In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The last time that adult-contempo balladry took over the pop charts, I was not into it. For a few years there, we seemed to get an endless procession of children of Adele. I’m talking about your Ed Sheerans, your Sam Smiths, your Lewis Capaldis — all these sensitive and sincere balladeers whose sleepy white soulfulness and aw-shucks personas somehow broke out of the UK middlebrow and onto our Hot 100. Adele’s volcanic ballad “Someone Like You” proved that there was an appetite for bare-bones voice-and-piano sentimentality, and then opportunists like Bruno Mars and John Legend rushed in to serve that demand. It all just bored the shit out of me. For a minute, I didn’t think we’d ever escape that stasis.
Cherubic Scottish belter Lewis Capaldi showed up at the end of that stretch, and I probably got madder about him than about any of the others. At least Ed Sheeran hung out with grime MCs sometimes. At least Sam Smith had a few fun dance bangers in their catalog. Lewis Capaldi only made hair-shirt woe-is-me bawlers, and he made Sheeran look like Jim Morrison or some shit. Lewis Capaldi did not come off as a pop star. If anything, he was smaller than life — a second-generation Xerox of Sheeran. He had the round face, the quavery voice, the self-deprecating jokes in the interviews, but the whole package had even less swagger. And this person was going to come along and colonize our pop charts? I’m making my reaction seem more visceral than it really was. I don’t think I thought about Lewis Capaldi all that much, honestly. But when I did, it was with a dull resignation. As in: Great, now we have to deal with another Ed Sheeran.
Well, that was a few years ago. Lewis Capaldi did not became a chart-dominating megalith, at least over here, though he never stopped making his sadder-than-thou ballads. I saw him do enough interviews that I eventually warmed up to all the self-deprecating jokes, which he does better than any of his contemporaries. Capaldi turns out to be more of an Adele than a Sheeran — a down-to-earth human being who seems utterly bemused at his success crafting really boring music. That doesn’t make his music any less boring, but it’s kind of endearing. And anyway, we’ve got a whole new chart takeover of adult-contempo balladry going on now, and this one is way worse than that one. This one is bleak. Compared to this moment, that last wave of balladeers feels like an adrenaline needle to the heart.
Will I ever warm to the songs from this current gloop-attack? Fuck, I hope not. I hope I hate them forever. I hope I maintain the kind of bloody-eyed grudge that I can hand down to future generations — a vast bloodline of tall, attractive, widely beloved geniuses spitting on the ground and cursing Alex Warren’s name. But I did not manage to hold onto my disdain for Lewis Capaldi and his one big (American) hit. Now, I’m like: “You know what’s pretty good? That one where the guy goes, ‘And now the daayyyeee bleeds! Into niiieeeeght-fall! Und yaw naawwwwt theeeeah! Tah help me throoooouugh it aww!'”
“Someone You Loved” is about Lewis Capaldi’s grandmother dying. That’s what he says, anyway. Capaldi made that claim in the most public of ways. At the 2020 Brit Awards, he brought his bottled beer up onstage to accept Song Of The Year from Tom Jones, and he said, “A lot of people think this song is about my ex-girlfriend, who you can now see every night on Love Island. But it’s actually about my grandmother, who sadly passed away a few years ago, and I hope to God that ITV don’t contact her to be on a reality TV dating show… Thanks to my mum and dad for, I don’t know, making love? And yeah, thanks to my grandmother for… dying? Sorry!” See what I mean? Not uncharming! (Google tells me that Capaldi does have an ex-girlfriend, Paige Turley, who was on the UK Love Island, but that’s none of my business.)
