When Sam Smith gets stage fright before a concert, which is always, they envision the universe in all its vastness: “How big the world is, how high the moon is,” the singer said. “How small I am, and how small this room is that I’m performing in, even if it’s an arena. I look down on it from above and remind myself that this is OK, and I’m safe.”
Smith dreamed of pop stardom since childhood and achieved it by 22. Scoring a worldwide smash, “Stay With Me,” in 2014, they have been a global phenom ever since, with a lustrous, octave-bending tenor that elicits chills and tears in equal measure. And yet, “I really struggle,” they told me one recent sunny afternoon. “Singing for me is an incredibly personal thing. You don’t hear me singing unless I have to.”
At 34, Smith has spent the last three-plus years burrowing into that need, as their life turned somersaults. They moved to New York from their native England, for a boy, the fashion designer Christian Cowan, who has now, Smith revealed to me with a giddy smile, officially become a fiancé.
Smith’s new album, “Hazel Eyes,” out Aug. 21, charts the course of their romance quite closely; they began composing the yearning first track, “Everlasting Love,” the night before their first date with Cowan, and finished it deep in coupledom. As a crooner known for heartbreak ballads, this was seismic: their first time writing “about requited love” as they put it at a sold-out show in San Francisco earlier this year — proudly, and pointedly, celebrating a queer relationship.
It’s also the first record Smith has made fully on their own terms, outside the suit-y structures of the music industry — the teams of songwriters in polished studios; the rounds of A&R notes — which had otherwise scaffolded their career. Instead, buoyed by making a similar leap with “Unholy,” their 2023 Grammy-winning No. 1 hit with Kim Petras, they squirreled away with new collaborators, like the indie rocker Feist, producing a dozen dreamy tracks with a full gospel choir and a more handcrafted sound.
And their adopted home gave them an unexpected lift — as a queer artist, as a partner, as a person longing to communicate and be understood. “Being in New York, I’m not the only freak on the street,” they said, as we perched over fizzy waters, then martinis, at Julius, the historic gay bar in Greenwich Village that is one of Smith’s favorite hangouts. “I’m surrounded daily by people that are too much. And I mean too much as a compliment.”
Which is not to say that “Hazel Eyes” (their fifth album, and named, yes, for Cowan’s color) is pure contentment. There are darker moments, lyrics that flick at deception and pain, production that sounds like impending thunder. We listened to it at Electric Lady, the storied studio in the West Village where Smith recorded some tracks; they closed their eyes as they heard the ups and downs. At love’s peak, “you’re like, is this too good to be true?” they said. Sneaking in that duality was intentional. “I feel all types of things all the time,” Smith said. “In my happiest moments, I can get really sad.”
An album made in the regular pop machinery might’ve brushed that tension away. But Smith has a new clarity and confidence, friends and peers observed, in not filtering off the edges. “Since Sam’s move to New York, I feel like they really embrace the creative eccentricities more,” said Simon Aldred, a Manchester-based songwriter and producer who first met Smith at 21, and who worked on their blockbuster debut, “In the Lonely Hour,” and on “Hazel Eyes.” “They’ve been given free rein on this album to be really, the voice that I know, that I’ve sat in a room with.”
Newfound Serenity
For years Smith’s fans have sobbed and sung along to their chart-topping anthems of pining for a cheating lover (“I’m Not the Only One”), of lonely self-sabotage (“Too Good at Goodbyes”), of one night stands that could mean more (the Grammy-winning “Stay with Me”). So when Smith stood onstage at a series of sold-out residencies in New York late last year, and then in San Francisco to introduce a new number called “My Guy,” the audience members very nearly held their breath.
“I feel good, I feel happy,” Smith, in scuffed brown denim, announced one winter night at the Warsaw, a club in Brooklyn where Smith played 24 shows. In San Francisco, where Smith was the first performer to reopen the landmark Castro Theater after its renovation, they went further: “It really feels like a lifetime I’ve waited to sing a song like this.”
Achingly sweet, with a doo-wop lilt, “My Guy” was created in one full rush, “born of this genuine, blooming awareness that Sam had met their person,” said Feist, a co-writer on the track, along with the esteemed multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.
