My interview with Lewis Capaldi... four years later.

In 2018 at sixteen years old, I sat in a dressing room interviewing upcoming self-proclaimed ‘Scottish Beyonce’ Lewis Capaldi ahead of his sold-out show at Leeds O2 Academy. Skip ahead to the present day four years later, Capaldi has become a worldwide superstar smashing records throughout his rise to the top and doesn’t seem to be slowing down only last week claiming yet another UK number one single with his comeback single ‘Forget Me.’

After all this time I thought it was only fitting to share our interview where we discussed plans for 2019, life on the road, and a potential upcoming album ‘Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent’ which later became the biggest-selling album in the UK in five years.

Looking back to your music career starting out, did you expect to have so much success and popularity in such a short time and how does it feel to be where you are?

To be honest no, I mean it feels very nice, it feels great but, no I didn’t ever expect to have as much success or as much popularity as I have. The thing is as well I started gigging when I was 12 so, I kind of felt like, which this sounds weird but by the time I was 20 I didn’t ever feel like it was going to happen just cause I was already gigging for almost 10 years and I was like “aw this is never going to happen, I’ve been doing this for so long” do you know what I mean? But like back then I never released music properly so when I did that for the first time and it took off it was very nice, yeah, I never really expected to get this far even when Bruises was doing well when it first came out I didn’t expect it to you know, I just thought it was kind of going to die down and then go back to normal.

Do you think it was the fact you did so many gigs or social media?

I think Spotify and Apple Music, and yeah social media all helped and yeah the gigs as well but again as I said earlier, I’ve been playing gigs for so fucking long and it didn’t feel like anything was going to change do you know what I mean and when I did I was like “oh cool this is happening now I better get ready to be ‘really famous’ but, yeah.

Other than Bruises, which is the song that got you out there, what song of your own means the most to you and why?

I’ve got a song called Figure It Out it’s kind of about, I mean you would’ve heard it yesterday but, it’s kind of my own anxiety if you will as not even as like social anxiety or anything like, anxiety’s not the word but just my own insecurities about being a singer. I wrote it with a guy called Joe Little who wrote Royals with Lorde, and a guy called Micah Premnath who wrote Back To You by Selena Gomez and obviously they’ve both done loads of other stuff. I thought it was quite interesting cause it’s 3 people who are at very different stages, or who have had very different levels of success so me being the least successful of the three of us and then there’s Micah and there’s Royals which was one of the biggest songs ever so there’s Joe and it’s just interesting that we all had very similar feelings about music and stuff like that so it’s like all about kind of just wanting to do the people around you proud and stuff like that and how it feels when you’re kind of up and down quite a bit in music like, one day like everything’s going fucking amazing and the next it’s like “oh fuck, everything’s terrible” and i just thought it was really interesting that all 3 of us again are at very different kind of stages and what we were doing is just like yeah, we all had the same kind of experiences and that and yeah, i guess that one kind of means the most to me because it’s about that and it’s not about being in love or anything like that which i am not.

CREDITS: Anthony Longstaff

Whilst on the topic of songs, your latest release Grace has quite an interesting music video, talk me through what the ideas were and the inspiration for the whole concept?

So that was, it actually kind of came from the label cause they had been asking. We tried to do a video for Tough and it just didn’t work out with time and me being away and stuff like that so it was a bit of a pain in the arse and I kind of regretted not doing one and so did the label and management and stuff, and I’ve never been a music video guy like I’ve never been. Growing up I would watch live videos of artists performing live stuff like that and listen to music rather than music videos so, for that it was yeah, pretty interesting because they were like “okay, let’s do something” and they were getting loads of these, when you do a video you get lots of briefs in that are just like directors and producers and stuff all writing what they think when they’ve listened to the song they think, “oh this made me think of this video”. So, we got loads of them in and they were good but, they were all like very, obviously because the song is like very serious, and emotional, and whatever and, I was getting a lot of serious and emotional briefs in and I was kind of like “I don’t want to do any of this” cause I’m not very good at that stuff, I’m not a very sincere person as you will know obviously, I’m just not that guy that’s going to sit and be very emotional. So, it was just kind of like “no, I don’t want to do this” and the label was like “well, let’s do something from you, and what do you think?” They were like very encouraging because my tweets and my Instagram and stuff are a bit different to other people who might be singers, they were kind of like ‘let’s just do something like this” so I was like, “okay cool” so I just thought of the most fucking ridiculous thing I could think of, which was me in a strip club stripping and doing a big sexy dance which isn’t in fact, it’s not ridiculous to me as that’s something I’m very good at and I know that.

To the naked eye, it might have seemed a bit strange, and to someone who might not know, I expected them to like shut me down but they were like “fuck it, let’s do it!” So, they got in touch with a director called Louis Bhose who directed the video, and he was fucking incredible for just working with me, and building it up and making it much better and yeah, we just went and done it which, i think it’s helped the song massively to the point where I now understand why like music videos are a thing which is weird to say as I’m a musician whose you know been doing it for so long, guess I’ve been “around the tracks” but, yeah it’s fucking mad for that it’s like fair fucks to the label for letting me do that, and fair fucks to the people involved. That’s the thing as well, I was shitting myself because even know it’s like it’s a music video and it’s all fucking fake or staged even, I still had to do a fucking routine in front of like, a lot of fucking people like extras, there were 30 extra’s and then 20 crew on top of that and then there are cameras everywhere and you’re on a strict time constraint to do it and yeah, I was fucking shitting myself, but it turned out well and I’m happy with it.

Album update? What type of stuff can we expect on there and do you have any ideas for a name?

I don’t have a fucking clue what the name is, I don’t even know what songs are on it, I mean Bruises will be on it I’d imagine, it would be weird if I didn’t have it on it but yeah, Bruises will be on the album at some point well, it will be on the album and maybe some other songs that have been released I’d kind of like to put Grace on the album as well but other than that, I don’t fucking know what’s going to be on it. It’s definitely going to be out next year, it’s not a case of I don’t have songs or anything like that, it's a case of I’ve got a lot of songs. The album will be the next release, the albums coming next year at some point maybe, I don’t know when exactly, maybe past like, the first half of next year who fucking knows?

Is there going to be more singles with it before then?

Yeah yeah, a lot more music coming like, there’s a lot more music coming this year like, a lot more than I think people maybe realize like, there might be more songs coming before the end of this year, than I have put out already do you know what I mean so might be more than 7 songs coming out before the end of the year, I think, I don’t know if I’m 100% yet but yeah.

CREDITS: Official Charts

Listen to the full unedited, extended audio transcript of the interview below.

LINK FOR AUDIO- https://on.soundcloud.com/z8orP