The rise and rise of Sam Smith

ALL through his most recent American tour, Sam Smith has been stunned by the size of his crowds. When he first played in Philadelphia, in March last year, it was at a bar too small to fit his full band; last month, he filled Temple University’s basketball arena. His New York debut, in August 2013, was at the tiny Mercury Lounge, and a few weeks ago, Smith sold out Madison Square Garden, where thousands of fans sang along to his slow-burning anthems like Stay With Me.

After Adele and Amy Winehouse, America has now fallen for Sam Smith in a big way. Picture: Getty

“This is a really big, big place, isn’t it?” Smith, who at 22 has cherubic cheeks and a high-piled wedge of brown hair, said as he surveyed the crowd at the Garden. “I never thought that I’d be standing on this stage in only a year and a half.”

Barely known to American audiences a year ago, Smith became a breakout pop star in 2014 with an emotive brand of blue-eyed soul that drew comparisons to Adele. His first album, In the Lonely Hour, a song cycle about a troubled affair, tugged at the heartstrings of listeners and radio programmers alike, and was one of only three new releases last year to go platinum. Of the six Grammy Awards he was nominated for, he took home four, in the top categories, including pop vocal album of the year.

Key to Smith’s success has been his sweet tenor voice, which climbs to intense, androgynous peaks. Yet his rise is also a sign of what can still happen in the struggling music industry when everything clicks – when the right balance is struck between online seeding, mass-media blitzing and live appearances. To a degree rarely seen in brand-new acts, Smith and his label seemed to get nearly everything right, from an early appearance on America’s Saturday Night Live to business details like the management of digital sales.

“He is the perfect new artist in this world we live in,” said Steve Barnett, chairman of Capitol Music Group, Smith’s label. “People talk about how there are so many things wrong in the modern music business, but five years ago, you could not have done what we did in the last six months.”

In person, Smith is softly-spoken but makes it clear that stardom has been a lifelong ambition. Born in London, he grew up idolising pop divas such as Whitney Houston and Chaka Khan, and he spent his teens singing jazz and musical theatre. His future direction was sealed by 11, when he heard Amy Winehouse’s first album, Frank, with its blend of jazz, contemporary beats and unabashed sexuality.

“The grittiness and honesty in her music, it started to affect my singing,” he recalled backstage before his show in Philadelphia, at the Liacouras Centre. “I started becoming Sam Smith, the singer, instead of trying to be Jean Valjean in Les Mis. I was creating an identity in my voice, whereas before I would just clone other singers.”

Three years ago, hustling for his break in music while still working at a bar in London, Smith met the dance-music duo Disclosure. Guy Lawrence, one of the two brothers behind the group, remembers being stunned by Smith’s voice on a demo recording and inviting him to a writing session sight unseen.

“I actually thought he was going to be a black woman, like Samantha Smith or something,” Lawrence recalled.

Latch, the song they wrote with Jimmy Napes, one of Smith’s regular collaborators, is a buoyant house track punctuated by Smith’s signature high notes. Released in late 2012, it went to No 11 on the UK chart, leading to more guest spots on dance songs (including Naughty Boy’s La La La, which went to No 1) and making Smith a budding star in Britain.

Signed by Capitol, he began to develop the theme of his solo debut. It came together once Smith, who collaborated with other writers for every song, let himself be guided by the most intimate feelings about his own unrequited love for another man. “For this album,” he said, “I showed the writers my text messages.”

The album touches on various styles: I’m Not the Only One and Stay With Me have a spare, retro-soul sound; the upbeat Money on My Mind features one of Smith’s most acrobatic vocal manoeuvres.

CONNECTING them are lyrics that are strikingly revealing, even if they leave the sex of his lover ambiguous. But shortly before the album was released, Smith revealed the songs’ real-life inspiration in an interview with the Fader magazine, and the video for the countryish Leave Your Lover also plays with gender roles: After following Smith in an apparent love triangle with a woman and another man, the video shows at the end that it was the guy Smith was after all along.

Smith said that he never hesitated about exposing his feelings but was cautious about how and when to reveal his sexual orientation.

