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    Diagnosed With Tourette’s, Lewis Capaldi Takes a Break From Touring

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    After performing at Glastonbury Festival over the weekend, Capaldi, the popular Scottish singer-songwriter, said he would stop touring “for the foreseeable future.”The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi announced on Tuesday that he would take a break from touring “for the foreseeable future,” including the remainder of his current world tour, in order to adjust to life with Tourette’s syndrome, with which he was diagnosed last year.During a performance Saturday at Glastonbury Festival in England, Capaldi, 26, lost his voice and had to enlist the help of the enormous, enthusiastic crowd to finish his 2018 hit “Someone You Loved.”We love you Lewis Capaldi ❤️Glastonbury crowds are the best. pic.twitter.com/x6ZnIIgRpP— BBC Radio 1 (@BBCR1) June 24, 2023
    In the three weeks leading up to Glastonbury, he had canceled shows, he said, to take a “moment to rest and recover.”In his statement on Tuesday announcing the break from touring, Capaldi wrote, “The fact that this probably won’t come as a surprise doesn’t make it any easier to write.”“I used to be able to enjoy every second of shows like this and I’d hoped 3 weeks away would sort me out,” he wrote. “But the truth is I’m still learning to adjust to the impact of my Tourette’s and on Saturday it became obvious that I need to spend much more time getting my mental and physical health in order, so I can keep doing everything I love for a long time to come.”Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by sudden jerking movements and uncontrollable tics and vocalizations, and Capaldi could be seen twitching onstage during his performance Saturday.His next show was scheduled for Wednesday in Zurich, followed by performances across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.This spring, he released a Netflix documentary, “How I’m Feeling Now,” about his diagnosis and the management of his illness. He also discussed it during an interview with The New York Times last month, before he released his second studio album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent.”“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s.” More

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      Lewis Capaldi Will Break Your Heart. (But Don’t Take Him Too Seriously.)

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      The joke-cracking Scottish musician’s melodramatic ballad “Someone You Loved” is a blockbuster. Figuring out his next moves became more complicated than he’d anticipated.The first thing you have to know about Lewis Capaldi is that he is kidding. The Scottish musician, who specializes in pop treacle, is foulmouthed the way a young child is — cheekily and cuddly, without a fleck of harm. He is anti-piety, a bloke on a punchline bender. Almost everything he says is accompanied by a wink.One Wednesday afternoon last month, Capaldi jumped out of a chauffeured SUV in Times Square, joined by his manager and a handful of associates. Up on a billboard — which one wasn’t immediately clear — was an ad for a documentary Capaldi had released on Netflix that day, and he was there to film some shocked-and-awed promotional content for social media.The first time the ad rotated in, Capaldi tried a couple of photos pointing up at himself — eh, not so funny. By the third time, after several interruptions from fans surprised to see the global superstar out and about, he’d figured out a mischievous plan.He hit record. “People over here are having orgasms left, right and center,” he shouted into his phone’s camera, while clips from the film played behind him. He gave the phone a serious, shocked look, then added, “Whenever they see my face.”He seemed pleased. The next day, he posted the video to his Instagram story, quickly followed by footage of someone wheat-pasting posters over his own ads. “My 15 minutes of fame are over,” he deadpanned.Those minutes, though — they have been very, very intense. In late 2018, Capaldi released “Someone You Loved,” a startlingly crisp and uncommonly beautiful jolt of nuclear-grade mush. It is lightly schlocky in the 1980s way — ultra-saccharine, hyper-melodramatic — a diminishing resource in the contemporary pop landscape. It has become the fourth most streamed song in Spotify history, with 2.76 billion streams.Just before his Times Square outing, Capaldi, 26, was nursing a Sprite at an outdoor table at the classic New York City dive bar the Ear Inn, musing over the weight of such a massive hit.“Such an anomaly,” he said. “I hate saying this because it makes me feel noxious almost. It’s becoming quite an evergreen song. I still hear it as much as I did when I first put it out.” For those who feel that they have been oppressed by the song, he understands: “You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”He was wearing a ruddy brown vintage Carhartt jacket, a black Nike sweatshirt, dark pants and Vans — simple and unglamorous. Around a dozen times over two hours on a block with almost no foot traffic, he was politely interrupted by fans — at one point, a car screeched over to the curb so the driver could hop out to tell Capaldi he’d seen him perform in Philadelphia the previous night. (“He jumped out his car, just like I told him to,” Capaldi joked.)“It’s fine if that’s my song forever, and I kind of expect that to be” — at this moment, he was interrupted by a young girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and her mother, asking for an autograph.“What name should I put on it?” he asked. “Just your name,” the girl replied, and Capaldi guffawed.Capaldi’s nominally less scarred second album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent,” will be released this month. Not every track on the album is a laser-targeted assault on the emotional stability of the listener, but the best ones are. Whether he’ll be able to unmoor his adoring public to the same degree he did the last go-round remains to be seen.Either way, Capaldi remains sanguine. “I went into releasing ‘Someone You Loved’ going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do that well.’ I’m going into this going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do as well as “Someone You Loved”’ — that’s a very big jump,” he said.“You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”Lyndon French for The New York TimesCapaldi has a scorched cannon of a voice, and it’s best deployed on songs about anguish. To date, his career has lurched forward one vocal bloodletting at a time. His debut single, “Bruises,” in 2017, was viral for that era. His debut album, “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent,” was released in 2019 and featured “Someone You Loved” — which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for a song of the year Grammy — and also “Before You Go,” another howling and deeply moving catalog of despair.While all of this was happening, on the internet and in the media, he was a relentless jester — hilariously self-deprecating on Instagram and, later, TikTok. (“In the U.K. it’s like, This [expletive] guy again,” Capaldi said of his musical success there, whereas in the United States, “There are people here who just know the TikTok.”)Capaldi has had umpteen small moments in which his comedic persona has been as loud as his songs. At the Grammys in 2020, he had an Andy Kaufmanesque face-off on the red carpet with an unsuspecting Ryan Seacrest.“I was throwing a baseball at a brick wall, so there was no recoil,” Capaldi said of the appealingly peculiar interaction, adding that he’d been enjoying the fruits of Grammy weekend partying. “It was like, oh, this is so bizarre. But then in my head I’m like, this is even funnier.”All the while, his health was precarious. Last year, he announced that he’d been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome — for Capaldi, it manifests in physical tics that arrive at random and can be made worse by stress. Sometimes, they happen when he’s onstage — at one recent concert, the crowd finished the songs that he couldn’t. But the tics subside when he’s at ease: When fans came up to him outside the Ear Inn to chat, they all but disappeared.“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s. Which is mental, ’cause then I’m like, Billie Eilish has Tourette’s, and she doesn’t bang on about it like I do.”He continued, “It feels dirty. It feels odd.” Then he added with a laugh, “Whatever sells the records!”Capaldi’s diagnosis and the management of his illness is a major theme of his new documentary, “Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now,” which was originally intended to capture him wrestling with how to navigate a musical answer to one of the biggest songs in recent years, but ended up also documenting a much darker and more worrisome stretch of events.The cameras hover over Capaldi at his most awkward — false starts in the songwriting room (“My insecurity was so sky high”), cold sores on his lips, his manager fretting about whether any of the songs he has recorded are a worthy follow-up to “Someone You Loved,” his parents critiquing his songs. And also the tics that have been a feature of his life since childhood, which he now understands are attributable to his Tourette’s. He talks about going on the medication sertraline, which gives him diarrhea and erectile dysfunction.“There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi said of following up his hit. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe film ends on a lightly triumphant comeback note, but the original ending was more somber. Capaldi said watching it was disorienting: “I was like, ‘Do I die? Is this posthumous?’”The day after Capaldi’s Times Square adventure, he was performing at Radio City Music Hall. Backstage a few hours before the show, in between playing putt-putt and eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, he remarked that he was planning to take omeprazole pills before his upcoming appearance on the spicy wings challenge talk show “Hot Ones,” a booking that fulfilled what he called in a 2018 tweet “ma life long dream.”In this country, he is both very, very popular and, somehow, a bit of a cipher. Onstage at Radio City, he joked about how much smaller the room was than the shows he’d recently played in Europe. “Every minute I’m up here I’m losing money,” he said. “It’s really not worth it.” (The show was still his biggest American concert to date, a quirk of blowing up just before the pandemic.)Near the end of the set he played “Wish You the Best,” a song that is the logical inheritor of “Someone You Loved” — cataclysmically depressing, but somehow triumphant and engineered for universal acclamation. The video is primally gut-wrenching, if you’ll allow for it; on TikTok, Capaldi has been cheerfully reposting fans’ clips of themselves weeping uncontrollably at its ending.But he chose not to release it as the first single from the new album, because he wanted a bit of freedom from the success he’d earned for himself. “I mean, I would love to work with, like, the Thom Yorkes of this world, but unfortunately, I don’t think he’d answer the call,” Capaldi said. Lately he’s been listening to the Mount Eerie album “A Crow Looked at Me,” an anti-pop grief purge that arrives at the same affect as Capaldi’s music with absolutely none of the bombast.