"For me this sounded more like a jazzy track, but Zane Lowe was actually the one who said - he rang me up and left a voice mail on my phone - and was like, 'Sam, this is a hip-hop track. In all my records on the album, this song came the quickest in terms of lyrics." Then two weeks later, I just loved the chords so we returned to them, and then we wrote 'I'm Not The Only One' in like an hour. We wrote a completely different song on top of those chords and it wasn't very good, so we scrapped it. "Jimmy Napes played the chords one day and I was obsessed with them. That's a nice lesson to learn actually, because it means if I really like a song, I'm never going to let go of it." "Then they listened back to it and we all just became completely obsessed with it. They were like, 'Oh I can't remember that one'. Then I was at Jools Holland and we were talking - it was getting close to the album coming out - and I just said to my managers, 'I'm always going to root for this one song - it's my personal favourite'.
They heard it for the first time and they said, 'Yeah it's really nice,' but never spoke about it again. Sometimes it's quite hard because people have such high expectations that they can overlook certain songs. "I played it to my label and managers the day after we wrote it and they didn't. We just put that down as a demo and it took about an hour to write - then we went and got a bagel together! I remember feeling so proud that I got the word "him" in. "I immediately came up with that lyric, 'Leave your lover, leave him for me'. We were in his living room having a cup of tea and I was completely entranced by the chords. "I wrote this track in Manchester with Simon Aldridge, who's actually a gay man himself and we got together and this song came so quickly. We wrote this song very very quickly and then I felt like something was missing at the end of it, so I went into the studio and did different takes in different parts of the room and we built up the sound to sound like a gospel choir." "It's actually not a gospel choir on that track - it's all my voice.
I kind of loved that and I feel like it really came across in the song." If you actually listen to my vocal, I'm not even trying to sing or sound pretty because I was so upset and sad. 'Good Thing', for me, is the darkest song on the record. He started playing some music and the song was then basically already written. I was showing him some things I had been saying between me and another guy, and he was writing down everything I was saying. "With this song, I showed him my text messages. We didn't actually start making music at the beginning of the session, we would sit and he would just ask me about what I was going through. With all the songs we did together, we wrote in a very odd way. Eg knows more about my private life than a lot of people do. "Working with Eg White was an incredible experience, and this song was one of them. So the next day I rang up Two Inch Punch and I actually went in with him and we wrote a song about that guy." "I remember just thinking in the moment, 'I'm not going to do the writing session the next day with you, because this is just bulls**t'. I didn't get too angry, except he got quite malicious about the whole thing. He was basically asking me to write him a hit song, so I could buy him a new car. They hardly wrote anything and they were also about the material things. "I had two writing sessions booked in with someone in the music industry and on the first one we basically got into an argument and the person I was writing with was making music for the wrong reasons. Since its release back in May, it has become the biggest selling debut album in both the US and UK, as well as being honoured with a nomination for Album of the Year at the 57th annual Grammy Awards.Īfter Digital Spy decided to name In the Lonely Hour the best album of 2014, we caught up with Sam to find out more about the inspiration, process and stories behind each of its tracks. "I sit here all day every day at the moment dissecting what it is that's made this album connect," Sam Smith told us recently, reflecting on the immense success of his debut album In the Lonely Hour.
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