Lewis Capaldi Grows Anxious Under Pressure in ‘How I’m Feeling Now’ Trailer
Lewis Capaldi needs to reconnect with his roots. In the announcement video for his upcoming Netflix documentary How I’m Feeling Now, the Scottish musician cycles through a number of identities, cosplaying as the streaming platform’s greatest hits. One moment he’s vying for the hand of a duke like a Bridgerton character and in the next, he’s a strategic Squid Game contestant. In another, he’s Joe Exotic in Tiger King and the moody Wednesday Addams in Wednesday.
The documentary will hopefully clear up any confusion about who Capaldi really is. The film follows the singer through the motions of creating his sophomore album, Broken by Desire to be Heavenly Sent, set for release on May 19. The record is the follow-up to his 2019 debut Divinely Inspired to a Hellish Extent, the album that spawned his career-altering hits “Someone You Loved” and “Before You Go.” The success he experienced was life-altering, too.
“You can only be the next best thing for, like, a year,” Capaldi says in the first official trailer for the documentary. “Of course there’s pressure.” How I’m Feeling Now finds Capaldi searching for a safe place to land as he emerges from the whirlwind. Ultimately, he retreats back to Scotland, reconnecting with his friends and family as he settles back into a semi-normal routine at his parents’ home in Bathgate, a small town between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Directed by Joe Pearlman, the documentary features several years’ worth of footage and never-before-seen looks into Capaldi’s life and mind, exploring his hopes and fears as the pressure of creating his second album mounts. How I’m Feeling Now also seeks to dig beneath the surface of an artist known just as much for his clownish antics online as he is for his music.
“I feel like I’m in a race against the clock to get my mental health in order,” he explains, detailing the anxiety that has bubbled up from the pressure he feels both internally and externally. “Other people are depending on me to get better. And I know that I can.”
Even when he predicts that he’ll stumble, or fall from the heights he reached in the past, the singer maintains a hopeful outlook. “I’ll probably fuck up,” Capaldi admits. “But we’ll have a good time while we do it.”
“Digging beneath the popular clichés surround the most unlikely of posters reveals a deeply thoughtful and self-reflective young man at a unique crossroads in his life as he carries the weight of trying to eclipse the success of his record-breaking debut album,” a synopsis for the film reads.
“If it’s any consolation to those that don’t like me, most people who have a very successful first album go on to have an absolute shocker of a second one,” Capaldi told Rolling Stone in 2020, settled in at his parent’s home (although threatening to fight them) and making headway on album number two. “I’ve been writing songs about specific nights that I’ve had on tour and people I’ve met during my travels. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of [the new] songs are still about how girls don’t like me — but how maybe an Australian girl doesn’t like me, as opposed to one from Glasgow.”