"Lay Me Down" - Sam Smith

Sam Smith! He plays a dual career as a Grammys darling and a perpetual pain in my ass.

Boring! Boring! *sigh* Look, all things considered, Sam Smith is talented. But he always seems so distant from actual emotion when he sings. When he sings, I don't really believe what he's saying. He sounds like he's emoting to gain popularity, rather than to show true emotions. In short, Sam Smith hasn't been one of my favourite artists as of late.

But then I heard this song, and I was pleasantly surprised! So now it's my job to figure out exactly what works about this song, and what didn't about Sam Smith's other singles.

Okay, well let's go past Sam Smith for a bit and look at the instrumentation. Sam Smith's musical accompaniment has been fairly minimalist. And this new song, "Lay Me Down", is about as minimalist as you can get. If you replaced the  white guy with a white girl, it would all of a sudden turn into a Christina Perri song.

But then I remember: I hate Christina Perri! Great, so now I've got another question to answer: what makes the meager musical accompaniment work with "Lay Me Down"? Well, Sam Smith's main draw has always been his vocals, which I guess is another reason why "Stay With Me" doesn't really work - Sam Smith can do the vocals on his own, so what's with the gospel choir? They add nothing to the subject matter of the song, whiny as it is. If anything, they detract from it.

But in "Lay Me Down", Sam Smith gets to have a shining moment for his vocals, because the only thing stopping him from doing so is a piano. Christina Perri just doesn't have the pipes to justify such minimalist music. And here's another important thing that makes "Lay Me Down" work: Sam Smith appears to be legitimately emoting.

Honestly, I was waiting for this guy to make a song I liked, I think. I begrudgingly saw some potential in the guy, and I wanted to see if he could justify it. Well, with this song, I think he just did. And if an artist has a good song in them, they get off my list of complete infamy. Trust me, you don't want to be on my list of complete infamy. It's not a good place to be. Jeremih is there. Vanilla Ice is there. Stay away from there.

Sam Smith: Not as bad as I thought he was. That's all.