Eight years is a long time to disappear in pop terms. In human terms, it’s a blink if you spend most of it arguing with yourself. When Paolo Nutini finally resurfaced with Last Night in the Bittersweet, it didn’t sound like a comeback so much as a man easing back into a room he never quite left. The voice is still huge. The instincts are still sharp. The difference is that Nutini now seems more interested in how — and whether — he wants to be seen at all.
“I’ve always found joy in a lot of different kinds of music,” he said, almost apologetically, explaining why each record tends to shapeshift. “When I write songs… all of that different music will always kind of filter through.” Songs arrive from different eras of his life, some dating back to before his debut, waiting until he feels like he’s earned the right to sing them. One track he mentioned was written in the same early burst that produced his first album, but back then it felt like him singing from the perspective of someone who’d lived more than he had. “I never felt I had a right to sing that song,” he said. “Now, 19 years later… I do.”
That sense of timing — of songs aging alongside their author — runs through Last Night in the Bittersweet. Nutini writes constantly, by his own admission, claiming music occupies “at least 80 percent” of his brain. But releasing it is another matter. Touring, promotion, the public vulnerability of standing still while opinions fly — those are things he’s grown wary of. “That kind of exposure was something I’d grown uncomfortable with,” he said. For a while, he even flirted with the idea of stepping back entirely, writing songs for other artists instead. The meetings sounded promising. The publishers floated big names. And then, inevitably, he pulled the songs back. “All of the ones they deemed to be the best… were the same ones I wanted to keep.”
The pandemic shifted that calculus. Isolation forced a reckoning with the person left behind when distractions disappear. “I had to really come to grips with whoever’s the person I’m living in the body of,” Nutini said. Slowly, the idea of connection — of stepping back into that vulnerable exchange with an audience — stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like a gift again.
One way he protects himself inside the songs is by slipping sideways into stories that aren’t strictly his own. Movies, especially, become masks and mirrors. The album’s “Afterneath” famously samples True Romance, with Patricia Arquette’s voice drifting through the track. Nutini called it “one of the most amazing love stories ever… brutal, but beautiful,” and the permission to use that audio felt like a small miracle. “That’s a big part of it — the way she delivers those words.” Quentin Tarantino even gets a writing credit, which Nutini seemed quietly amused by.
That cinematic thinking spills everywhere. He talked about watching the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune — the glorious, never-made sci-fi epic that almost bent reality — and feeling it drop him into the headspace for “Take Me Take Mine.” “It put me on this endless, empty planet,” he said, imagining just two people alone, trying to get to the other side of something vast. The influence isn’t literal. It’s atmospheric. A door opens, and suddenly he’s elsewhere, writing.
Sometimes it’s as simple as sitting at the piano and drifting into fragments from Delicatessen, that oddball, post-apocalyptic French comedy. “That will be my segue into what I’m going to try and write,” he said. Movies and books aren’t escapes so much as transport systems — quick ways to detach just enough to say something true.
That tension between hiding and revealing crystallizes on “Stranded Words,” with the line Nutini lingered on: “Have I shown you enough of me?” For him, it’s less a performance question than a personal one. “It can be easy to pretend a lot,” he said. “You can start to forget yourself.” Writing from characters, from borrowed worlds, becomes a way to tell the truth without staring straight into the camera.
By the time the album closes with “Writer,” the argument with himself is out in the open. “I promise that I’ll never change — hell, I tell you I will — but I’ll stay the same.” Nutini laughed at how neatly it summed things up. It was the long look in the mirror he’d been avoiding, and the decision to step back out anyway. When we spoke, he was sitting in Colorado, waiting to play a show the next night. “Things are working out,” he said, laughing again.
After eight years, that's nice to hear.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