To hear Capaldi tell it, then, “Someone You Loved” goes straight into the grand canon of songs that are not actually about romantic love despite the public’s widespread acceptance of them as such. I’m not sure I fully buy that, though. On his “Someone You Loved” chorus, Capaldi brays out that he let his guard down and then somebody pulled the rug, and that is just a psychotic way to think about the act of dying. Capaldi’s grandmother should be like, “Sorry, did I inconvenience you by ceasing to be alive?” Or I guess she’d say the Scottish version of that, which would sound much funnier. Really, though, that means that Capaldi knows how to write and deliver generic sensitivity at the highest level. He can describe his own individual sadness in ways that millions of people can apply to their own lives.
Generally speaking, I prefer the other kind of songwriting, the specific kind. For me, heartbreak hits harder when I know all the granular details, when the writer puts me in the perspective of an entirely different human being. I have to live inside my own skull all the time, and I love music that can pull me out of it through the sheer power of empathy, whether we’re talking about Jarvis Cocker invoking specific Sheffield intersections that I’ll never see or Gucci Mane evoking specific Atlanta intersections that I’ll never see. But I respect the power of the generic, the ability to channel vast emotions through vague gestures. It’s a different kind of skill, but it’s still a skill. “Someone You Loved” is an elite-level display of that particular skill.
When you sing a song like “Someone You Loved,” you really need to lay it all the fucking way out there. You need to portray yourself as a pathetic, fragile, blubbering mess whose entire existence is dependent on another human being’s affection. There’s no glamor in that viewpoint, so maybe a song like that becomes better when the person singing it isn’t glamorous, either. Lewis Marc Capaldi is not glamorous. He’s just some guy. That’s key to his appeal. Capaldi was born in Glasgow, and his family moved out to a Scottish town called Bathgate when he was a kid. His mother was a nurse, and his father sold fish. They’re just some guys, too. (When Capaldi was born, Los Del Rio’s “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)” was the #1 song in America. In the UK, it was Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast At Tiffany’s.”)
Lewis Capaldi was the youngest of the kids in his family, and he was born after his father had a vasectomy, which is sort of inconsiderate of him. He caught the performing bug as a little kid, when he got up in front of strangers and sang some Queen songs on a family vacation. He taught himself guitar and spent his teenage years getting up and singing covers on any stage that would have him. He started recording songs on his iPhone and posting them on SoundCloud, which is how his manager Ryan Walter first found him. Capaldi was 18 then, and he’d never gotten any attention. Walter told Music Business Worldwide, “The bit I enjoy the least about [being a manager] is sitting, trawling through SoundCloud and YouTube for seven hours a day, but that’s what I did. I would open — no joke — about 500 SoundCloud tabs at a time, listening to 10 seconds of each artist to get a read on it.” When Walter found Capaldi, he had two songs on SoundCloud, both with fewer than 20 streams. But Walter was immediately arrested by Capaldi’s voice, and he started to make things happen.
Walter flew out to Scotland to see Capaldi play an open-mic night, and he started talking Capaldi up to labels right away. But he wanted to prove that Capaldi could make an impact even without the machine behind him. In 2017, the 20-year-old Capaldi released his debut single “Bruises” independently. “Bruises” pretty much established the Lewis Capaldi blueprint. He sings about sadness in a big, raw, heartfelt howl. He never tries to hide his thick Scottish accent. Instead, he steers right into it, which helps distinguish what would otherwise be a thoroughly unmemorable post-breakup lament. At the climactic moments, Capaldi’s voice shoots upward — emotional distress, rendered in such a way that it sounds like he banged his shin on a coffee table. Again, that’s a smart way to do it. It sets him apart.
Despite Lewis Capaldi’s distinct voice, I get nothing from “Bruises.” Someone did, though. Lots of people did. Even without label machinery behind the song, “Bruises” racked up millions of Spotify plays. Capaldi signed to Virgin, which re-released the single, and it reached #6 on the UK pop charts. Capaldi dropped an EP, opened for some other UK singer-songwriter types on tour, and got Canadian pop artist Jessie Reyez to appear on his single “Rush.” None of Capaldi’s other early tracks connected the way that “Bruises” did, but he had his foot in the door.
Toward the end of 2018, Capaldi released Breach, his second EP, and it included “Someone You Loved,” a song that Capaldi took six months to write. He kept trying to nail the melody, and it wouldn’t fall into place. He’d abandon it for months at a time, come back to it, and keep banging away at it. In a 2019 NME interview, he repeatedly refers to the process as “bashing my head over and over again.” Honestly, it’s a little comforting to know that Lewis Capaldi is not the kind of songwriter who can come up with a global smash in ten minutes flat. It fits with the whole just-some-guy narrative. Capaldi wasn’t touched by some divine force. He simply kept working.
Eventually, Lewis Capaldi took his the still-unfinished “Someone You Loved” into the studio with a team of pop professionals. The song is produced by TMS, a three-man team of British song-machine veterans who have all been friends since childhood. TMS’ first big credit was “Blank Expression,” a 2006 Specials cover from the great UK pop singer Lily Allen, but most of their early collaborations were with UK rappers like Tinchy Stryder and Wretch 32. Eventually, they graduated to producing for British pop stars like Little Mix and Jessie J, as well as Cher, who isn’t British but who seems to like working within that system. In 2015, they co-wrote G-Eazy and Bebe Rexha’s “My, Myself & I,” a forgettable track that reached #7 on the Hot 100. (It’s a 3.) That was an anomaly, though. Most TMS tracks didn’t really exist in the US.
Another person at the studio session with Lewis Capaldi was Sam Roman, the UK songwriter and producer known professionally as Romans. Romans was pretty new to the pop system, but he’d worked with people like Demi Lovato and Clean Bandit. There were no stars involved with the making of “Someone You Loved,” but the people who co-wrote the song with Capaldi were all solid professionals with decent resumes. They quickly helped Capaldi finish “Someone You Loved” — all four of them have songwriting credits — and they wisely decided to record it with little more than piano under Capaldi’s voice. They tried adding drums and strings to the mix, but they didn’t sound as good, so they took them back out. The piano on “Someone You Loved” comes with such glossy reverb that the song never really sounds minimal, and Capaldi’s delivery is way too over-the-top dramatic for the song to be considered restrained. But Capaldi’s voice is the special thing about “Someone You Loved,” and everything about the track is arranged to highlight that voice.
Lewis Capaldi intentionally wrote “Someone You Loved” so that it would work for someone who’d been through a breakup or mourned the passing of a loved one. It’s an aria of self-pity, a howling into the void that he, the narrator, will never be OK without this other person in his life. He kinda liked the way this other person numbed all the pain and the way this person helped him escape. He was kinda getting used to being someone this person loved. (I kinda like Capaldi’s repeated use of “kinda”; it lends a conversational feeling.) But now Capaldi’s narrator has nobody to hear, know, have, or hold, and he’s not doing very well with it. Most of the meaning isn’t conveyed in the greeting-card words. It’s in the melody, which is graceful and sneakily catchy, and it’s in the vocal, which really sets the song apart.
If you can’t stand the way Lewis Capaldi sings, then I have nothing for you. This song must be the most obnoxious thing ever created. Capaldi’s delivery is raw and raspy and kind of ugly in a good way. Part of the delivery is the Scottish accent, which I think is one of the my favorite accents but which I guess doesn’t work for everyone. As the chorus hits, Capaldi pushes things into the red, almost shouting. You can tell that he grew up with emo and metalcore, the way he uses the urgency of that delivery for theatrical effect. It goes a long way to making a staid piano-ballad sound immediate. Within that roughness, there’s a certain level of hamminess, as if Capaldi is inviting you to attempt the song at karaoke yourself. Go ahead! Try it! You might do as well as this guy! When he gets to wailing out that chorus, I always try to convince myself that I’m too cool for what’s happening, and I always fail. Inevitably, I end up belting along with it. For a melodramatically sad song, it sure is fun to sing.
