Sam Smith left London and moved to New York after already winning a Grammy, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BRIT Award before hitting thirty. All the honors have been won thanks to ballads, and the ballads were successful because of one reason only—the voice carried the lyrics to perfection. Almost any line could be sung to perfection because of the incredible voice, and for the majority of the singer’s career, it has been that way. Even though “Unholy” and the Gloria cycle were more of club pop, Smith was soon back to ballad singing, organizing a 24-show run at Warsaw in Brooklyn and another 24-show run at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco before starting to write Hazel Eyes over three years with David Odlum, Simon Aldred, and a few more friends, partly at Electric Lady Studios. Smith says that this process taught them a lot as an artist, that they were really pushing themselves all the time, and that the result is incredibly romantic.
He has always written love songs, pointing at some emotion and expecting the voice to deliver the message. On the opening song, Smith asks a night walker to dance, offers to become an echo in his/her heart and a sparkle on the darkest nights, and the second verse of “Everlasting Love” repeats the first verse with slight modification. “Hazel Eyes” accumulates autumn leaves, summer breezes, winter freezes, and evergreens in one verse, and four seasons become just one pastel landscape. “Moondance” (featuring Feist) takes things even further. Smith becomes the sand, rides the river of sunlight, collides with other celestial bodies, and writes a constellation of everything he/she is. The voice is beautiful in all three songs, and the lyrics could be sung by any singer in the world.
Smith has said that they wrote “My Guy” with friends on a summer day in New York, and the song preserves this energy. “Like all good things, he caught me by surprise/You could dream he’s yours all you want, but he’s mine, mine, mine.” This is a playground taunt, childish and lovely at the same time, and the bridge challenges someone to argue, repeating that he can’t have him, that they can try, try, try. At the very end of the chorus, when Smith calls him “a breath of fresh air, a rose on the vine” and says that they can stare at him all the time, the lyrics and feeling finally match. Two images (both small and both grounded) can be easily pictured.
On “When He’s Gone,” Smith starts singing about the fight, which is irredeemable: “Hate it when you speak to me with cruel and careless words/Everything you say to me, can’t you see it hurts?” Smith is asking how the hell he got here. Fighting talk is cheap. Every time he throws the dice, he gets the same failure. And then the close flips: “That’s the thing with passion, it passes like the weather/If he stays with me tonight, I promise I’ll be better.” This promise has its expiration date in the same sentence. Passion passes, and Smith knows it when making this promise. Another song, “Thief,” starts with a simpler detail: “You’re on New York time/Over here it’s way past midnight/I drank a bottle of wine/So I can sleep tonight in silence.” The distance is measured in time zones, in drinking wine to go to bed, and in silence as the best-case scenario. After that, Smith gives a few more reasons why this person would regret his action: the gold rush, shaking the whole ocean, and no cavalry coming to help. “Baby, you held heaven.” In both these songs, there are rooms, clocks, and fights between people who know everything about each other. The writer has brought what has long been promised in love songs, but it has never come.
Smith’s greatest writing on the album is a dialogue, which cannot be completed. In “Oh Mother,” there is a mother and daughter talking about a man who hurt her, and nobody can complete this story. The mother warns: beware the woman scorned, she could move a mountain, cross the driest desert, and her anger would make roots of the earth to be torn apart. The daughter says that “He’s no man of mine” and immediately adds, “Mother, I don’t know where to start/If I stay, will he break my heart?/Maybe there’s still time to explain/But I’m too tied up in my pain now.” She wants the rescue and the permission to stay at the same time. By the fourth verse, she becomes sweaty, can’t breathe anymore, and begs her mother to come faster.
At “Constant Companion,” Smith fully commits to a cowboy image, and the commitment is clear even though the image itself is strange. “Sugar Rush” asks, “Who’s that with the killer smile?” and runs out of ideas before the second verse. “Hold On” and “To Be Free” repeat the words about rivers, feathers, and freedom’s wings, pleasant and going nowhere. Smith has said that this album is the result of pushing themselves in every possible way. The push can be heard in only four or five songs. In other songs, the voice works as hard as the pen left it to work, and after listening to “When He’s Gone” and “Thief,” one notices the difference in comparison with Gloria.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “My Guy,” “When He’s Gone,” “Oh Mother”