Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, the review: finding and understanding yourself through music

Mental health, Covid, the price of success: this is what Lewis Capaldi talks about: How I’m Feeling Now, the new music documentary that stands out from the others, from April 5 on Netflix.

There is a new trend that is gaining ground starting from Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, the Apple TV+ music documentary released a few months ago: it is no longer interested in telling the rise to success of certain artists, especially very young, if not to understand the reasons for the mass phenomenon that goes beyond music (see Taylor Swift). Rather we want to focus on the price that success entails, which is not only made up of parties and fun but above all of anxiety and stress which can also lead to extremely harmful consequences for the person behind the artist. The review of Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, the new doc. musical centered on another music star, available from April 5 on Netflix.

The price of success

“After the incredible success of the first album there was a lot of pressure for the second. This is also why I feel worse than before, instead of invigorated by fame”. It is with these words that Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now begins and this is how we approach Lewis Capaldi, a 26-year-old from Glasgow completely overwhelmed by success. A boy who does not embody any ideal of beauty that contemporary society imposes, who has a powerful and at the same time choked voice, and who has spoken of heartbreaking and heartbreaking feelings in his songs and thanks to this he has achieved worldwide success . A common thread interesting that runs throughout the documentary, between notes and anecdotes, which focuses on the one hand on how Lewis Capaldi’s music is born and what it talks about, but above all on the other on how he dealt with these turbulent years. Someone You Lovedprobably his most famous song, topped the British and American charts for two years (2019-2020) and at that point came the responsibility of repeating the success.

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, the review: when music talks about mental health

In the beginning was the pandemic…

At the same time the pandemic comes to change everything, including perspectives, and forces Capaldi to return to his family’s home in Scotland, as happened to many of us during the various lockdowns. The hypochondriac, stress-induced Scottish boy only feels free when he’s on stage performing because he feels the love coming back to him from the fans, who understand his songs, even though he keeps wondering why they should come see him rather than just listening to him at home. In the documentary we see him together with his family – his parents, affectionate and full of typical Anglo-Saxon humour, and older brothers – and his lifelong friends, with whom he is seen regularly in the pub and some of them have become part of his entourage. Because the most important thing for the artist is to keep his feet on the ground. Always. The docufilm thus focuses on the intimate and familiar side of the singer, for real and not as an official synopsis, showing all his more “uncomfortable” and less glamorous sides, all his nervous tics: the singer-songwriter gets naked (just as he will for the advertising campaign of his second album) and friends, family and collaborators talk behind the scenes of what it is like to live, work and “create” with him. It all starts from the heart and from the urgency to tell something: something broken inside that you try to fix outside. There is so much self-irony and above all self-criticism on the part of Capaldi, that he must learn to come to terms with himself and with his own insecurities and fears.

…and then it was mental health

There is no lack of humor that we have mentioned, such as when at the Brit Awards he thanks his grandmother for being dead and allowing him to write that much loved song. In fact, many thought that Someone You Loved talk about his ex, contestant on the reality show Love Island, but it’s actually about losing a loved one too soon. Something similar happened with Before You Go, which instead recounts the heartbreaking loss of her aunt, her mother’s sister, who committed suicide after years of battling with psychological instability: it was her father who found her at home while the others were out playing in the snow. Here is the focus of the doc. in all respects: attention to the mental health, a topic we seem to want to talk about in the audiovisual sector for a mere awareness campaign but in reality it is about much more. We want to try to understand how today’s society through social networks and being constantly bombarded with information, together with success at such levels, can do more harm than good to the most fragile and suggestible young people. There is a very interesting editing work in the documentary, which often intersperses a few moments of thoughts that overlap confusedly in Lewis Capaldi’s while, with the sequences in which he is preparing to go on stage, or still composing at the keyboard, the other time when he feels even more stressed and his shoulder tic gets worse. Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now it is truly a journey into the mind of the Scottish singer-songwriter to discover himself and his fears, and we spectators with him, to be moved and above all to feel him close as never before; while he will also discover something about his own physical health just like Selena Gomez in her documentary.

Second challenge

At one point Lewis Capaldi – we remember Peter Capaldi’s second cousin, the twelfth Doctor Who which appeared in the video clip of Someone You Loved since it spoke of a family loss – he stops singing on stage at a concert because he can no longer handle the stress and physical tic that comes with it. It is clear to his family that the tour must be stopped and the boy must take some time to recover and see a doctor. Months go by in which he will change a lot, especially his awareness of himself. And he will be back with a second album 3 years after the previous one and with a new single, Forget Mejust as long after the success of Someone You Loved. A track that right from the title speaks of the fear of being forgotten after such a worldwide success, of ending up being a meteor in the musical firmament like so many others before him, and at the same time demonstrating that he still has a lot to say through the music of he. A song that reminds us how strange it was for all of us to return to a semblance of “normality” and “freedom” after three years, in small daily actions as well as in bigger ones. Of wanting to come back At home after being in London and Los Angeles. Because that torment, that black hole, we carry with us for life if we don’t learn to convince ourselves, to understand it, to manage it. We hope to see other musical experiments in the audiovisual genre, because they are much more interesting and current than the self-celebration of some star who doesn’t really want to tell and investigate herself.