“There are ballads on the album for sure, and I think maybe the easy thing to do would’ve been to put them out first,” he said. “It’s not necessarily that I was trying not to be put in a box. I just felt it weird to come back straight in: Here’s a ballad. Again.”In the documentary, you see Capaldi and his manager grappling with the follow-up pressure. In the SUV heading to Times Square, Capaldi needled his manager for having a “major label mind-set.”He understands, though. “There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi explained. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Capaldi closes the album with “How I’m Feeling Now,” an acoustic confession of his insecurities. “It’s like ‘The Elephant Man’ — ‘I am a human being!’” he said, emphasizing that he’s more than just a ballad automaton. “I wanted to suck the air out a little bit.”At Radio City, though, there was little sign that Capaldi was unhappy with his lot. “New York!” he shouted. “It feels so good to be inside of you!” At the merch stand, he was selling country-and-western-style T-shirts that read “America’s Sweetheart Returns: Stealing Hearts in Every State.” The Jonas Brothers joined him onstage for a song, and Capaldi shouted to the crowd about how … aroused he was.Before “Before You Go,” about the death of his aunt by suicide, he solemnly proclaimed, “I want to thank you, Pat, ’cause it made me a lot of money.” And during “Lost on You,” he playfully chided the crowd for singing along too enthusiastically — “The song’s not finished, shut the [expletive] up.”He paused, then gave the crowd a rascally grin: “It sounds much better when I sing it.” Everyone cheered. 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      ‘Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now’ Review: Breakout Crooner in Meta Form

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      The Scottish musician’s infectious presence makes every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi knows the drill: In pop star documentaries, we hear the rough cut of a song and then, inevitably, we watch as the crowd eats up every word of the resulting hit. When he mocks just how commonplace that particular scene is in his own doc, “How I’m Feeling Now,” you sense he gets it — this one will be different. But the director Joe Pearlman sticks to that trajectory, where triumph comes after a tough era for Capaldi, who released his debut in 2019 and then returned home during the pandemic to live with his parents in his hometown in Scotland. That would be more of a knock had the film not already winked at embracing that conventional course as the outcome, or if Capaldi’s infectious presence alone didn’t make every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.In the film, his charmingly crass persona is in contrast to his sensitive ballads, a revealing dichotomy that runs through “How I’m Feeling Now,” which examines the fragmented ways in which people appear to be and the ways they actually are. On Instagram, where he has amassed over six million followers, Capaldi has acted like a jaunty college frat boy; in the film, we see a darker side of him, where his palpable discomfort with anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome are deserving of sympathy. Remarkably, “How I’m Feeling Now” manages to escape most of the promotional trappings of its ilk, striking a more meaningful note than other pop star docs. By the time it reaches its predictable end, I still wanted to grab a beer with Capaldi and celebrate his healing, and I don’t even drink beer.Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Björk Insists on Connection, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blood Orange, Madison Cunningham, Yeat and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Björk, ‘Atopos’Multiple Björks converge in “Atopos,” the first single from her album due Sept. 30, “Fossora”; “atopos” is Greek for “out of place” or “amiss.” There’s the brash, declarative Björk, calling for unity and belting, “Thank you for staying while we learn/To find our resonance where we do connect.” There’s the beat-heavy Björk, who collaborated with Kasimyn — an Indonesian disc jockey who is in the duo Gabber Modus Operandi — on a stark, elemental kick-drum syncopation that turns to fierce battering at the end. There’s the nature-loving Björk, who surrounds herself in the video with close-ups of fungi. And there’s the modern chamber-music Björk, who chooses a family of instruments — on this track, six clarinets from bass on up — and writes gnarled, harmonically ambiguous arrangements for them. The song is equally cerebral and visceral — and, in its own way, jolly. JON PARELESBlood Orange, ‘Jesus Freak Lighter’A skittish electronic beat collides with a low, morose guitar riff on Blood Orange’s “Jesus Freak Lighter” — which is to say it’s a little bit New Order, a little bit Joy Division. Though Dev Hynes remains Blood Orange’s creative nucleus, as usual he’s brought on some new collaborators to orbit him on “Four Songs,” a new EP coming out next week; Ian Isaiah, Eva Tolkin and Erika de Casier will all be featured. “Jesus Freak Lighter,” though, is all Hynes, fitting since it conjures a mood of digital-era solitude: “Got carried away,” he sings with a kind of muffled melancholy, “Living in my head, photo fantasy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPhoenix featuring Ezra Koenig, ‘Tonight’Phoenix harkens back to 2009 on the sleek “Tonight,” not just in the way the group recaptures the sound of the excellent record it released that year, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” but in the cameo appearance from another late-aughts indie-pop luminary, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising,” Thomas Mars quips on the chorus; by the second iteration, Koenig adds some backing vocals to keep him company. ZOLADZDeerhoof, ‘My Lovely Cat’What if the spiky San Francisco art-rock band Deerhoof decided to write a Rolling Stones song? “My Lovely Cat” might be as close as they get, with a rowdy, distorted 4/4 guitar riff, a more-or-less march beat and a slide guitar that veers between teasing the rhythm guitar and shadowing the vocal. Satomi Matsuzaki sings, in Japanese, about bonding with her cat in the internet era: “Let’s monitor on pet-cam!