For the original “Someone You Loved” video, Lewis Capaldi called in a favor. His second cousin happens to be Peter Capaldi, the Scottish character actor who played Doctor Who for a little while and who’s better at saying cusswords on TV than almost anyone else alive. Peter doesn’t say any cusswords in the “Someone You Loved” video, though. (I assume he doesn’t say them in Doctor Who, either, but you’d have to ask someone else.) The “Someone You Loved” clip, which doesn’t feature Lewis Capaldi at all, steers hard into the mourned-loved-one side of the song. Peter Capaldi plays a man whose wife dies, but she donates her heart to a young mother. He gets to hear his wife’s heartbeat again, and the lady’s daughter draws him a picture to say thank you even though it wasn’t his heart. This is all the hackiest, most emotionally manipulative shit that you ever saw in your life, and Peter sells the shit out of it.
“Someone You Loved” went crazy in the UK. The song topped the singles chart over there early in 2019, and it spread through the world and reached #1 in tons of countries. Lewis Capaldi made another video for the song, for the parts of the world where Peter Capaldi’s face wouldn’t necessarily ring any bells. In the US, “Someone You Loved” first reached the Hot 100 in May, and then it steadily grew from there. The thing that apparently put it over the top was an October Dancing With The Stars performance from Queer Eye star Karamo Brown. That’s what my man Chris Molanphy wrote in Slate at the time, anyway. But I am blissfully ignorant of just about anything related to Dancing With The Stars, and I can’t find that performance on YouTube, so I’ll have to take his word for it. In any case, America held out for a while, but “Someone You Loved” finally topped the Hot 100 a year after it was first released.
“Someone You Loved” remains an absolutely huge song. It still one of the most-streamed tracks in the entire history of Spotify, and it’ll probably get its four billionth play sometime in the next month or two. The single went diamond in 2023, but it didn’t lead to some huge pop-star run for Capaldi, at least over here. I think Capaldi is pretty likable, but I just now listened to his debut album Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent for the first time, and hoo baby, that thing is boooo-ring. You probably shouldn’t use a self-deprecating title when the self-deprecating title is accurate. Maybe some of the other songs would grow on me if they became as familiar as “Someone You Loved,” but I doubt it. It’s just all ballads that sound like shittier versions of “Someone You Loved.” The LP didn’t do much business over here, but the album track “Before You Go” slowly meandered up the chart, eventually peaking at #9 in September 2020 and saving Capaldi from one-hit wonder status. (It’s a 5.)
Things went differently in the UK, where Lewis Capaldi is apparently considered a national treasure now. Over there, “Before You Go” became the second of Capaldi’s five #1 hits. Capaldi sold out an arena tour before his debut album was even out. In 2022, he revealed that he’s got Tourette’s syndrome, and he did a nice job serving as a public face for the condition. A year later, he released his sophomore LP Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent. Lead single “Forget Me” only made it to #58 over here, but it went straight to #1 in the UK. Then two more singles from the same album also went to #1.
Ultimately, Americans will probably remember Lewis Capaldi as a James Blunt type — a charming UK balladeer whose grip on our collective imagination proves to be fleeting. But I don’t know, we’re apparently very into blandly devotional ballads these days, so Capaldi might always be a threat to return. At this point, I probably wouldn’t even be sorry to see him pop back up again.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: Tons of people have covered “Someone You Loved,” and very few of them have done anything interesting with the song. So I’m kind of into the fact that Camila Cabello, someone who’s been in this column a couple of times, transformed “Someone You Loved” into a gaudy dance-inflected track when she sang it during a 2019 visit to the BBC Live Lounge. Here’s her version:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the Italian drill artist Shiva enlisting the New York sing-rapper Lil Tjay to give “Someone You Loved” the sample-drill treatment on the 2025 single “Pensando a lei 2”:
(Lil Tjay’s highest-charting single, the 2021 6lack collab “Calling My Phone,” peaked at #3. It’s a 4.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. And now the day bleeds! Into nightfall! And you’re not there! To buy the book at all!