“I wanted my voice to be Story No 1 when you Googled my name,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be ‘Sam Smith, the gay singer’. I wanted it to be ‘Sam Smith, the singer who happens to be gay.’ You can’t box things. It’s the same with music, sexuality, race. You can’t give them labels just because it’s easy for us to digest it.”

The biggest promotional boost for Smith came when Saturday Night Live offered him a coveted musical guest spot in late March last year. It was still nearly three months before the album release – unusually early for such a high-profile booking. Lindsay Shookus, a producer who had just been wowed by Smith at the South by Southwest festival, remembered telling Lorne Michaels, the executive producer: “There’s a guy I want to book. The timing makes no sense, but he’s incredible. I think he’s going to be a star.”

Such early Saturday Night Live bookings had backfired for Lana Del Rey and the group Karmin. But Smith’s silken performances of Stay With Me and Lay Me Down started a wave of adoring publicity and stoked advance orders of the album.

With In the Lonely Hour, Capitol employed a windowing strategy for online sales, withholding the album from streaming services for a month to drive sales. It worked. In the Lonely Hour opened at No 2 and has sold 1.3 million copies in the United States – last year, only Taylor Swift and the Frozen soundtrack sold more. In the Lonely Hour also ended up as Spotify’s second-most popular album of the year around the world. (Ed Sheeran’s x was first.)

As a stark, gospel-tinged ballad, Stay With Me would seem a hard sell for commercial radio. Sharon Dastur, senior vice-president for programming at iHeartMedia, recalled that last summer “the top five songs for weeks and weeks were Taylor Swift, Meghan Trainor, Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea”. But amid all that upbeat music, Smith stood out. “It’s that passion, the purity in his voice,” Dastur added.

Stay With Me became a smash on multiple radio formats and reached No 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. (But it did have one setback: After the publishers of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down complained of melodic similarities between the songs, Smith agreed to add songwriting credits for Petty and his co-writer, Jeff Lynne.)

When it came to marketing Stay With Me, history was also on Smith’s side. The breakthroughs of Adele and Winehouse had primed programmers for the next big British thing, a process that Smith’s own team had played a role in: before joining the revamped Capitol, Barnett had been a co-chairman at Columbia Records, Adele’s American label.

“Without Amy and without Adele, the path to Sam’s success would probably have been harder,” said Nick Raphael, president of Capitol Records UK. “They set the tone; they changed the format of radio.”

When asked about the Adele comparisons, Smith at first politely demurred. “It’s a huge compliment,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s correct.”

THEN he took the opportunity to take a jab at the pop music world at large, suggesting that he and Adele were among the few singers “just standing on stage singing songs” without making prop use of their rear ends.

“If we went back 30 or 40 years, there’d be many more people like that: Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald,” he said. “It wasn’t about the celebrity; it was about the music and the lyrics.” On stage, he wears dark suits and a pair of shiny, black-and-white Prada trainers.

Over a few hours in Philadelphia on the afternoon of his concert, Smith seemed to be adjusting to his success. He was apparently unrecognised at a hip downtown coffee shop, but a waiter at a sushi spot next door said he was going to the show, and Smith looked pleased.

Stirring tea backstage at the Liacouras Centre, he was still coming down from his performance the night before, outside Washington. “I did my first arena show last night,” he said, “and then you come into a room like this, and it’s completely silent. That drop is something that I still have to get used to.”

At the Grammys, Smith swept the board, winning best new artist, album of the year and best song and record, for Stay With Me, beating off stiff competition from 
Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Beck, and making him the first to do so since Christopher Cross in 1981.

Beyond awards season, Smith is working on his next album. “This will be the most honest thing I’ve ever written in my entire life,” he said. “It’s about my mum and dad splitting up, and it’s going to be even more honest and even more brutal.”

He has already begun playing two songs for his family and associates, he said.

“I showed my make-up artist the other day,” Smith said, “and she burst into tears.”

l The Brit Awards 2015 are hosted by Ant and Dec on Wednesday and will be broadcast live on STV from 8pm. Smith is the most nominated artist, with nods in five categories, www.brits.co.uk© NYT 2015