Lewis Capaldi is doing pretty fucking well at the moment. I wanted to take a second to quickly examine the idea of can vs should and use him to express what I mean! Here is the video for his brilliant “Someone You Loved”.

So, what we’re looking at is the idea of this video. Can they do it? Sure, they did it! They were able to put that video idea into practice. Should they have done it? No, and here’s why.

The problem stems from the fact that this is one of his first ever videos and hence, what I assume, is one of his first times both acting and lip syncing. IT’s not an easy song to lip sync and express the emotions that he is clearly trying to convey. The acting of it all is pretty bad, and that isn’t helped by the lack of emotion when he’s lip syncing. There’s camera shots where he’s not even bothering to move his lips. If the idea of the video is that he’s singing this aloud, which is what it is, he should always be singing. He can’t stop, it wouldn’t make any sense and it would ruin the structure, which it does. Also, when he’s singing at the edge of his range, which always sounds great, he does LOOK like he is. He’s lip syncing parts of it the way he’s lip synced the rest of the song. If this video was a couple more albums in, when he’d had more practice, it’d be much more powerful.

Off the top of my head, a video that’s comparable in terms of it’s story/idea is Will Young’s Leave Right Now.

Now, I’m not saying that Will’s video is a fucking masterpiece or anything, and I’m only using it because it has a lot of similarities. I think the setup of Lewis’ is better, but the execution of Will’s shows us how it should have been done. So can they do it, sure, should they have done it, no.