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Hellin Kay

Photo: Courtesy of Shamil Tanna

In 2010, following the release of his sophomore album Sunny Side Up, 23-year-old Paolo Nutini took stock of his life. Since age 16, he'd been writing music, touring, building his own celebrity...and pretty much nothing else. "There was a real sense of self-absorbance," the soulful crooner says. While his record label hounded him for another hit track, preferably one similar to his 2007 breakout single "New Shoes," endless streams of yes-men enabled him and confused him. It just didn't feel right. "I remember looking at pictures of myself, and I was airbrushed within an inch of my sexuality," he adds. "I didn't even recognize who the fuck I was."

For Nutini, this revelation inspired him to take a lengthy break from music. Over the past few years, the shaggy-haired singer traveled extensively, wrote poetry and, for the first time in his life, felt it necessary to learn basic survival skills. "I started to learn some common sense," he says. "Even just sort of day-to-day things. I started to cook a little bit more and try to learn to fix things around the house. If something breaks down, rather than call a guy, there's got to be more I can do."

Not surprisingly, however, it wasn't long before Nutini felt the itch to write music. It's a practice, he said, that still gives him the most poignant insight into himself. "I've always found that I can [express myself] much more honestly and better through my music," Nutini says. "So for me, it's almost like I've been doing it for so long that it's become part of my personality." Cue Caustic Love, Nutini's third studio album, which is out tomorrow. It's perhaps his most soul-baring effort yet.

Beneath the funk-strewn licks of "Scream (Funk My Life Up)" and the boogie groove of the Janelle Monae-featuring "Fashion," Nutini's new album is a lay-it-bare confessional. For the 27-year-old Scotsman, music has long been the preferred vessel for looking inward. "My songwriting… it's almost like a kind of self-therapy," he says. "In the sense that I think that one of the things about my songs is that I quite heavily acknowledge my faults. And the acknowledgment of one another's faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth."

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When he casts his gaze outward, however, Nutini proves even more effective. On the Caustic Love centerpiece "Iron Sky" (complemented by a disturbing, thought-provoking music video directed by Daniel Wolfe), the singer challenges a world marked by gross income and class disparity to check its pulse. "To make [the world] work, to make everything better, it's gonna take the people who hold themselves so highly above everybody else to come back to our level," he offers. "And to the people who feel that they're so far below everybody else to realize they really aren't. There's a place in the middle that we can all meet."

Though, make no mistake: Nutini doesn't believe himself any more enlightened than the next man. In fact, he shudders at the idea that a musician should be so narcissistic to believe he or she can pass judgment on others. "I'm not one to go down that road to say I have some kind of social consciousness," he explains. "I think some people have done that and done that well: Like [John] Lennon and [Bob] Dylan, amongst others. But then you get, like, a Bono, for instance."

"I was really off-kilt before," he says of the pressing desire to now make peace with his outsize career and public persona, and simultaneously focus on finding the simple joys in life. "But I think things are aligning themselves quite well. That's coming to me in various ways: I met a woman a month ago, and she's one of the most amazing women I've ever met. Things are happening on the surface, below the surface, that are helping me be a bit more happy. It's kind of what you have to do. You only have one vessel. You've got to make your peace with it."