SAM SMITH
I’m not the most eloquent person. I didn’t get the best grades in school. I mean, I’m just good at singing.
CALIFORNIA: This is a mostly complete inventory of the times sweet, sad Sam Smith cried over the course of two hours on a couch at the Château Marmont Hotel on a recent Friday.
He cried when he talked about the house he grew up in; when he reminisced about a crush who turned on him; when he talked about his first voice teacher. He cried when he talked about writing Pray, a song from his new album, The Thrill of It All.
He cried when he talked about the children he met in Mosul, Iraq, on a humanitarian mission, and then he looked down at the sparrow tattoo he got on his arm when he returned home, with “Be good, be kind” written in Arabic beneath it, and he cried.
He cried talking about how much he cried when he watched the movie Inside Out. And he cried when he talked about love. When he talked about love, he leaned back on the couch with his limbs splayed and looked upward as if he died momentarily just considering a concept so big.
Yes, the floodgates really opened once Smith began to talk about love – big, delicious tears that coated and magnified his sad, glorious blue eyeballs but never leaked out on to his cheeks.
He’s fine with his crying, what choice does he have? His father used to cry at a sunset or after an argument. He encouraged his son to be emotionally expressive. It worked. The superhighway that runs between Smith’s amygdala and his tear ducts is deep and well worn.
He’s been in love, he said, but it was unrequited. He was crying.
It’s been more than three years since his first studio album, In the Lonely Hour, flung the planet’s broken-hearted face-down upon their beds anew with its wet-pillowed, dark-soul despondence.
It’s been that long since his lovely, million-faceted voice called out to the bereft, the forsaken and the rejected and announced itself as this generation’s avatar of romantic despair. It’s been almost that long since he became a real, live pop star: a four-time Grammy winner with five Top 10 singles, an Oscar winner all with one measly LP, less than an hour’s worth of music.
When Smith tells me this, his eyes dampen – it’s been just about that long since it seemed like there was anything he could do right. Lord knows he’d been trying.
He wanted to be open with the world; he wanted to share his truest self. He wanted to be known. His only goal with his music is to get closer and closer to who he really is, even though that’s sometimes hard when you’re in your young twenties. He’s 25. He is trying to bare his soul. But a 25-year-old soul can be a volatile thing. He doesn’t always know how to articulate what he thinks. He doesn’t always realise the implications of what he says. The soul can be sloppy. The soul can be under construction.
In 2014, Smith did something revolutionary. He came out publicly as gay just as soon as his album was released. He was not going to leave the question of his sexuality to guesswork or rumour. He thought this was enlightened.
In the Lonely Hour was a little more than a half-hour crying jag about longing for a man – a straight, married one he was in love with whom he never so much as kissed. Nearly every song was about this: Stay With Me, the sad song about wanting a man to stay even when it’s clear he’s not in love; Good Thing, the sad song about deciding that he’s stayed too long waiting around – that one begins with a vision of him getting mugged outside the man’s door and dying in his arms.
And, on the deluxe edition of the album, a cover of Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know? which was not a sad song until he sang it.
He gave an interview where he talked about Grindr and Tinder, the hookup apps, and how sad it was that all the possibility behind love and serendipity came down to a swiping culture, and saying this offended some in the gay community, too.
He accepted the Oscar for best original song for Writing’s on the Wall, from Spectre, the James Bond movie, referring to an article he’d read in which Ian McKellen had “said that no openly gay man had ever won an Oscar. If this is the case – even if it isn’t the case – I want to dedicate this to the LGBT community”.
Well, he woke up the morning after the Oscars to an assassination’s worth of ridicule, including from an openly gay man who had won an Oscar.
Sure, he quickly realised, the Oscar thing was wrong – he’d meant to say that there’d never been an openly gay lead actor winner – but the other stuff: why was it taken so badly? So what if he didn’t like hookup apps?
Why was that surprising? Hadn’t people seen him, dressed like a 1950s lounge act, complete with a pompadour? Hadn’t they heard his retro soul? What about him seemed modern? So what that he wanted his music to be a universal experience? He never said he was the spokesperson for gay people.
The vitriol of the Oscar incident surprised him. His heart was clearly in the right place. He was a proud gay man. How could that not mean anything?
“I’m not the most eloquent person,” Smith says. “I didn’t get the best grades in school. I mean, I’m just good at singing.”
His parents signed him up for voice lessons when he wouldn’t stop crooning throughout the house. He had a manager from the age of 11, then another, then another, each promising him that he would become famous soon. It didn’t happen. He moved to London, where he tended bar. One day, he met Jimmy Napes, who introduced him to his eventual managers, who in turn introduced him to the electronic duo Disclosure, with whom he recorded the vocals for Latch, Disclosure’s single – and his breakout – in 2012.
The rest – the album, the tour – it all happened fast. He woke up the day after the Oscars, saw the chaos online, apologised and slunk off. Why wasn’t this working? People loved his music, but they were turning on him. He couldn’t bear being thought of as a traitor to his people.
“I lived in a village in the middle of nowhere as an openly gay man from the age of 10 years old,” Smith said. “I didn’t meet another gay man until I was 19 when I moved to London. I just went gay clubbing a few times with some straight friends and with some girlfriends of mine, and then I became famous. I never got an opportunity to find my people in the gay community and find my friends.”
If In the Lonely Hour was the myopic look into the heart of a boy helplessly in love, then the new album, The Thrill of It All, is about a man who turns his gaze outward. Midnight Train is a sad song about ending a relationship that was inspired by friends; Palace, a sad song about whether love is worth it if it ends; HIM, a sad story of an imagined boy in Mississippi coming out to his father.
Some of the tracks are about Smith, including Burning, a sad song about pining for a man who has left; and One Last Song, a sad final ode to the man who was the subject of In the Lonely Hour.
The new album won’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with the first one: The old-timey soul is there. Smith decided long ago that his voice was the instrument: melisma, whispered baritones, surprise out-of-nowhere ultra-high falsetto, even a haunting, beautiful croak of longing sprinkled here and there. It is prime music for “having sex with your sadness”, as Smith said.
But he can recount actual relationships in his songs. He’s never been in the kind of magical Notebook love he longs for, he said, but about a year ago, he had a fivemonth relationship that took three breakups before the breakup took and which is the subject of Too Good at Goodbyes, the first single off the new album, which is in the Billboard Top 10 as of this writing. He’s been dating the actor Brandon Flynn, from Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, seeing where that goes.
Backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, Smith drank a cup of Throat Coat, then took a Gaviscon for acid reflux. He sang through a cocktail straw while holding up a tissue to make it move with his breath to strengthen his throat muscles, something he learnt from an opera singer. He motor-boated his lips. He was ready for the show. The next day, the news media would pick up a statement he made about feeling as much like a woman as a man, and social media would get on him for being too casual about gender fluidity when he identifies as a gay man.
One day he will get it right, he said, his eyes shiny with big, sad Sam Smith tears.