Sam Smith "wanted to make a Rihanna record," he told Billboard last year. Instead, he remade a Tom Petty song — or so Petty contended when someone noticed Smith's bittersweet pop-soul hit "Stay with Me" sounded a little like Petty's 1989 rock song "I Won't Back Down." (Never mind that Petty seemed fine with previous tunes by the Strokes and Red Hot Chili Peppers that sounded a lot like Petty songs.) Petty asked Smith for a co-songwriting credit and Smith acquiesced.
I was only casually familiar with Smith's honeyed falsetto before the "Stay with Me" controversy lit up social media feeds in January like a Donald Trump outburst. It was the same-old, same-old: Classic-rock fans complained Smith was a frothy, unoriginal pop singer; savvier music followers enumerated the long history of pop plagiarism, from the Rolling Stones cribbing of Chuck Berry's signature riffs to Master Petty himself mimicking the Byrds borrowing from Bob Dylan imitating Woody Guthrie. An old story. Yawn.
The flap did, though, pique my interest in Smith, the 23-year-old newcomer who performs on the main stage at Outside Lands Sunday right before Elton John. It makes sense that Smith and Elton, singers separated by at least two generations, would appear so close together on the schedule. Both are British trailblazers — Elton because he was one of the earliest mainstream gay pop stars to come out, and Smith because he's among the first mainstream gay pop stars comfortable enough to use the male pronoun in his love songs.
Smith's also the latest British blue-eyed soul singer to take an album full of painful songs of unrequited love to the Top 5 in both the United States and Great Britain. The previous singer to do that was Adele, whose 21 was a track-by-track confession of her failed relationship with an older man. Smith's 2014 debut In the Lonely Hour, by contrast, was a track-by-track confession of his futile love for a straight man who had no clue of the singer's obsession. "I know he loved me too, but not in that way," Smith told British tabloid The Sun. "I made the record so that this doesn't happen again. I don't want to fall in love again with someone who doesn't love me back."
Since the release of In the Lonely Hour, Smith has gotten plenty of love back from pop and R&B fans who see him and Adele as the most important faces of contemporary British blue-eyed soul, part of a continuum of white U.K. soul singers that stretches back to artists like Stevie Winwood and Dusty Springfield. After taking home armloads of awards this year, Smith has kept busy working on new material, recording an alternate version of his latest hit "Lay Me Down" with John Legend, and most recently singing on "Omen," his second collaboration with the electronic duo Disclosure. It was an earlier song with Disclosure, "Latch," that had introduced Smith to the music world in 2012.
As for accusations of plagiarism, no other rockers have come forward to pick on Sam Smith, but we should expect one any day from the ghost of Jackie Wilson. Because if any artist has inspired Smith by osmosis, it's surely the singer of "Lonely Teardrops" more than the privileged straight white rock dude who once whined that his girl didn't have to live like a refugee.
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