Songfacts®:

• This big, emotional piano ballad finds Lewis Capaldi eulogizing his lover. His life would be pointless without her in his life.
• Capaldi co-wrote "Pointless" with Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid and producer Steve Mac. It stems from the opening line of a track his collaborators and Ed Sheeran had started but never completed. "Ed had that lyric, 'I bring her coffee in the morning, she brings me inner peace,'" Capaldi recalled. "And pretty much every other line of that opening was just banging."
  
  Capaldi wrote the rest of the song around the red-haired pop star's words, and the track formed into "Pointless" by the end of the day.
• Capaldi told the BBC a different story. During a writing session, Sheeran came up with the opening lines:
  
  She gives me more than everything
  I'll give her my last name
  
  Capaldi insisted on changing it: "I was like, 'Ed, this is 2022. No one has to take anyone's second name. I'm not singing that!'" he said. "I don't even think that Ed's own wife has got his last name."
  
  So they changed it to:
  
  I bring her coffee in the morning
  She brings me inner peace
• Capaldi was worried about having Sheeran as one of his credited writers. "Every British artist who has a #1 record seems to have Ed on it. That's a testament to how good he is, but I was wary of it," he admitted to the BBC. "My ego was going, 'I don't want people thinking Ed wrote my song.'"
  
  "I actually mentioned that to him and he offered to take up a pseudonym," he added. "But at the end of the day, he did help write it, so there should be no question."
• Capaldi recorded "Pointless" for his second album, Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent. The record continues the successful formula of his debut set, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent. "I don't want to create a new sound for myself, or reinvent myself," he said. "The songs I want to write are emotional songs, about love or loss."
• Hector Dockrill (Sam Fender, Post Malone) directed the cinematic video. It follows the relationship, and unconditional bond, between a mother (played by Niamh Algar) and her son (played by George Jaques). We see them navigating their way through meandering moments of adolescence and adulthood.
• The song became Capaldi's fourth UK #1, following "Someone You Loved" (2019), "Before You Go" (2020) and "Forget Me" (2022).