“Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi (2019)

One person’s view:  “A bland, drippy piano ballad that would have been boring if not for Lewis Capaldi bellowing every line like he's at the bottom of a well; unfortunately, that just makes it insufferable instead.” – Cosmiagramma @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.32 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2019

Every so often, the world’s eardrums are rattled by a white male singer-songwriter howling his lungs out while lamenting a lost love.  This type of ballad is just begging to be bullied.  You might as well dress it in a Cub Scout uniform, give it a My Little Pony lunchbox, and put it on a school bus with some guys from the football team.  “Someone You Loved” is probably expecting to get its head knocked in by this blog, but I’m going to let it off with just a wedgie.

“Someone You Loved” is one of the most basic, unsophisticated tunes to reach #1 in recent decades.  The instrumentation is mostly just a piano playing the same simple riff over and over again, varying only slightly during the bridge.  Likewise, the lyrics repeat themselves like a local TV newscast that tries to milk a city council meeting, a house fire, and a slight chance of rain for 90 minutes of air time.  Even a terrific top-of-the-crop singer – someone like Ann Wilson or Adele – would struggle to make this track interesting.  To catch the listener’s ears, it needs a performer who is a decent vocalist but who also sounds kind of weird.  Just as James Blunt’s odd bleating was enough to distinguish “You’re Beautiful”, Lewis Capaldi’s imprecise diction rescues “Someone You Loved” from oblivion.

Some have speculated that Capaldi was drunk when he recorded this song, but I have a different theory:  he was Scottish.  Of course, “Scottish” and “drunk” are listed as synonyms in some thesauri.  (It isn’t the Scots’ fault that their whisky tastes so good.)  Regardless of whether and what he may have imbibed, Lewis’s slurring tugs at our emotions:  “And you’re not here / To get me froo it all.”  I actually enjoyed his histrionics enough to listen to the song four times before hitting my lifetime limit.  In other words, I liked “Someone You Loved” less than “All About That Bass” but approximately four times more than “Shape of You”.

Lewis has said that the song is not directed to an ex-girlfriend, as most people assumed, but to his late grandmother.  This raises some uncomfortable questions about the level of intimacy that is suggested by the lyrics.  Maybe it’s best not to open that bottle of Glenfiddich single malt when Grandma Capaldi comes over.

Let’s abruptly change the subject to something more appetizing:  toilets.  Much like Meghan Trainor, Lewis Capaldi is brimming with anecdotes about everybody’s favorite variety of plumbing fixture and its usage.  My favorite is the time a grocery clerk recognized him and permitted him to relieve himself in a staff restroom that is normally off-limits to the public.  Capaldi realized at this moment that he was now a celebrity, and that the best perk of fame was that he could now pee wherever and whenever he wanted.  If you get a front row seat to one of his concerts, you might want to bring an umbrella.

With that, we are now done with the 2010s.  I bet you never thought we would get froo it all.  I’m running out of steam but I still have a few more “bad” #1s to subject you to before this blog calls it quits.