Harry Styles has openly linked the recording of his 2019 album Fine Line to mushrooms, sunshine and Rick Rubin’s Malibu lawn. A leading psychedelic neuroscientist explains what the science actually says about play, creativity and the artist brain on classic psychedelics.
Harry Styles isn’t exactly shy about provocative jokes, pop-star mischief or, lately, his appreciation for ecstasy. During his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, he said as much while promoting his very energetic new pop album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. It’s solid pop, but Styles’ most interesting drug-adjacent mythology still belongs to Fine Line, the album he has openly linked to mushrooms, sunshine, Rick Rubin’s lawn and a little blood.
Mushrooms, to be exact, which he enjoyed in fine quantities at producer Rick Rubin‘s Malibu Shangri-La studios. “Did a lot of mushrooms in here,” Styles told Rolling Stone. “We’d do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine. We’d just turn the speakers into the yard.”
“We were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place.”
Harry Styles, on recording Fine Line at Shangri-La Studios
Plenty of sweat and tears go into Styles’ work (so much heartbreak for one beloved young fella) but blood too went into the mix of his hits.
Sunshine, McCartney records and a little blood
Whether shrooms shaped the fun warmth of Fine Line is impossible to prove. What Styles has said is that they were part of the atmosphere at Shangri-La, along with sunlight, McCartney records and, apparently, a little blood. In Rubin’s notoriously tranquil recording space, Styles produced “Golden,” “Adore You,” “She” and a song once impossible to miss while baked and strolling 7-11, “Watermelon Sugar.” The sound, production and the vibes, man, make the mushroom stories easy to believe. Styles’ warmest, most fun-loving album is perfect listening for a breezy summer day, which is not the same thing as proof, but is definitely part of the fun.
The Fine Line sessions
Where
Shangri-La Studios, Malibu (founded by Bob Dylan, owned by Rick Rubin)
Tracks born there
“Golden,” “Adore You,” “She,” “Watermelon Sugar”
What the science says about play
Of course, psychedelics and music have had a long relationship, perhaps originally and most famously with The Beach Boys and The Beatles. “Harry Styles and psychedelics, I wouldn’t have necessarily put that together,” said Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. “He’s kind of gone up a few points in terms of cool points hearing about this.” Carhart-Harris is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Founding Director of the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division. His debut book, How Psychedelics Work: Illuminating the Hidden Mind, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Carhart-Harris broke down to High Times a few of the doors psychedelics can open for artists generally. “Under the influence of psychedelics, the brain shows parallels with the brain earlier on in life,” he explained. “As we age, we engage more of our prefrontal cortex. In relation to that, we become more top-down in our thinking, whereas psychedelics are reversing that. It is a bit like an age regression. Where do you go back to? Well, one of the things you go back to is play, and play is spontaneous. It’s fun and inherently creative. That’s its nature, it’s tied to joy and strong and labile emotion.”
“The main thing is that psychedelics kick you out of ruts. The immersion as well, getting out of the cognitive, out of the thinking mind, analytical judging mind and into the stream of creativity, the creative flow. There’s something quite beautiful about that.”
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, UCSF
Labile emotion is Fine Line in a nutshell. Full of emotional highs and lows, all presented with a tangible quality that’s, admittedly, slightly missing from Styles’ new album. Notes and lyrics have a crackle to them, not so much a digital sheen. It also wasn’t much of a surprise that reading author Haruki Murakami played an influence in the mushroom trips. His dramatic and poetic trippiness is catnip for sensitive artists.
Lyrics do glow in Fine Line. Songs of daydreaming, the power of flowers and the moon. These are songs of someone looking around and feeling everything at 200. “The main thing is that psychedelics kick you out of ruts,” Carhart-Harris added. “Ordinarily, you might go into the music studio and be that same old riff, that same old, same old, and lock straight back into it. But it’s a classic one where psychedelics open up more possibilities. The immersion as well, getting out of the cognitive, out of the thinking mind, analytical judging mind and into the stream of creativity, the creative flow. There’s something quite beautiful about that.”
In other words, flow state. In the case of Fine Line, Styles had the mushrooms, the Malibu sunlight, the Paul McCartney records and, yes, the benefit of an exorbitant recording studio. Whatever did the trick, the dapper pop man found something loose, bright and unusually alive. With Fine Line, Styles hit a high in more ways than one.
