Song Lyric Sunday – Someone You Loved

The Brit Awards are the theme for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday. We are to choose a Song of the Year. I have picked Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi from the 2020 Awards. It is a lovely song with lyrics that tug on the heartstrings of anyone who remembers the pain of having loved and lost. Capaldi’s voice is unique and he draws you into the song making you listen to those lyrics.

The Song

This piano-centered ballad finds Capaldi mourning a lost lover who walked out on him. He addresses his ex telling her he misses the feeling of being loved. 

Now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you’re not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

Capaldi told The Courier this is the saddest song that he’d ever written. He explained that it’s about “that feeling when you start getting to know someone and things have been going really well but you’ve been reluctant to be as open as you like with stuff in the past and all that.”

Capaldi added that after a time you’re comfortable in the relationship and it’sgoing great, but as “soon as you let them in something goes wrong” and they leave you, just as you were getting used to being loved.

The song’s music video was directed by Phil Beastall. The clip stars the singer’s second cousin, Peter Capaldi, who we see donating his late wife’s heart to a young mother. The visual was made in partnership with organ donation charity Live Life Give Life.

“Someone You Loved” finds Lewis Capaldi reflecting on both the end of a relationship and family bereavements, in particular his grandmother. The Scottish singer explained to NME that he chose to write open-ended lyrics for this song as he was “bored of talking about myself.” Over the course of making his Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent album, a couple of family members passed away and he “wanted to write a song that could be applicable to both my relationship ending, which I was writing a lot about, and then this bereavement thing.”

It took Capaldi six months to write the song. It started with a recording session he was doing when the chords he was working on inspired another melody. He recorded it onto his phone.

A few months later, Capaldi was sitting at the piano in his back garden shed trying to develop the song idea. He recalled to NME that he was “bashing my head over and over again to get a chorus and a pre-chorus melody.” He eventually came up with a rough demo.

Some time on Capaldi was in the studio with producers TMS, and after they’d completed a couple of songs he told them “I’ve got this other thing.” The production team let him “do a stream-of-consciousness sort of thing” and within a couple of hours they’d completed “Someone You Loved.”

The song featured in the 12th episode of the first season of The CW’s Legacies, which first aired February 28, 2019.

The song was a huge hit, topping the UK Singles Chart for seven weeks. Asked by NME why it had been so successful, Capaldi said that part of the reason may be that it’s a simple piano ballad.

“There’s a lot of music out there that has a lot of production on it,” he explained. “There’s something to be said for just a song with just piano and vocals. I’m not saying this is the song to do it, but maybe it cuts through a bit more.”

He continued: “I don’t think there’s any explanation. I think you’ve got to count yourself lucky and ride the wave a bit, which is what I’m doing.”

Lewis Capaldi came close to ditching “Someone You Loved” because he didn’t think it was strong enough. The singer told the Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column that he wrote the melodies for it before deciding it wasn’t any good, so he stopped working on the tune.

He added: “I kept revisiting it over the months and still thinking, ‘this isn’t good enough still,’ and I was almost trashing the song every single time.”

Capaldi was especially concerned that it was too similar lyrically to his other tracks. “I had written the breakup song so many times that I was like, ‘I can’t write about this again,'” he told Billboard.

The breakthrough came when TMS encouraged Capaldi to write about loss more generally. He finally completed “Someone You Loved” about three weeks before the release of his November 2018 EP, Breach, enabling him to include it on the tracklist.

Lewis Capaldi released a second music video following the one starring his distant cousin, actor Peter Capaldi. This second video explores the song from a romantic heartbreak angle. The Ozzie Pullin-directed visual finds Capaldi wandering down a London street, fresh from a breakup. Every time he turns to go after his ex, people try to dissuade him and keep him moving forward.

“I wanted to show another side to the song,” Lewis said in a statement. “For me, the video is about the people we surround ourselves with that have the strength when we don’t, and help us continue to make the right decisions in moments of fear or hardship.”

He added, “In the moment, we often choose to ignore friends and family, thinking our judgment is better, but of course in hindsight, when you’re in that headspace, it’s almost impossible to make the right decisions.”

The song climbed to the summit of the Hot 100 after 24 weeks on the chart. Capaldi was the first Scot to score a solo US #1 since Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train (Nine To Five)” in 1981. The other Scots to top the US singles chart between 1981 and 2019 did so as either a featured artist or part of a group. They include Annie Lennox (as part of Eurythmics) and Calvin Harris (with Rihanna).

This won Song of the Year at the 2020 BRIT Awards. Capaldi also took home the gong for Best New Artist.

This spent 31 weeks in the Top 10 of the UK singles chart, the most ever for a song by a British act.

Songfacts

The Lyrics

I'm going under and this time I fear there's no one to save me
This all or nothing really got a way of driving me crazy
I need somebody to heal
Somebody to know
Somebody to have
Somebody to hold
It's easy to say
But it's never the same
I guess I kinda liked the way you numbed all the pain

Now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you're not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

I'm going under and this time I fear there's no one to turn to
This all or nothing way of loving got me sleeping without you
Now, I need somebody to know
Somebody to heal
Somebody to have
Just to know how it feels
It's easy to say but it's never the same
I guess I kinda liked the way you helped me escape

Now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you're not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

And I tend to close my eyes when it hurts sometimes
I fall into your arms
I'll be safe in your sound 'til I come back around

For now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you're not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

But now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you're not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

Writer/s: Benjamin Kohn, Lewis Capaldi, Peter Kelleher, Samuel Roman, Tom Barnes
Publisher: BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, TuneCore Inc.
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind