Someone You Loved

“Someone You Loved” was released on the 8th November 2018 by Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi, as a part of his late 2018 EP “Breach”, and later his debut album “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent”, which was released in May 2019.

Speaking to music publication Genius.com about the track, Lewis Capaldi discussed his inspiration behind the track as well as the public’s reaction to it:

Genius: How did the song come about?

Lewis Capaldi: So the first ever studio session I had for the song was actually in a shed in my back garden. I had started doing it, my album was finished and then I had just started to just kind of thrown down ideas and be like “I wonder if there’s anything else that I could, anything else going on in there”, and thank fuck I did because the album would have bombed without it. So thank God for that! But then I was just mucking about and I sat at the piano for about, I think it was about four hours or something and nothing was coming whatsoever so I hated myself for three hours and 45 mins. But then by the last 15 minutes, I just managed to get the verse, pre-chorus and chorus melody for “Someone You Loved” in a really short spurt. But even then, I’d been at it for four hours and it was three in the morning, and I was like “fuck this I’m going to bed”. So I recorded it and almost forgot about it for a while, and then found it again and tried to write lyrics and nothing was coming. And basically a lot of my album was completely written about an old relationship that I’d had, and by this point two years after, three years actually after it had happened I didn’t really care, not that I didn’t care about it anymore do you know what I mean, but I’d written everything I could want to write about that relationship and how it broke up. So I find just trying to write a song like that because I thought that is what people would want to hear, and I was like fuck it, I just won’t do it. So cut-forward to six months after I wrote the original melodies, I’m in a session with friends of mine called TMS and Romans, and we’re just messing about with this other idea that’s very uncharacteristically for me, upbeat and very happy. And they like “let’s try something else”, because they had that idea moving, they were like “do you want to try another thing.” I am thinking at this point, album two. I’m thinking I’m writing for songs that were going to be on that album. So I show them these melodies, and they were like “cool, let’s work on this, this seems like it’s got legs”. And yeah, it was the same kind of thing of me being, writing about that relationship that had already been, and it was like “this is f**king”, it just wasn’t clicking. And then, I think it was one of them that said, “you know you don’t have to write a song about your relationship that broke up”. Which sounds very simple, but once you’ve been doing it for three years, writing about that same relationship, it’s very hard to get yourself out of that space. So yeah, that for me was a light bulb moment, and one of the things I hadn’t written about was people in my life who had died over the course of me making this album. So people like my grandmother had snuffed it, and a bunch of other people had popped the clogs, if you will. Yeah, even that I was kind of like, “I don’t really want to write a song about death, I think it’s very morbid”. And the way I would do it, what is it, “oh I’m so sad someone in my family died.” But for me it’s one of those things I wanted to write a song about loss, and the feeling of losing someone, whether that be through a relationship or bereavement, or even just as simple as your friends from school who you no longer speak to anymore because you both just grew up and grew apart. So once we started messing around with that idea, it came really quickly. The thing that I found easiest for me to write about it, was to keep it quite broad, so you could apply those different scenarios to it. So if someone who is listening to it had lost someone through being bereaved, they could find something in it, and again the relationship thing and all that. I just didn’t want write about me again necessarily, so directly about me, and my experiences. I wanted to keep it broad for people to find their own thing.

G: Did you know the song would be so big?

LC: No I didn’t think this song would take us as far as it’s taken us. Because it’s weird we were touring for two years before this song, and I had thought, right it’s has already reached a point of … In the UK we were doing rooms of 2000 people, and it was great. And this is beyond anything that I’d ever imagined anyway, and it was like “cool, this is it, this is cool”. And this is a dream come true and this is a dream come true, we’ve smashed it. And then this song just really took on a whole other life and really just kicked things up a gear. But yeah, I never imagined it, even now when people ask me, I cannot stress this enough. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing most of the time. And I’m being serious when I say that. I write songs that I think that I enjoy, that I think “I like this.” Then I see what happens, and every step of the way I have been fucking baffled at any response we’ve had, or all these amazing things. Even doing stuff like this, is fucking wild to me, so I don’t understand. I never thought I’d be in a position where someone was asking me about my lyrics to my songs, you know what I mean? So, it’s like I’ve not got a fucking clue what’s going on. But it’s cool, I like it. It’s a nice thing.

The music video was directed by Phil Beastall, and was released on the 8th February 2019, and features famous British actor Peter Capaldi, who is Lewis Capaldi’s second cousin once removed. The music video takes place in Buxon in the UK, and was made in partnership with the charity “Live Life Give Life” in order to raise awareness about the issue of organ donation. The video tells a story of loss as well as hope, showing a husband (played by Peter Capaldi) who is coping with his wife’s death, as she became the heart donor for a young mother of another family – ultimately saving her life. The two families are brought together and listen to his wife’s heartbeat. The video has almost 70 million views and over 1.1 million likes as of October 2019.

Release Date: 8th November 2018

Songwriter/s: Lewis Capaldi, Samuel Romans, Thomas Barnes, Peter Kelleher & Benjamin Kohn

Producer/s: TMS

Label: Virgin

Music Video Release Date: 8th February 2019

Music Video Director: Phil Beastall

Chart Rankings & Certifications: “Someone You Loved” did exceptionally well worldwide. The track charted in the following countries once it was released: #4 in Australia, #8 in Austria, #2 in Belgium, #90 in Brazil, #2, #13, #2 & #7 in Canada, #1 and #5 in the Czech Republic, #8 in Denmark, #12 in Finland, #20 in France, #18 in Germany, #22 and #17 in Hungary, #1 in Ireland, #7 and #11 in the Netherlands, #4 in New Zeland and Norway, #25 in Poland, #8 in Portugal, #22 in Romania, #1 in Scotland, #4 in Singapore, #8 in Slovakia and Slovenia, #49 in Spain, #7 in Sweden, #3 in Switzerland, #1 on the UK Singles Official Charts Company, #3 on the US Billboard Hot 100, #30 on the US Billboard Adult Alternative Songs, #6 on the US Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, #1 on the US Billboard Adult Top 40, #8 on the US Billboard Dance/Mix Show Airplay, #3 on the US Billboard Mainstream Top 40 and finally, #40 on the US Rolling Stone Top 100 chart. The track received Platinum certification in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Spain and the US; 2x Platinum in Italy and New Zealand, 3x Platinum in the UK and Canada, 4x Platinum in Australia and Gold in France, Poland and Sweden.

The lyrics to “Someone You Loved” can be found here: LINK