Niall Horan has been thinking about the set list for his upcoming Dinner Party tour for months. But with four albums to factor in, the singer-songwriter has recruited his fanbase to help him decide what makes the cut. “Lovers! I’m almost done with the tour set list but it’s gotten so much tougher,” Horan shared on social media. “So I need your help.”
In collaboration with the audience-engagement platform Set, Horan has launched a portal through which fans can vote for up to 20 songs from his discography they want to hear live. Their options include tracks from his latest album, Dinner Party, as well as 2023’s The Show, 2020’s Heartbreak Weather (the tour for which was canceled during the pandemic and never rescheduled), and his 2017 debut, Flicker.
There are 50 songs listed, meaning fans must vote strategically if they want their favorite deep cut making it onto the set list. They also have the option to note which date they will be attending. The vote gives them a taste of what Horan has been struggling with since before Dinner Party was even released.
“You could go on forever. Four albums is fun to work with, though,” Horan told Rolling Stone earlier this year about putting his next set list together. “You could probably see where it’s going based off the last one. You can see which songs are starting to disappear. Some of them might make a reappearance. I kept gaps in the set list and threw songs in and out. It’s funny how songs that you wrote on the first album match up to songs on this album in a weird way and could go next to each other in a set list. I like to take people on a bit of an up and down roller coaster throughout the gig, obviously come out with a bang. If I was a fan, I’d be very excited.”
The Dinner Party tour kicks off on Sept. 22 in Birmingham, England. The show will keep Horan on the road through May 29, 2027, when he’ll wrap up with a final date in Vancouver. “It’s the best part about what we do. It’s also the thing that I’ve done the most of for the last 15 years,” Horan said about touring. “I just get excited now about the prospect of putting on the biggest possible show I can. I’ve already basically made the set list, and we’re six months out from it even starting. I have it all in my head. I know exactly what the stage looks like.”
The fans have been at the heart of it from the beginning. “Giving people value for their money is what I’m trying to do the most,” Horan said. “Because we were at the start of community-based fandoms, it feels stronger than ever, which is a cool thing for the artists on the other end — that you would write songs and people would attach themselves so deeply to it that they do all of these things for you. And they’re doing it for themselves, too, which is as important.”
