The Curious Case of Lewis Capaldi

Recently I watched a documentary on Lewis Capaldi.

Now, he’s not the type of artist that I’m typically drawn to, but you’ve got to be arrogant as hell to ignore someone with that much fame and assume there’s nothing to be taken from it.

The documentary is great.

I live under a rock and literally could not have named one of his songs prior to the documentary, but pop music is so omnipresent in our culture that when I looked him up afterwards there were at least three or four songs that I knew.

For those who don’t know his backstory, Capaldi is a Scottish lad who grew up in working class Glasgow. He largely had no familial musical ties, but was gigging around pubs nonetheless with songs he’d written himself.

He shot to fame when one of his live shows went viral and the world was exposed to his powerful voice. With the help of a relatable personality, he became an international superstar.

The documentary tracks this inspiring rise to the top—which I’m always a sucker for—but it really kicks up a notch when he gets given a deadline to write his sophomore album and the pressure begins to ramp up for the first time.

He develops physical ticks, starts struggling to complete live shows and just to help matters, he’s now surrounded by the most plastic parasitical “industry” types you could imagine, who have nothing to offer him during this struggle but pathological “niceness.”

Anyway, enough spoilers on that, it’s called How I’m Feeling Now, it’s on netflix, it’s good. Go and watch it and come back for the second half of this

—although you can probably appreciate my point without doing that.

So ignore that.

Keep reading.

The mystery of pop.

Now, aside from the very human story this documentary tells, the scenes that stuck with me were the ones in the studio writing room where Capaldi was paired up with LA songwriters attempting to reverse engineer what made his early songs successful and come up with something that might be able to follow that template.

These supposed “experts” looked like a pair of AI programs attempting to make sense of humanity. Sure given that Capaldi was there in the room with them, perhaps its not crazy to assume that he might have been able to offer some insights into his process.

But I think I’ve established my perspective on creativity by this point.

Just because someone wrote something, doesn’t mean they are the arbiter of it. They tapped into something universal, that cannot be boiled down to it’s component parts and more often than not, cannot be explained in plain English.

Now naturally, following the documentary I got a little bit obsessed with Capaldi’s story and made a genuine effort to get into his music—with mixed results.

See, there’s definitely something there. In a similar vein to the artists mentioned in my last post, Lewis Capaldi has a gift for a turn of phrase. Pin pointing the one line that captures a whole feeling. Its’s melancholy, it makes you yearn for things you never lost, but….it doesn’t quite do enough for me.

Listening to his albums, I find myself silently screaming, you’re almost so good, why did you have to take it to that place? Repeat that line? Settle for that rhyme?

On 70% of his songs, there are moments where I find myself thinking, “shit, I really like this,” but they always seem to take a turn at some point, there’s a shift and each of them suddenly sound like every radio track I’ve heard for the last ten years.

My first instinct is to wonder, how do they not recognize this? Of all the great producers out there, how is no one seeing what I’m seeing? The potential that is right there on the table that is being missed. Just a small tweak could make these songs transcend to something genuinely great.

But then I remember, I don’t actually like pop music.

This is just my taste launching all these complaints. Not everyone looks for the things I like in music. I avoid top 40 lists like they’re trying to broadcast Covid directly into my lungs so why would I assume something that’s interesting to my ear would appeal to the masses?

Furthermore, this man is selling out stadiums…

Based on this evidence, perhaps and just perhaps…my opinion isn’t a universal one.

And even if it was, with that much money on the line, why would anyone decide to fuck with that recipe?

This is all valid. Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I’m just the contrarian here, priding myself on being out of the loop on pop music. How original.

But before you write me off there. Consider this.

What if that quality of being “almost there,” is the core ingredient in Lewis Capaldi’s widespread success?

What if the places were I feel my interest dropping are the exact places where a person with different taste picks up their interest?

What if the secret to his sound is this ability to captivate—if not entirely satisfy—the broadest range of people for different reasons, leaving none entirely content, but all partially intrigued.

Maybe that is the secret that those saran-wrapped reptiles were trying to put their finger on.

Never let the songs evolve into the pinnacle for any individual, because to do that is to alienate. To specialize is to limit your broad appeal.

I’m sure this is not a place most artists would want their work to end up, but there might be something to the idea.

In any case I’m doing something very similar to the thing I’ve criticized above. Attempted to reason out the unreasonable. So I’ll leave it there. Watch the documentary, listen to the music, let me know if you agree.