The finished song couldn’t top Smith’s original exuberance so the vocals are from the initial demo. “This might be the first dance” of many future weddings, “queer or straight,” Feist predicted.
That Smith’s newfound serenity is coming at a moment when the rights of gay and especially transgender people — Smith came out as nonbinary in 2019 — are under assault is not, of course, lost on them. They have been an outspoken member of the gay community since their 2014 debut album — unusually so for the pop world at the time (and sometimes inexpertly, too). Two years ago, they started an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.-supporting charity, the Pink House Foundation. But as an artist they also have their own statement.
“For me, there’s something radical about being queer in this time, in this world, and singing love songs,” Smith said. Joy amid strife is an act of resistance, they concluded, saying, “I’m not going to allow the poison that I read and that I see to affect my way of loving.”
Over the past few months I sat for two long interviews with Smith, watched them duet with Brandi Carlile and Ed Sheeran in Brooklyn, vamp in leather hot pants and thigh-high boots at the Castro, and get heartfelt at a mini-concert at the Stonewall National Monument at the start of Pride weekend. Still, I was surprised by how open and engaged with the city they were (with an Instagram account devoted to foodie exploits), how unabashedly they moved around despite attracting attention. “I’d never walked down the street with someone that would leave a ripple,” Feist said.
Some of Smith’s intimates worry about them, as a highly visible nonbinary musician. “This cultural climate has a mandate of care for absolutely nobody,” said Anohni, the fiercely visionary singer-songwriter and artist, who Smith considers a queer-conscience foremother. “They are a very authentically kind person,” Anohni said of Smith, “an innocent, you know? And I’m older, and I’ve seen a few seasons of this now.”
But, she added, “Sam is incredibly resilient. And resilience is a strength that understands its own vulnerability.”
A Voice for the Ages
Smith was raised in a village near Cambridge, England, in a pink house, by fields and rivers where they would escape, alone, to recharge. “I would just go off walking for two, three hours,” they said. “I talked to trees.” (Cowan lived 10 minutes away, but the two met online, in New York, four years ago.)
They came out as gay at 10 years old, to friends and a supportive family, with two younger sisters. Their mother, the breadwinner, worked in banking, and their father was “a househusband,” they said, and a caretaker. Their maternal grandmother and aunts figured prominently too. “I grew up in a very emotionally charged, femme world,” Smith said.
Success arrived quickly, after they moved to London and supplied soulful vocals on a pulsing track by the electronica duo Disclosure in 2012. By 2016, they had won four Grammys and an Oscar (for their James Bond theme, “Writing’s on the Wall”).
The depth of their ambition distinguished them early, Aldred said. “Sam just had a drive,” he said. “I was kind of taken aback by the drive, to be honest. And the voice!”
Smith’s range, from earthy gravel to falsetto, wowed other artists too. “The natural expression, the timbre, the scale and the ease of it,” marveled Feist, who had never co-written with anyone before. (Smith invited her through an Instagram DM.)
Smith’s vision first bore its fullest fruit on the cheekily raunchy hit “Unholy,” which Smith called a turning point. But in the studio, Smith said, it ran into opposition.
“There was a lot of straight male voices in that room,” they said. “Some people didn’t get it, didn’t think it could be on the record.”
Smith and Petras prevailed, driven by their connection to the sound. “I used to dance in my bedroom all the time in my mum’s clothes in front of the mirror — I felt like that when I listened to the song,” Smith said, adding: “In a tense environment, me and Kim stood up and stuck our tongues out. Just teased. And that’s part of queer power, you know?”
Smith harnessed that in recording “Hazel Eyes,” too, in unexpected ways. “Oh Mother,” a theatrical, rollicking track, that flicks at both Smith’s maternal lineage and queer notions of “mother,” was “the biggest hill and monster of a song to climb,” Smith said. They redid their vocals several times, dissatisfied with the energy. Finally, though no longer a smoker, they grabbed a pack of cigarettes, “stripped their shirt off and asked the studio manager to get a bottle of whiskey,” Aldred recalled. “I have never seen anyone give as much to a vocal in my life.”
Smith no longer hits their high notes the same way; their vocal command has changed with age and experience. They once panicked about that. But now, when they listen to their voice on this vessel of an album, “it soothes me,” they said. “You hear life within the instrument.”