Someone You Loved Chords: How To Play This Lewis Capaldi Classic

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Learn to play Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved Chords & learn the art of transposing!

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In this free lesson you will learn…

• How to play “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi
• How to use a capo
• Why this chord progression is so important to pop music
• How to transpose into different keys

Play These Someone You Loved Chords For Someone You Love!

Someone once said that blues music makes you feel better about feeling bad. 

• That applies equally to all music, don’t you think?
• Sometimes the smartest thing to do to turn around a bad day is to pick up that guitar and learn a sad song.
• No matter what your current frame of mind happens to be, today we’ve got a lovely sad song for you to pour your feelings and fingers into.

Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved is powerful and pretty, while sort of heartbreaking.

Best of all, it’s easy to play no matter how long you’ve been at the guitar.

Currently, this song is still in the top 100, and we’re very excited to bring you some fresh music to add to your repertoire! Let’s explore these Someone You Loved chords!

In this lesson, we’ll cover a bit about the song’s background and creator, Lewis Capaldi.

• We’ll show you how you can play this song as it was recorded, with chords you can use as a beginning or intermediate guitar player.
• We’ll show you how you can strum these Someone You Loved chords to keep the beat and support the song effectively.

Finally, we’ll summarize the structure of the song (the order of the parts) so you can learn to play it without having to look at any paper.

Let’s dive in!

Someone You Loved Chords: The Background

One day, Lewis Capaldi was sitting around in his room recording a song to upload onto his SoundCloud account.

• He was discovered through that SoundCloud account by his manager, and by the time he was 20, he was releasing his first EP, Bloom.
• His song “Bruises” attracted 25 million plays on Spotify. He was then picked up by a record label.

For Capaldi, it’s been something of a rocket ship ride ever since. He just released his first full album, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, in May, 2019, and everyone snapped it up right away.

His popularity owes a lot to Someone You Loved, released in November 2018 on his second EP, Breach.

It all sounds so easy, right? Record a song, throw it up on SoundCloud, and spend the next three years playing festivals worldwide!

• Popular music history is filled with all sorts of stories about how, for example, Elton John wrote “Your Song” in about a half hour after getting the lyrics from Bernie Taupin.
• We know differently however, and so does Capaldi.

He has said that the lyrics to his Someone You Loved chords took him six months to write:

“I think my best songs come from me sitting at the piano, bashing my head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end to get one good melody.”

Take heart, budding songwriters! It seems there’s no correlation between the time it takes to write a song and how good or popular it turns out!

Someone You Loved Chords: A Version For Beginners

Someone You Loved was recorded in the key of C. This is a perfectly lovely key for people who know chords like D minor and F major.

• For a lot of us, though, those chords can take some time to work up, which seems to put quite a few songs out of reach until we can make those chords sound good.
• If you’re not yet comfortable with those chords, we’ll just transpose the Someone You Loved chords into a key that’s a little more beginner-friendly: G major.
• With the key of G major, you’ll be able to play all of the chords and get through the entire song.

To put the song back into the key of C, all you have to do is set your capo on the fifth fret and use the chord shapes from G major. Easy!

In the key of G major, all of the Someone You Loved chords are ones that you can either already play or learn quickly.

There are two chord progressions in this song. Here’s what you’ll need:

G (320003)

D (xx0232)

Em (022000)

C (x32010)

Am (x02210)

You’ll need the first four chords for the verse and chorus. The progression for most of the song goes like this:

G  D Em  C

Practice those chord changes! Spend a few minutes at a time on each change.

Try G to D, back and forth, until your fingers start to remember what to do. From there move on to D and Em, back and forth. You’ll have it down in no time.

The Someone You Loved chords for the bridge go in this order:

Am  Em D  |D Em|

Am  Em D  D

Pro-Tip: See those chords in between the two bars? That’s a common abbreviation for a split measure. If a measure has four beats, then each chord will get two beats.

Someone You Loved Chords: The Original Key

Some songwriters like Capaldi and Elton John do their writing on the piano, blissfully unconcerned about how guitar players like us are going to be able to learn their music. 

Needless to say, Someone You Loved is not designed as a guitar song.

• The key of C is technically a “guitar key,” because the main chords in the key are available to be played as open chords.
• C is slightly more advanced than the keys of A, D, and G, because it contains the F chord, as well as Dm.

If you know the F and Dm chords, or if you’re looking for an opportunity to work on them, playing these Someone You Loved chords in the key of C will get you there.

Here are the chords you’ll need to play this song in the key of C.

C (x32010)

G (320003)

Am (x02210)

F (xx3211)

Dm (xx0231)

One thing we can promise you: if you practice playing C, G, Am, and F in order, sooner or later another song will come out.

These are no ordinary chords – they are a hit-making formula!

This exact chord sequence appears in so many songs of the last 30 years that The Axis Of Awesome made an entire song and video about it.

The progression of Someone You Loved chords is no different!

