Watermelon Sugar

A Song Named After a Book Nobody Expected

Most people hear "Watermelon Sugar" as a breezy summer jingle: horns, a big chorus, a pop star grinning on a beach. The real origin is much odder. The title comes from In Watermelon Sugar, a short, dreamlike novel the American counterculture writer Richard Brautigan published in 1968. In it, a small commune lives in a place where everything, from the buildings to the bridges, is made out of watermelon sugar. Each day the sun shines a different colour, and that changes the colour of the sugar.

According to Styles and his collaborators, a copy of the book was lying around the studio while they were writing. Somebody picked it up, the phrase stuck, and a song grew out of it. Styles has said in interviews that the first version felt almost too silly to keep. He admitted the band went back and forth on whether it was any good, and that he nearly dropped it from the album. Pop history is full of hits that their own makers doubted. This is one of the clearest examples: the throwaway idea became his first number one single in America.

Background: From Boy Band to Malibu

To see why the song matters, you have to remember where Harry Styles stood in the late 2010s. He grew up in Holmes Chapel, a quiet Cheshire village, and was put into One Direction on The X Factor in 2010. Over five years that group became one of the biggest pop acts on the planet. When One Direction went on an extended hiatus in 2016, Styles had to prove he could be more than a heartthrob in a skinny suit.

His 2017 self-titled debut album answered that with a heavy dose of 1970s soft rock: Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, a bit of the Rolling Stones. The follow-up, Fine Line, came out in December 2019 and was looser, more colourful and more openly joyful. "Watermelon Sugar" was its sunniest corner.

The song was reportedly written in 2017 at Shangri-La, the Malibu studio closely associated with Rick Rubin. The Band once used the building as a clubhouse in the 1970s. Styles wrote it with his regular team: producer Tyler Johnson, guitarist Mitch Rowland and producer Kid Harpoon (Thomas Hull). Rowland is a detail fans love. He was reportedly working in a pizza restaurant before he became Styles's main guitar partner, and his loose, sunny playing gives the track much of its swing.

For British readers there is a nice irony here. A lad from a Cheshire village, who first sang in a local band called White Eskimo in a school battle of the bands, made his breakthrough American number one with a song that drips with Californian sunshine. Yet the song never sounds like an imitation of California. It sounds like a British fan's daydream of it: a holiday postcard written by someone who still finds the whole thing a bit unreal.

The song was first released in November 2019, the week Styles hosted and performed on Saturday Night Live. It then took an unusual route to the top. It did not explode on day one. It climbed slowly, helped by radio, by TikTok, and above all by a world that suddenly needed a summer it could not have.

What the Song Is Really About

Here is the part every listener eventually asks about. Under the fruit-stand imagery, the lyrics describe longing for a lover, and they carry a strong and fairly obvious double meaning. The narrator talks about craving a particular sweet taste. He describes how one person's company feels like the high point of summer, and he admits that being without it leaves him wanting more. Read with an adult ear, the watermelon sugar is a stand-in for physical intimacy. Many listeners concluded early on that the song is about oral sex.

Styles has never been shy about that reading, and he has never fully confirmed it either. Asked on NPR's Tiny Desk what the song was about, he paused and then said it was about "the sweetness of life", which drew laughter from the crowd. In other interviews he has played along with the innuendo with a knowing grin. That mix of mischief and deniability is very much the point. The song lets a teenager sing along in the car while the adults in the front seat raise an eyebrow.

Reading the song only as a dirty joke misses something, though. The lyrics keep returning to sensation: the taste of strawberries on a summer evening, the glow of a beach at dusk, the feeling of something cool and sweet at the end of a hot day. The narrator is not boasting. He sounds a little dazed and a little hungry, almost grateful. The real subject is appetite in the widest sense, the urge to enjoy good things fully and without embarrassment.

That links back to Brautigan. In the novel, watermelon sugar is the material of a gentle, slightly unsettling utopia, a world built entirely from sweetness. Styles borrows the phrase and turns it into an emotional place, the warm moment you keep wanting to go back to. The repeated chorus works like a craving: the same few words, circling, insisting. It is less a story than a mood that you are invited to step into and stay in for three minutes.

The arrangement backs this up. The bright horn lines, the swinging bass and the gang-vocal feel of the chorus all sound like a party on the sand. There is nothing brooding about it. Even the moment where the song strips back before the final chorus feels like a deep breath before diving back into the water.

Cultural Context and Legacy

The official music video arrived in May 2020, in the first locked-down spring of the pandemic. It had been shot that January on a beach in Malibu: Styles in a bright shirt surrounded by a crowd of models, eating fruit, lounging and laughing. When it came out, the world was stuck indoors, and the video opened with a dedication to touching. That one line changed how many people saw the song. It stopped being only a flirtatious summer track and became a small act of nostalgia for physical closeness, for crowds and beaches and other people's hands.

