Niall Horan joined Zane Lowe via FaceTime on Apple Music on Wednesday (April 8) to discuss a variety of topics and a number of his famous friends.
He shouted out Taylor Swift in particular, noting that she's "just one of the greatest songwriters of her generation."
"I sometimes will sit here and I'll play some chords and then I'll go, 'What would Taylor do right now?'" he continued. "I actually said it to Taylor. It was her birthday and I sent her an email and I was like, 'There's very few artists around now that you could say that, when you're sitting writing a song, you're like, 'What chord would Taylor choose now? Would she go minor? Would she stay it a bit straighter?'' Taylor Swift is one of those and she deserves everything she gets."
"The most successful of all time have been no beating around the bush with the lyric," Horan added. "It's been Paul Simon, it's been Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift. It's just poetic, it's storytelling, it's straight down the middle stuff and just, yeah, you can literally just see the picture being painted in front of you, which is something to behold and something I'm sometimes jealous of."
Another favorite that the crooner mentioned in the interview is Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," which he described as "arguably the best pop song of the last 20 years. I absolutely think it's genius. Just from the construction of the riff to the verse pre-chorus, the Swedish verse pre-chorus, verse pre-chorus, middle it, breakdown."
Listen to the full interview here, where Horan also discusses sharing similar musical taste with Harry Styles, pulling inspiration from Ed Sheeran and reaching out to Shawn Mendes and Lewis Capaldi amid the quarantine.