C  G Am  F

That’s all you’ll need for the majority of the song. The progression in the bridge changes things up, and goes like this:

Dm  Am G  |G Am|

Dm  Am G  G

Play the main progression of Someone You Loved chords and see which other songs pop into your head. The medley practically writes itself!

Someone You Loved Chords: Numbering Chords

How does this whole thing work, anyway? You can put the same four chords together and make countless different songs. 

To understand this, we’re going to dip into the world of chord numbering – it’s a way of identifying chords in terms of their relationship to each other, so the chords can sound the same in different keys.

It’s a little more complicated than this, but for the guitar keys of C, A, G, E, and D, all you need is the musical alphabet and the ability to count to seven.

• The Someone You Loved chords are in the key of C, so C becomes Roman numeral I chord.
• Each subsequent letter in the musical alphabet gets a number: capital for major chords (I, IV, V) and lower case for minor chords (ii, iii, vi).
• Don’t worry about vii right now; you won’t need it for this song.

It gets easier to transpose songs into different keys, once you begin to understand this numbering system.

• In the key of G major, our alternate key for the Someone You Loved chords, G is the I chord.
• D is V, Em is vi, and C is IV.
• The I-V-vi-IV progression is what Axis of Awesome used in the video above to make the monster mashup of songs.

Transposing songs with the this numbering system helps you to figure out which key is easiest for the songs you want to learn.

You can also use the numbering system to deepen your understanding of how chords work together.

The combination of I and IV chords sounds the same no matter what key you’re in.

Listening to a I-IV progression helps you to recognize it in any song!

Someone You Loved Chords: The Rhythm

The fact that Someone You Loved was played on the piano is good news and bad news.

• The bad news is that there’s no built-in strumming pattern for us to copy quickly and get on with it.
• The good news is that the lack of a built-in strumming pattern gives us a lot of freedom as to how we’d like to style this song.

To keep it simple, especially for beginners, there are a few ways you can keep this song moving without making it too aggressive or fast. Try these four-count patterns on for size:

Down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up (straight eighth notes)

Down, down, down, down-up

Down, down-up, down, down-up

Any one of those patterns, or a combination of them, will get you through these Someone You Loved chords simply and effectively.

If you’re ready to make your arrangement of the Someone You Loved chords a little more intricate, you can try to borrow a little rhythm from the piano part of the recording.

• The piano isn’t playing the chords of the song the way we might strum them on the guitar, with the notes all together in one block.
• The chords are arpeggiated, played one or two notes at a time. It’s a beautiful way to get all of the notes of the chord out there without overpowering the song with a bunch of accompanying sound.
• The piano part is simple, and it’s also easy to transfer it onto the guitar.

We don’t have to copy it note for note, but we can get pretty close by making the chord shapes and doing a basic fingerpicking pattern.

Try this one, or make your own. You can use this outside-inside technique for all or part of these Someone You Loved chords.

Having different rhythm options for the Someone You Loved chords gives you a lot of flexibility in developing your arrangement.

• In the recording, the only accompaniment at the beginning is the piano. The strings sneak in and are only fully present in the first chorus.
• That makes the chorus a little bigger, and then the next verse quiets down.
• The song is biggest in the bridge, when the vocals are also loudest. Use this information to decide how you want to shape your arrangement.

A fingerpicking rhythm at the beginning will start this song quietly, and strumming the chorus will make it louder.

Use all the rhythm tricks at your disposal to give your version of the Someone You Loved chords an appealing arc.

Pro-Tip: Once you’ve got the rhythm arrangement you want, you can still change this song into any key that suits your vocal range.

Check out our lesson to learn How to Use a Capo in 3 Easy Steps.

Someone You Loved Chords: The Structure

Learning a song part by part helps you to understand the song’s structure. That’s how the song is organized, how many times each part repeats and in which order.

Once you know all the parts of a song – in this case, a verse, a chorus, and a bridge – all you actually need to remember is the structure of the song, and you’ve got it memorized!

For this song, the structure is as follows:

Intro: C  G Am  F (x1)

Verse: C  G Am  F (x4)

Chorus: C  G Am  F (x2)

Verse

Chorus

Bridge: Dm  Am G  |G D| Dm  Am G G

Chorus

Chorus

Tag: C  G Am  F C

A tag is a common way to end a song. With a tag, you simply repeat the last line of the song once or twice. It helps the song coast to a stop.

Think of it like slowly pumping the brakes on a car to bring it to a steady halt.

If you’d like a complete chart with lyrics and the Someone You Loved chords, you can check out this one.

A Little Theory Goes A Long Way When Learning Songs

Lewis Capaldi might be young, but he’s shown us how to play his Someone You Loved chords in any key we choose. 

He’s also taught us a hundred other songs that use the same chord progression!

A little theory leads to a lot of knowledge! If you’re interested in learning more, one of our favorite theory books is Ed Roseman’s Music Theory for Practical People.

Recommended Resources

If you’ve enjoyed this lesson, we have other places for you to go next! Continue on your path with these lessons:

• Best Music Theory App
• Reading Guitar Music
• Guitar Keys
• Guitar Tips
• Guitar Instructors