An unvarnished confessional with a yearning, singalong melody, Someone You Loved spent seven weeks at No 1 in Britain. In the US, it reached No 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100, propelled by countless radio plays and more than 750 million streams on YouTube and Spotify.
Those are highly unusual numbers for a stripped-down ballad at a moment when the Top 40 is crowded with busy hip-hop tracks by the likes of American rappers Post Malone and Travis Scott.Now Someone You Loved – the key track from Capaldi’s debut album, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent – is in the running for January’s Grammy Awards, with music industry insiders speculating about its chances of being nominated for song and record of the year. Capaldi himself is tipped for a best new artist nod.
The Recording Academy, which will announce nominations on November 20, has a proven historical weakness for this type of nakedly sentimental material, particularly when it comes from young Britons with show-stopping voices – see Ed Sheeran, Adele and Sam Smith, all of whom have won song of the year with tunes that might have been composed decades ago.
The ascent of such an old-fashioned tune feels especially remarkable today, given how quickly pop has been moving of late; 17-year-old Billie Eilish was virtually unknown when Adele cleaned up at the 2017 Grammys, and now she’s even more of an awards front runner than Capaldi is, thanks to songs that pull freely from rap.
Like many in his generation, Capaldi, whose aspiring rock star of an older brother led him to start playing music at school, was discovered by a manager after he posted home-made recordings online.
His meal ticket of an instrument, though, sets him apart as much as his attraction to classic arrangements does.
Where artists like Eilish and Khalid do “this supercool kind of mumbly, vibey thing”, as one of Capaldi’s producers, Malay, put it, Capaldi uses his powerful chest voice to reach the cheap seats. In the weathered grain of his singing – rich with echoes of Otis Redding and Daryl Hall – you can hear a performer capable of turning pain into beauty.“There’s just not that many people out there who can do that right now,” said Malay, who has also worked with Sam Smith and Frank Ocean.
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What’s striking about Someone You Loved – and about the rest of Capaldi’s impressive album, which he made quickly after an early single took off on streaming services – is that his stories often resist the type of emotional grandstanding for which his voice sets you up.
Yes, the feelings are big and often raw. But Capaldi describes break-ups the way they happen in real life – not necessarily “an explosion of trauma”, he said, but the sad, relatable experience of two people slowly drifting apart.
Indeed, Capaldi is on sufficiently good terms with the ex-girlfriend about whom he wrote most of his songs that, as he worked on them, he’d send them to her to see what she thought.
“She’s one of the only people who could tell me if they felt true or not,” said the singer, who now jokes frequently on social media about his hit-or-miss use of Tinder.
Backstage at the Boston show, which Capaldi’s parents had flown in for, he faced some more fact-checking from his mother regarding his usefulness as anything but a musician.
“Couldn’t even do a dish,” she said, to which he shot back, “I f ***ing washed dishes!” At that his dad laughed heartily while his mother winced at the sound of yet another F-bomb. “The swearing’s his fault,” she said, gesturing toward her husband. “He thought it was funny when Lewis was young.”
“Get your eight-year-old to say ‘f*** off’ in front of your whole family,” Mr Capaldi advised in a thick Scottish accent. “It’s funny, you’ll see.”
These days the singer’s father isn’t the only one laughing at the foul-mouthed antics that provide an intriguing counterpoint to Capaldi’s ultra-sincere songs.
On Instagram, he’s become something of a sensation among his nearly 4 million followers with hilarious videos about English singer-songwriter Noel Gallagher’s harsh opinion of his music and about the time he clogged a toilet in a Los Angeles hotel room.
If all the wisecracking seems at odds with his tortured-romantic persona, Capaldi insists it’s no less a product of his real life than his music. The other day, his publicist got a call from a reporter who’d heard that he employed a comedy writer, which blew Capaldi’s mind since he doesn’t consider himself all that funny – definitely no funnier than his family or his old pals from home.
“It’s just where I’m from,” he said. “If I’m sat having dinner with my mum and dad, we’re all taking the p*** out of each other. It’s how we show affection.”
In 2019, he pointed out, “People like to know where they’re getting their meat and their fruit and their coffee.”
It’s the same with pop songs.
“You hear something you like, you want to know where it came from.”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Unlikely balladeer’s sentimental journey
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