Bruce Fielder
, aka
Sigala
, is a chart-topping British producer. When he got hold of ”
Lasting Lover
” — a song
Lewis Capaldi
wrote but didn’t record — Sigala turned it into a dance track and recruited
James Arthur
— best known for “Say You Won’t Let Go” — to sing on it. Now, Lewis’ leftover is their hit.
“I found out later that it was something that he had written initially for his album, but it sort of just sat on the pile…it wasn’t right for him lyrically, or there was something about it that he didn’t think fitted on his album,” Sigala tells ABC Audio. “But [he] and his team thought it was worth sort of somebody else using it.”
Sigala says when he got “Lasting Lover,” it was an acoustic ballad that “sat on my computer for a long time.”
“I didn’t really know what to do with it…But then I just set myself the challenge to see if I could turn this ballad into something that was, like, a pop club kind of record and it turned into something really cool,” he continues. “And I’ve been wanting to work with James for a long time…and he fell in love with the track as well. And we made it happen from there.”
“I know from speaking to him, he really didn’t want to let the song go,” James says of Lewis. However, he notes, “I think he heard what Sigala did with it and he thought, well, ‘He’s breathed the type of life into it that maybe he couldn’t have.”
“It is hard to give songs up if you really love them,” Sigala points out. “But then what’s the point of sitting on 100 songs and you can only release 10? You may as well do something with them.”
By Andrea Dresdale
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
