With that voice, Capaldi could be the next Adele
BOSTON – Lewis Capaldi is the ugly-cry balladeer of 2019.
Standing onstage recently at the Royale nightclub in Boston, the singer from Glasgow, Scotland, with the rough-edged voice delivered only a few lines of his chart-topping “Someone You Loved” before nearly every member of the capacity crowd took up the song, hungry for the catharsis to be found in bellowing Capaldi’s words about the emotional cost of a loved one’s departure.
“Now the day bleeds / Into nightfall,” hundreds of them roared, all but drowning out the 23-year-old behind the microphone, “And you’re not here / To get me through it all.”
When he finished the stately, methodically paced tune — virtually inescapable on U.S. pop radio over the past few months — Capaldi took a minute to let the energy settle in the room. He seemed to know that he’d unleashed something powerful — that when you close a show like that, people need to reacclimate to the here and now before you disappear from in front of them.
Over breakfast in Boston that morning, he’d said there’s a section in the middle of his live show in which he does three slow songs right in a row; the third, “Headspace,” has a lyric that pleads, “Sing me a song and send me to sleep.”
“And every night I always look around at that point hoping no one heckles me: ‘You’re doing a good job of it!’ ” mock-hollered the singer. Dressed in a T-shirt and rumpled windbreaker, he ran a hand through his tousled hair and grinned. “I’m like, I need to get Trippie Redd on this just to spice it up.”
“Someone You Loved” spent seven weeks at No. 1 in the U.K. Here, it’s reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100, propelled by countless radio spins and more than 750 million streams on YouTube and Spotify — highly unusual numbers for a strippeddown ballad at a moment when the Top 40 is crowded with busy hip-hop tracks.
“Look at the records around it on Spotify, globally or in the U.S.,” said Capitol Records Group Chairman and CEO Steve Barnett, who traveled to Boston from Los Angeles to present Capaldi with a plaque commemorating the song’s latest sales achievement. “There’s nothing like it.”
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 Nov. 20, has a historical weakness for this type of nakedly sentimental material, particularly when it comes from young Brits 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.
Like many in his generation, Capaldi was discovered by a manager after he posted homemade recordings online. His meal ticket of an instrument, though, sets him apart as much as his attraction to classic arrangements does. As one of his producers, Malay, put it, Capaldi uses his powerful chest voice to reach the cheap seats. In the weathered grain of his singing, 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,” Malay said.