/Shall I start Instagram or TikTok?” Of course Deerhoof skews things, with sudden silences, sneaky shifts of key and meter and a final minute of obsessive repetition. But there’s a Stones swagger lurking underneath. PARELESMadison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’Opposites attract, and perplex, in “Our Rebellion” from “Revealer,” the new album by Madison Cunningham. As she tries to defuse a lovers’ quarrel by recognizing differences — “You speak in numbers/I sing in metaphor” — she insists “I’m not trying to simplify you.” That certainly applies to the music: a perpetual-motion weave of deftly picked guitar lines in a brisk 7/4 meter, stacking up and realigning, jabbing and easing off, sometimes running backward, as the crafty wrangling goes on. PARELESJordana, ‘Is It Worth It Now?’Perky synthesizer arpeggios, a confident guitar line and a broad-shouldered drumbeat promise something cheerful. But “Is It Worth It Now?” is actually a snap-out-of-it pep talk for someone deeply depressed: “Disinterest in the things that made you wanna live is sad enough itself, isn’t it?” She has advice — “Swim right into the center of all your doubt” — but the song ends with a question, not a cure. PARELESThe Waeve, ‘Can I Call You’Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall are former members of two very different, if quintessentially British, bands: Blur and the Pipettes. They recently joined forces to form a new duo, the Waeve, and announced that a debut album will be coming next year. The first single, “Can I Call You,” is full of unexpected and sonically adventurous twists and turns: Just when it seems that the song has settled into its groove as a plaintive, folky piano ballad sung by Dougall, a screaming guitar solo from Coxon propels it into a different, and much antsier, register. “I’m tired of being in love, I’m sick of being in pain,” they chant together in a punky cadence, shouting to be heard over a cacophony that now includes Coxon’s blaring saxophone. “Can’t you just kiss me, then kiss me again?” ZOLADZYeat, ‘Krank’One of several space jams from the new Yeat EP, “Lyfë,” “Krank” is woozy, circular, lewd, lightly dystopian, and 10 percent less inscrutable than the average Yeat song to date. It’s something like growth. JON CARAMANICABryson Tiller, ‘Outside’Bryson Tiller sings with gymnastic verve, never letting the potential power of a lingering note get in the way of a slickly assembled cluster of syllables. Here, he prances and slides atop a beat that borrows heavily from the Ying Yang Twins’ signature salacious hit, “Wait (The Whisper Song).” CARAMANICA​​Lewis Capaldi, ‘Forget Me’The yowling prince Lewis Capaldi has made hay from singing himself hoarse, his hits filled with raw eruptions of schlock so potent they transcend past corn into something far more cooked. Unlike his biggest hits, “Forget Me,” his first new song in about three years, has a slight tempo to it — you aren’t bathing in his pathos quite the same as you once were. The verses amble by amiably, and there’s just the faintest echo of “Man in the Mirror” as the song begins to build. But Capaldi unleashes the full catharsis at the chorus: “I’m not ready/to find out you know how to forget me/I’d rather hear how much you regret me.” The only catch is that the song feels as if it’s rushing him along, urging him not to wallow. And wallowing is where Capaldi thrives. CARAMANICAMarisa Anderson, ‘The Fire This Time’When the 21st-century folk-primitive guitarist Marisa Anderson — no stranger to electric instruments, home recording or multitracking — learned about George Floyd’s death in May 2020, she spent the day recording ‘The Fire This Time’ and quickly put it on Bandcamp for a month as a benefit single. She has re-edited it for her coming album, “Still, Here.” Anderson places steady, mournful fingerpicking behind searching, keening slide-guitar lines and, at the 30-second mark, a police siren that passed by her window as she was recording. It’s a musician working out emotions physically, instinctively, with her fingers on the strings. PARELESMakaya McCraven, ‘The Fours’Jazz, minimalism and a rich sense of unfolding mystery suffuse “The Fours” by Makaya McCraven, the drummer, composer and producer whose next album, “In These Times,” arrives Sept. 23. The track begins with muffled drums and a patient bass vamp, but other instruments keep arriving, slipping into the mix almost surreptitiously and then adding their own layers of counterpoint: cello, viola, piano, harp, saxophone, trumpet, flute, even some flamenco-like handclaps from McCraven. The players collude as sections — strings, horns — or peek out with their own bits of melody; loops mingle with live instruments. The track undulates and thickens, then dissolves before revealing too many secrets. PARELES More