How Sam Smith Found Their Voice

Why stressful?

I’ve always been freaked out by my voice. It’s a freaky thing. I don’t feel the same way that people feel when they hear it. When I hear myself, I’m very critical. I’m very hard on myself as a singer. I come offstage thinking I’ve done a bad job and people are, like, That was the best you’ve ever sounded, and I’m, like, I’m so confused!

But, in recordings, do you recognize how you sound?

I do now, but it took me . . . I first recorded myself when I was thirteen. My first recording was me singing “When You Believe,” by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. I sang every single part by myself. When I went into the booth after recording it and they comped the vocal and I sat down and I heard myself sing, I burst into tears, because I thought it was the worst thing ever. I was, like, In my head, I sound so much better than that. And then what came after that was many, many years of me having this dysphoria with my voice and trying to hear the goodness.

I’m still critical at times, but this album I’ve made is the most in tune that I’ve been with my singing. I feel like it captures me entirely, and I hear me when I listen to it.

You’ve said that, when you were growing up, and particularly in high school, you would wear makeup and dresses and traditionally feminine clothing. But when you were introduced to the public on your first album, you were not dressing like that. Was that something you intentionally toned down?

No, it wasn’t an intentional thing. I moved to London when I was eighteen years old, and I had a homophobic attack happen to me, and it triggered me to start wearing less makeup when I was walking around the streets—because I used to wear so much. As I started to wear less makeup, suddenly people started to notice my singing more. And then my manager for that first album came on board, and he went shopping with me and encouraged me to wear this type of coat or that thing, and I would put it on and walk into rooms, and doors just started to open for me.

I still felt very femme in myself and my body. The suits I was wearing—it was drag for me. I was really enjoying wearing something different and not having to deal with everyone looking at you. You know, the negativity that would come with presenting as femme as a child, I was enjoying that not happening. But I think after my first album is when I was, like, “Oh, O.K., this is an identity now. People think this is me. And if I start dressing femme like I used to, that’s gonna be something that people have to be educated on.” And my album was so massive that the world stage on which I had to make that announcement just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

You grew up in a village with fewer than a thousand people. The stereotype is that that would be a less safe place to present feminine, that London would be a safer place.

Yes.

But that was not the case for you.

No—I mean, looking back on it, I was very brave, and I have a very strong mother, and I have a very emotional, strong, sensitive father, and they really just let me express myself. But people would say things in the village, for sure. I worked in the village store once, and there were crazy experiences there when I was younger. So, it wasn’t easy. But when I came to London it became dangerous. And that’s when I started to, I guess, tone things down a little bit for my safety.

And you were given subtle signals from the industry about dressing more masculine. Was anything explicitly said?

Yeah. I mean, as I started to transition forward—and, I guess, backwards—into wearing the things I wore when I was younger, and publicly wearing makeup, moving in a more femme way, that’s when I started to hear things within the industry, and people would say things. That was hard.