest, and it is moving.
Final Thoughts
“Right Now” does not shout for attention, and that may be why it rewards the people who find it. It is a snapshot of a group in the thick of their fame, wide-eyed and tired and missing somebody, singing about the one thing that every traveller eventually learns. The place is never as good without the person. Beneath the stadium shine there is something quietly human, a reminder that even the most famous young men in the world had moments of simple longing. Listen to it on a late train or in a quiet room, and it still says exactly what it did in 2013. Pay attention. This is happening right now.