For Lewis Capaldi, Sad Songs Mean So Much

Lewis Capaldi has been named Songwriter of the Year by Variety, and he’s proud of the honor — but says the overall darkness of 2020 helped make him the man of the hour.

Lewis says “It’s genuinely overwhelming, especially this year, to know that through all this [crap] that has been happening, people are listening to my music. Whether or not they wanted to — maybe someone was listening on the radio and they went, ‘This [stuff] is terrible, turn that off. I’ve soundtracked the worst year of many people’s lives. That’s quite a feeling!”

So how does he write downer songs like “Someone You Loved”? He jokes, “What I do to get, as you say, in that zone, is: Immediately before a song, I will go to the bathroom, look into the mirror and I‘ll pick my nose hairs out or pluck my ear hairs out, while also just filling my own head with little things like, ‘Oh, you’ve got that weird tooth thing that Tom Cruise also has, where your teeth don’t line up. You’ve got one of those tuck-in chins that is not desirable at all.”