‘It was lonely being a young queer artist’: Sam Smith on finding health, happiness – and their hazel-eyed fiance
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- Sam Smith launched a six-city residency tour, "To Be Free," supporting their fifth studio album "Hazel Eyes," swapping the arena-scale theatricality of their last outing for smaller venues after describing past tours as "flailing around on a massive gold bum."
- Smith relocated from the UK to New York three years ago to live with their fiance, designer Christian Cowan — the "hazel-eyed" inspiration for the album — calling the city "a sanctuary as a queer person" where they could "walk in the street and feel no judgment."
- Hazel Eyes, co-written largely with Simon Aldred (a collaborator since Smith's 2014 debut) and co-produced by Smith for the first time, channels a "dusky, 70s blend of blues and folk, R&B and outlaw country" with 1am, tequila-tinged sessions alongside the Dap-Kings.
- The 2023 album Gloria and videos for "Unholy" and "I'm Not Here to Make Friends" drew accusations of oversexualization and transphobic rhetoric, creating "a bit of a media storm" that preceded Smith's move to New York.
- "Unholy," Smith's 2023 duet with Kim Petras, became their first US No. 1 and won a Grammy — ending a chase that had peaked at No. 2 with 2014's "Stay With Me" and that Smith calls their "most depressed or creatively stunted" period.
- Smith, 34, broke out at 20 on Disclosure's 2012 hit "Latch" and won an Oscar in 2015 for the Bond theme "Writing's on the Wall," but rejected comparisons to George Michael, saying their experience as a "queer femme artist on the global pop stage" has no real precedent.
- Hazel Eyes was built around a single guiding image — a "brown, sepia filter" inspired by rivers near Smith's Cambridgeshire hometown — that every song had to fit, a rigor Smith called "liberating" even when it caused friction with their label.
Why it matters: Smith's pivot from chart-chasing pop to a confessional, co-produced singer-songwriter record reframes their career arc: at 34, with five albums and an Oscar behind them, they're choosing emotional truth over commercial mechanics — a deliberate choice that cost label buy-in but puts them on their own terms at a moment when rightwing backlash against trans and non-binary artists is intensifying in the UK.
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