Lewis Capaldi to release ‘Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Existent’

LEWIS CAPALDI ‘Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Existent’

Release Date: Friday  May 17

“I keep hearing I’m taking over Calvin Harris in streaming numbers,” says Scotland’s Lewis Capaldi, incredulously. “Cool. But how come how he’s got a big house in LA and I don’t? I still live with my mum! Until my bank account looks like his bank account, it’s not real.” This cheerful statement tells you much about the character of the 22-year-old Glaswegian: wired to the earth, infectiously funny, profoundly Scottish. It also tells you much about his talent: those streaming numbers are real, 2019 seeing Capaldi’s songs on course to overtake superstar DJ Calvin Harris as Scotland’s most-streamed artist (say official numbers from online music service Deezer). “Don’t get me wrong,” adds Capaldi. “I’m so grateful people are connecting to the music, that it’s grown the way it’s grown. But I don’t really understand it. My heart isn’t in streaming data, d’youknowhatImean?”

Lewis Capaldi’s heart is in the writing, singing and playing live of his stunningly emotive songs. His vocal gift hits you where it counts, square in the guts, a gargantuan powerhouse force-of-nature whose melancholy odes to heartache have connected to a global audience like no one since, well, Adele. His timeless piano ballad Someone You Loved is doing for Capaldi what ‘Someone Like You’ did for Adele eight years ago, a top five UK hit in February 2019, top 40 in 9 countries, surpassing 75 million streams across all digital platforms. It’s a contemporary classic, Capaldi’s vocal effortlessly morphing from guttural to celestial. The song was taken to further emotional depths with a beautifully rendered video, which smashed through a million views in a matter of days, and stars actor Peter Capaldi, who Lewis had never met, despite being his dad’s second cousin. All Lewis’ idea, it’s a homage to the death-transcending power of organ donation (in partnership with organ donation charity Live Life Give Life). “I never thought Peter would do it,” says Capaldi. “But the day after asking he was ‘I’m in’. An amazing video, sad but uplifting.”

It was a very different video idea to his previous, for another of his much-adored anthems, Grace (from second EP Breach, September 2018). Video directors had duly approached, with treatments mired in hackneyed clichés. “The song is emotional and the treatments were all ‘he gazed across a field’,” he reflects. “Totally not me. So I went for the most ridiculous thing I could think of. Me pole-dancing.” It’s a blast: Capaldi busting dance moves, alongside topless males, swinging from the pole, one-armed, at 45 degrees. “Oh that was absolutely me,” he chuckles, “of course.”

Lewis Capaldi has forged his position in technology-driven contemporary culture the old-school way: playing acoustic guitar and singing his own songs in a lo-fi pub scene from aged 11 to 18 (alongside the odd cover of Paolo Nutini, the Beatles, Scotland’s indie scamps The View). Finding management aged 19 through bedroom performances uploaded onto YouTube and SoundCloud, he released a track, Bruises, in March 2017 while still unsigned ­– a primal, intimate, rasping howl of raw emotion over plaintive, delicate piano. “There must be something in the water,” he implores, devastatingly. “’Cause everyday it’s getting colder.” Like a blowtorch to kindling, Bruises ignited across the planet, making Capaldi officially the fastest-ever unsigned artist to reach 25 million plays in the platform’s history. Within months he was signed to Virgin Records in the UK, Capitol/Universal in the U.S, releasing debut EP Bloom (including the imperious Bruises) in October 2017.

Ever since, through 2018, enormous numbers and enormous names have affixed themselves to the unassuming Capaldi like butterflies to a wildflower meadow: 90,000 headline show tickets sold, 330 million streaming plays, over 500,000 people performed to in support slots in global arenas with Sam Smith, Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, Bastille and Niall Horan (after the ex-One Directioner personally DM’d him). Then there are all the award nominations (BBC Sound of 2018, Brits Critics Choice Award 2019) and all the awards he’s won (four in Scotland, including Scottish Music Awards Breakthrough Artist of the Year 2018 and MTV Brand New for 2019). Capaldi, though, doesn’t play the numbers game, or the names game. He plays the music game. And, crucially, the unique way of doing things game. His debut album is called, for a start, Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent.

“It was definitely a hard one to sell to the label!” confesses the irrepressible Lewis Capaldi. “But they were ‘cool man, it’s your album, let’s do it’.” Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent is a line taken from a song which didn’t make the album, a nod to the often-fraught creative process of delivering his debut, all the accompanying expectations, all the creeping self-doubt, all the striving for his personal best. “I just want to be as honest as possible,” he explains. “The full line I’d written is ‘Broken by desire to be heavenly sent, divinely uninspired to a hellish extent.’ There were points where I did feel divinely uninspired. It’s about the pursuit of trying to do something good, whether it’s work, relationships or anything else. But that was only small windows. When you push through that, you finally reach something you’re proud of.”

The result is 12 songs mining the rock-face layers of his inner heartbreak, an album of sumptuously-wrought tender ballads, of soul-searing power ballads, his vocal front-of-house to a backdrop (mostly) of brooding, dynamic, melancholy piano. Bruises, Grace and Someone You Loved are all here, alongside 9 others, including the intimate despair of Lost On You, the gorgeous, tormented Fade, the delicate yearning of Hold Me While You Wait, the Hammondy swing of Don’t Get Me Wrong and the soaring string-caressed elegance of The One. He’d set his bar high, obsessed since adolescence with the power of his heroes’ vocals, from Paulo Nutini, Adele and Frank Ocean, to Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker and the Beach Boys, to Kings of Leon, Kendrick Lamar and SIA. “I’ve always been a fan of a big big vocal chorus,” says Capaldi. “And this album was a chance to do that. From 17 I’d written kind of indie-rock but when I wrote Bruises something clicked. It felt like my sound.”

Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, once you’ve stopped smiling at the title, shines a retrospective light through the emotional prism of his biggest romantic relationship to date, through his teenage years, coming to terms with the grown-up minefields of attraction,  passion, insecurity, rejection, pain and letting go. “Because I was over it, I could understand it more, from the benefit of hindsight,” he says. “If you ask an 18-year-old guy how he’s feeling emotionally he’s not gonna tell you and he’s not gonna know! Now, I can explore all the angles.”

Still a fledgling artist, he enlisted collaborators in two rising young producer/co-writers, Edd Holloway and Nick Atkinson, Capaldi a fan of their work with upcoming artists (including Dean Lewis, Gabrielle Aplin and Lewis Watson), with further collaborations with Malay (Frank Ocean, Lorde) and Jamie Hartman (Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, James Bay). It’s been a mind-blowing process. “I never thought I’d be doing music as a full-time job, never ever,” says the innately humble Capaldi. “I never thought I’d have a single in the charts, ever. I was always focused on, let’s see if we can just make an album I really like. It’s mental.”

Lewis Capaldi’s family is Scottish-Italian and therefore “massive” (scores of aunts and uncles, cousins into infinity). Both vocally and culturally, then, he’s similar to one of his heroes, Paulo Nutini (whose staggering Iron Sky he cites as a vocal benchmark). “Being cut from the same cloth never crossed my mind until very recently,” he laughs. “He definitely looks Scottish-Italian. Where I look like a Scottish…ghost.” Like many Scots he has a way with self-deprecation, refers to himself not only as “chubby” but “a melting hippo”. The youngest of four kids (mum a nurse, dad a fishmonger), he first performed in public aged four, on a caravan holiday in France, blasting out versions of Queen’s We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions after finding a free Queen CD in a newspaper. “I could hold a tune,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘I like singing in front of people’. Er, that story’s a bit ‘in’ now the movie’s doing so well!”
He asked for his first guitar aged 9, wrote his first song aged 11 called The Show Must Go On featuring lyrics about the credit crunch and a then-wayward pop star. “It went, ‘The economy is going down the drain and Robbie Williams has gone insane.’ It was bad!”Nonetheless, still aged 11, he began gigging round the Glasgow pub scene. “Everyone was nice to me because I was 11, they thought ‘look at him, dead cute, you go mate’,” he recalls. “Puberty sets in and people go ‘he’s no’ so cute anymore, he’s actually a goofy looking bastard’.”
In the era of artists exploding overnight via YouTube, he uploaded his own bedroom performances onto the site with a cunning plan in mind: “I thought, if it blows up overnight I can leave school! I wanted to do music early so I just could not be in school.” He wasn’t academic, was the Class Clown and if music didn’t work out would become a tradesman (electrician, plumber, heating engineer). Becoming a professional musician was an abstract concept, “I never had a goal, just wanted to play music for a living, somehow”.Then, aged 20, Bruises blew up. “I have absolutely no clue how Bruises happened,” muses Capaldi. “I never stopped to ask, either. I’ll just ride this oot! It was number one in America on Spotify. I remember going to bed, waking up and my phone was going mad. But I always think ‘it’ll all just go away tomorrow’.”

It’s already tomorrow and he’s not going anywhere, Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent one of 2019’s most hugely-anticipated albums. The spirit of the title, too, can be found in Capaldi’s much-loved Twitter feed, an unfiltered playground of irreverence, put-downs (when inevitably slagged off) and youthful high jinks. “I don’t put that much thought into it,” he says. “People come up to me from other labels and say, ‘your social media strategy is amazing’. Are you kidding? What, me taking pictures of myself on the toilet? Ugly pictures of myself in stupid sunglasses? That’s just a man slowly losing his mind on the internet. I think it’s hilarious. In 2019 people just want to like the person whose music they’re listening to. Especially when Twitter enables so much fuckery behaviour. People just wanna think, ‘yeah, they’re alright’.”
Lewis Capaldi is much more than alright, not only an effortlessly likeable personality but a young man with an astonishing gift, his voice a rare, authentic conduit to profound emotional connection. Heartfelt sad songs from a happy-go-lucky spirit. “My favourite songs are when I feel like I’ve been punched in the face, in the best way possible,” he notes. “In everything else I do there’s no sadness. The songs I’ve always liked, lyrically and musically, sadness means more. The aim is to give people the same feeling my favourite singers gave me. That’s the pursuit.” Everything else – all those enormous numbers and names, all those awards and algorithmic data – for him remains an illusion. “You just need to recognise this is not normal,” decides the normal young man with the exceptional talent. “Take everything with a pinch of salt. Take nothing too seriously and realise how stupid everything is. That’s why playing live for me is the best thing about it. The one genuine, tangible thing. That may be a Scottish thing! My parents will never let me forget that all this is not real. As soon as you go back to Glasgow on a night out? That’s reality. Which goes back to my album title.”
Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent is not only, surely, the most self-effacing album title in recorded history, but evidence of a unique new voice, in every way, in culture today: as far away from boastful swagger and the lie of perfection as it’s possible to go. “My only hope for this year,” decides the divinely inspired Lewis Capaldi, “is to put out the album and it doesn’t bomb. Play to as many people as I can. Don’t die. And maybe put out a fitness DVD. That’d be nice.”