Its timing pushed the song to new heights. In August 2020, roughly nine months after release, "Watermelon Sugar" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was Styles's first chart-topper in the United States, a milestone that had escaped him even in the One Direction years. In the UK it reportedly peaked in the top five and became a fixture of that strange, quiet summer. At the 2021 BRIT Awards it won British Single, and at the Grammys that March it won Best Pop Solo Performance. That was Styles's first Grammy, and he opened the ceremony performing the song in a leather suit and a green feather boa.

That Grammy performance became a cultural moment in its own right. Styles's playful, gender-fluid fashion was already a talking point after his famous gown on the cover of Vogue. Singing his most openly pleasure-seeking song in a feather boa felt like a statement: masculinity could be soft, sensual and fun. "Watermelon Sugar" became a soundtrack for that relaxed new pop identity.

The song also showed how hits travel in the streaming era. Its slow climb owed a great deal to short-form video, where its chorus soundtracked thousands of summer clips, fruit-cutting videos and beach montages. It became a meme without ever turning into a joke. On the Love On Tour stadium shows, the crowd singalong for this song was one of the loudest of the night, often with fans in watermelon outfits and fruit-themed signs.

Why It Still Resonates Today

Years on, "Watermelon Sugar" has outlasted its novelty. Part of the reason is simple craft: the hook is instantly memorable, the groove is warm, and the song is short enough to leave you wanting another play, which suits its theme of craving.

There is also something deeper. The song gives listeners permission to enjoy things. Pop music often treats desire as drama: heartbreak, jealousy, regret. This song treats desire as delight, with no guilt and no tragedy attached. For a generation that has lived through lockdowns, anxiety and endless news cycles, a three-minute reminder that pleasure is allowed still lands.

It also captures a turning point in Harry Styles's career. This is the moment the former boy-band member became a fully formed solo star with his own visual language, his own band and his own sense of humour. When fans hear the opening guitar now, they hear more than a summer hit. They hear an artist relaxing into himself.

Then there is the Brautigan connection, which keeps drawing curious readers back to a strange little 1968 book. Plenty of young listeners have gone looking for the novel because of a pop song, which shows how much ground a single phrase on a studio table can cover.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Fine Line (2019) — Hear "Watermelon Sugar" in the setting it was made for, between the heartbreak of "Falling" and the psychedelic sprawl of "She". The album moves from euphoria to melancholy, and the song works as its bright, sunlit interval. Hearing it in sequence shows how deliberately Styles placed his joy beside his sadness.
• Harry Styles: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert — The stripped-back NPR session shows how the song works with fewer layers, and it includes his famous "sweetness of life" answer. It is a good way to hear the band's chemistry and the warmth in Mitch Rowland's guitar.
• Fleetwood Mac, Rumours (1977) — Styles has often named the band as a key influence, and you can hear their sunny, harmony-rich California rock in the DNA of Fine Line. Listening to it next to "Watermelon Sugar" shows where the song's breezy confidence comes from.

📚 Follow the story

• In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan — The 1968 novel that gave the song its title is short, dreamy and quietly eerie. Reading it shows how far Styles moved the phrase from its source: from a fragile commune of sweetness and violence to a pure summer high.
• Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan — If the first book hooks you, Brautigan's most famous work is a playful, fragmentary portrait of America that hippie readers loved in the 1960s. It helps explain why his phrases still float around popular culture.
• Harry Styles's Rolling Stone and Better Homes & Gardens interviews from the Fine Line era — Around the album's release, Styles gave unusually candid interviews about therapy, heartbreak and making the record. They show the emotional context that surrounds the album's lighter songs.

🌍 Visit the places

• Malibu, California — The song was reportedly written at Shangri-La studio, and the video was filmed on a Malibu beach. Shangri-La is a private working studio, so admire it from a distance, then walk along Zuma Beach at sunset for the full effect.
• Holmes Chapel, Cheshire — Styles's home village draws fans from around the world, especially to the local bakery where he once worked as a teenager. Standing on its quiet streets, you get a sense of how far the boy from Cheshire travelled to reach a Californian number one.
• Big Sur, California — Brautigan was part of the Bay Area and Big Sur literary circles. Driving the coast road gives you the dreamy, sun-and-fog atmosphere that runs through both his writing and the song's mood.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn it on guitar — The song rests on a simple, repeating chord pattern that beginners can pick up in an afternoon. Strum it with a relaxed swing rather than a straight beat, and you will find the summery bounce Rowland gives the recording.
• Make a watermelon agua fresca — Blend fresh watermelon with lime and a little ice, then play the song on a hot afternoon. It is a silly ritual, but it captures the song's real message: slow down and enjoy something sweet.
• Host a Fine Line listening night — Invite friends, dress in bright colours or a feather boa if you are feeling brave, and play the album start to finish. The song works best shared, the way it worked on tour.

🎵 Listen to this song