Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now’ on Netflix, Where The “Someone You Loved” Singer Attends To His Mental Health As He Preps A New Album

It’s not coincidental that How I’m Feeling Now, a Netflix documentary about Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi, shares its title with his brand-new single. It’s been four years since Capaldi’s debut album catapulted him to stardom, and this doc is both a look at how that happened and how sudden success can add a whole lot of professional and emotional pressure into the mix. “There’s that tension all of the time,” Capaldi says in How I’m Feeling Now. “You can only be the next being thing for, like, a year.”  

LEWIS CAPALDI: HOW I’M FEELING NOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Lewis Capaldi learned to play guitar and piano as a kid, began writing songs and uploading them to Soundcloud and YouTube, and spent his teenage years being driven by his dad to gigs in “shite pubs” all over his native Scotland. But that timeline wouldn’t be remarkable were it not for what came next, which was his song “Bruises” breaking the Internet in 2017. Millions and millions and many more millions of streams later, Capaldi was signed to Capitol Records, hopped on tours with Sam Smith and Niall Horan, and issued “Someone You Loved,” which charted worldwide. As an interviewer puts it in How I’m Feeling Now, Lewis Capaldi went from clubs to pubs to arenas in a very short time. But his whirlwind success only made his struggles with anxiety more pronounced.    

In How I’m Feeling, Capaldi is funny, garrulous, a giver of loud opinions, and happy to let his natural goofiness and sense of self-awareness about his own celebrity guide his lively social media presence. And as he returns to his parents’ home in the small town of Whitburn, Scotland to work on material for his follow-up to Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, we get a sense of how his personality formed. “It all seems very bizarre,” Carol and Mark Capaldi say of their son “Wee Luigi’s” success. And they nip at him for demanding clean underwear from his mom even as he takes a call at the kitchen island from a Capitol Records marketing exec.

Capaldi’s parents have always served as his critical sounding board. (When Lewis plays Mark part of a new song, his dad declares it to be total shite.) But they’re also his biggest supporters when it comes to their son’s mental health. “You’re twitching again,” his dad observes as Capaldi’s manager and various label people are clamoring to hear the new songs. And the singer says the twitching gets worse whenever he sits down to write. On a work trip to LA, Grammy-winning songwriter Amy Allen and some industry types encourage him to try therapy. Self-deprecating humor about his anxiety and twitching becomes a feature of his media interviews. But as Capaldi works on his sophomore album in fits and starts, it becomes clear that getting right by his health is more important than any professional expectation. And after a four-month break, diagnosis and treatment of his Tourette’s, and the advent of a dietician and life coach, Capaldi is celebrating his first UK #1 and preparing to play live shows for the first time in years.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In A Man Named Scott (Prime Video), Kid Cudi documented his journey toward balancing creativity and professional responsibility with his mental health. And in Driving Home 2 U, Olivia Rodrigo reflected on her own whirlwind trip to the top of the charts, where there are parallels with Lewis Capaldi’s career, since both of them broke through in part by generating mind-blowing Spotify numbers. (Rodrigo and Capaldi have also both worked with producer Dan Nigro, and Capaldi contributed a cover of Rodrigo’s single “Driver’s License” to Spotify.) 

Performance Worth Watching: How I’m Feeling Now keeps its circle pretty small. Beyond his parents, a few old mates, and various music industry personnel, it’s Lews Capaldi himself who we’re meant to get to know here. And to that end, one of the film’s running gags is its subject meta-directing the doc’s story beats and edits. When he’s seen packing for a trip to Los Angeles, Capaldi cues the director to include a follow shot featuring a commercial jetliner. 

Memorable Dialogue: Capaldi is open about how his songwriting process is both completely organic and totally dependent on him to produce in the moment. “I wasn’t a fucking poet. I didn’t have a journal. I still don’t have a journal. I don’t read. It’s not cool not to to read. I wish I did. But I don’t have the attention span.”

Sex and Skin: Another thing Capaldi is open about is the treatment regimen for his Tourette’s diagnosis. “I’m on these fucking pills, Sertraline, they’re not really doing anything except for a can’t get a fucking hard-on to save my life.” (He apologizes to the camera, and presumably to his mom.) “And they gave me the shits for six weeks, so that was great.”

Our Take: It’s easy for a contemporary music documentary to take a fly on the wall perspective of its subject’s hectic day to day, where life becomes a series of green rooms, photo and music video shoots, stolen moments in a cavernous arena hours before a concert, and FaceTimes in private jets with family and celebrity friends. And while How I’m Feeling Now features a little bit of all of that – Lewis Capaldi tells a funny anecdote involving beers with Ed Sheeran and an encouraging email from Elton John – it’s mostly a showcase for a young singer and songwriter who is managing to stay grounded and be true to the outsized personality that helped get him here. He even takes his faltering mental health in stride. As proud as he is of the work he put in to get healthy, Capaldi’s jester nature isn’t above goofing on the therapist who made him do homework. “This is just giving me more anxiety!”

The release of How I’m Feeling Now also coincides with the start of Lewis Capaldi’s largely sold out 44-date world tour, so it seems clear that the fans seen in the doc at music festivals, waving their phones and singing in unison, are plenty pumped for his second album and supporting tour. But he’s open and honest with that fanbase, too. Whenever his imposter syndrome acts up, Capaldi says he can’t fathom why anyone would love his songs enough to sing along. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love that come out to the shows to do it. And after his effort to get his mind right, it’s performing that he returns to as the reason for everything else contained in his newfound stardom. “I only started writing music so I could play for people live.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now is a warts-and-all look at a young singer-songwriter whose success, while earned, comes complete with a raft of professional charges and weighty personal taxes of its own.  

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges