If the October 2020 release of “Love Goes” has you hankering for more from the Grammy winning singer-songwriter Sam Smith, your wait is likely to be over soon. Word is out that the popular artist’s work on their fourth studio album is already underway.
Sam and partnering songwriter Jimmy Napes revealed their big secret on the ‘Straight Up’ podcast: “We wrote a song just the other day and it’s one of my favourite things we’ve ever done. Continuing to just do this and it still feels like the first time, essentially, that’s a really special partnership.”
Sam Smith’s soul stirring silky vocals in ‘’Too Good at Goodbyes’ made the singer a global sensation. It is little wonder that Napes is full of praise over Smith’s voice in the podcast as well. He says, “Sam’s voice is obviously one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard. To be able to have that voice expressing the music that you’re writing together, it’s like a joke.” The producer-songwriter does not hide his own excitement over having his work sung by Sam. “It can be a little bit of a trick because Sam could sing the phone book and it would sound amazing.”
Although the two seems to be churning out albums at an amazing speed, getting songs approved is not a breeze for either artist. The duo reveal that the pair had actually written several tunes that have been “binned” by Sam’s record label. As with any labor of love, rejection brings a lot of heartache for the pair. Jimmy explains, “On the whole a lot of the songs get binned. We, even on the day, might be jumping up and down saying. ‘I love this’, and then people in the team will just be like, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard’.”
Getting several of their work rejected can only mean one thing- Sam and Jimmy are constantly engaging themselves in producing fresh content to get over the heartbreak caused by the rejection.
Heartache, coincidentally, also happens to be a dominant theme in Sam’s music hits including the recently released ‘Love Goes’ album. Sam mentions how deeply they were broken within when they needed their relation with with ’13 Reasons Why’ actor Brandon Flynn in 2018. Sam mentions this was the first serious
relationship they had ever had and in that sense perhaps, it was also the first time they experienced “real” heartbreak. “I’d say [this was] the first proper time I’ve been actually heartbroken. That feeling of they’re gone, you can’t sleep, the really, really bad feeling.The others were the idea of it and it was pure unrequited love. This, I would like to say that we loved each other. So, I definitely, definitely loved him. So yeah, it was proper.”
The emotions were well captured in Sam’s rendition of ‘Love Goes’. Not only the lyrics, the very vocalization of the songs in the album has touched millions of hearts worldwide. The artist reveals the album would have been released sooner. However the pandemic of Covid-19 upset the original release plans.