Like Ed Sheeran, Adele and Sam Smith, Lewis Capaldi has a show-stopping voice: a look at his meteoric rise
- The Scottish singer’s chart-topping, old-fashioned hit Someone You Loved is bucking the Top 40 trend for hip-hop beats by rappers like Post Malone
- The single is in the running for January’s Grammy Awards, with industry insiders talking up its chances of being song and record of the year
Lewis Capaldi is the ugly-cry balladeer of 2019.
During a recent live show in the US city of Boston, the singer with the rough-edged voice from Glasgow in Scotland delivered only a few lines of his chart-topping Someone You Loved before nearly every member of the crowd took up the song.
When he finished the stately, methodically paced tune – virtually inescapable on US pop radio over the past few months – Capaldi took a minute to let the energy settle in the room. The singer, who will be bringing his live show to Hong Kong’s MacPherson Stadium on January 12, seemed to know that he’d unleashed something powerful.
An unvarnished confessional with a yearning, singalong melody, Someone You Loved spent seven weeks at No 1 in Britain. In the US, it reached No 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100, propelled by countless radio plays and more than 750 million streams on YouTube and Spotify.