This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Sam Smith is getting refreshingly honest about a very specific, very modern celebrity dilemma: what happens when you stop taking selfies with fans but still want to meet them.
In a new interview, the 34-year-old singer opened up about the emotional fallout of setting that boundary years ago, the depression it initially triggered, and the surprising joy they’ve found on the other side of it through therapy.
It’s a story about fame, privacy, and reconnection that feels a lot more relatable than you’d expect from someone with five Grammys and a Golden Globe to their name.
Smith’s comments arrive at an unusually reflective and happy moment in their career. They’re just days away from releasing their fifth studio album, “Hazel Eyes,” on August 21, and they recently confirmed their engagement to fashion designer Christian Cowan after three years together.
Taken all together, the picture that emerges is of an artist who spent years building walls to survive fame, and who is now, deliberately and carefully, learning how to take some of them back down.
Why Sam Smith Stopped Taking Selfies, and What It Cost Them
Speaking with The Guardian, Smith explained that the decision to stop taking selfies with fans wasn’t made lightly or recently. They set the boundary years ago to protect their privacy and peace of mind while still trying to be present with people who wanted to meet them.
What Smith didn’t anticipate was how heavy that decision would feel in practice, especially in the moments right after telling a fan no. “I felt like I was upsetting people all day,” Smith admitted, describing the near-constant sense that they were letting someone down every time they declined a photo request.
That guilt didn’t stay contained to isolated moments on the street or after a show. Smith said the accumulated weight of it eventually contributed to a real depressive period, one significant enough that it became something they needed to actively work through.
Rather than reversing the boundary altogether, Smith went to therapy to sit with the discomfort and figure out how to hold onto their privacy without carrying so much guilt about it.
That work appears to have paid off. “I actually have started to find the happiness and the joy of meeting people,” Smith said, describing a shift toward feeling more emotionally balanced overall.
It’s a distinction that might sound small on paper but carries real weight in practice: choosing not to take a photograph is not the same thing as choosing not to connect with someone.
For years, those two things had become tangled together in Smith’s mind, with every declined selfie feeling like a small rejection of the person asking.
Therapy appears to have helped Smith separate the two, allowing them to say no to the camera while still saying yes to the actual human interaction underneath it.
Smith also touched on how navigating fame from a young age, combined with publicly discussing their identity and pronoun changes over the years, added extra layers of pressure that made moments like these even harder to manage early in their career.
This isn’t the first time Smith has spoken candidly about the emotional toll of celebrity. They’ve previously discussed struggling with anxiety on tour, walking offstage mid-performance years ago on doctor’s orders, and spending extended stretches in therapy to work through what they’ve described as “the mess” in their head. What makes this latest reflection notable is its specificity.
Rather than speaking broadly about fame being difficult, Smith is naming one precise, everyday interaction, the selfie request, and walking listeners through exactly how something that small could snowball into something as serious as depression, and then, eventually, into a source of renewed joy.
A Fifth Album That Sounds Like a Love Letter, Because It Is One
Smith’s newfound emotional balance seems to be showing up in their music too. Their upcoming fifth studio album, “Hazel Eyes,” drops on August 21 and represents a notable departure from the heartbreak-soaked songwriting that first made Smith a global star.
Where 2014’s “In the Lonely Hour” mined unrequited love and devastation for four Grammy wins, “Hazel Eyes” is something considerably warmer.
Smith has confirmed that the album’s very title is a nod to the eye color of their now-fiancé, Christian Cowan, and that several of its twelve tracks were directly shaped by their relationship.
Speaking on The New Yorker Radio Hour earlier this month, Smith described the record as “incredibly romantic” and credited Cowan as a steady source of support throughout its creation.
“He’s been so beautiful and encouraging through the whole process of this record,” Smith said, before acknowledging the tricky balance of writing so openly about someone they love while still respecting the privacy of their relationship.
“It’s been the balancing act of, ‘How much do you share?’” Smith explained. “Not wanting to share too much but also it’s about him and it’s a love letter to him as a record and of this time that we’re in.”
Smith and Cowan, a fashion designer known for dressing stars including Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez, confirmed their engagement to The New York Times in an interview published July 28, following roughly three years of dating.
In that same conversation, Smith framed writing joyful love songs as its own kind of statement. “For me, there’s something radical about being queer in this time, in this world, and singing love songs,” Smith said. “I’m not going to allow the poison that I read and that I see to affect my way of loving.”
The couple has also made their creative partnership public in other ways, including matching red-carpet moments at recent Met Galas, where Cowan has designed custom looks for Smith that both have described as tributes to their relationship.
Boundaries Aren’t the Same Thing as Isolation
What ties Smith’s comments about selfies together with the story behind “Hazel Eyes” is a theme that runs through both: the idea that protecting yourself and staying open to connection aren’t actually opposites.
For years, Smith’s most celebrated music leaned almost entirely into sadness and longing, something they’ve reflected on in past interviews, describing how, in their mid-twenties, it felt easier to write from a place of negativity than joy.
In a previous interview promoting 2022’s “Gloria,” Smith went as far as to say that writing happy songs felt scarier to them than writing sad ones, calling the choice to lean into joy something that can feel “quite radical,” particularly as a queer artist navigating public scrutiny.
That same instinct, choosing vulnerability over self-protection, or joy over the comfort of familiar sadness, seems to be showing up again now, just in a different form.
Setting a boundary around selfies didn’t mean Smith wanted less connection with fans; it meant they needed a healthier way to have it.
Falling in love with Cowan and writing an entire album shaped by that relationship didn’t mean abandoning the emotional honesty that built Smith’s career; it just meant redirecting it toward something more hopeful.
Both stories point to the same underlying lesson Smith seems to be living out in real time: sometimes the boundary has to come first, so that what’s on the other side of it, whether that’s a genuine conversation with a stranger or a life shared with someone you love, actually has room to breathe.
As Smith gears up for the release of “Hazel Eyes” and settles into a new chapter with Cowan by their side, it’s clear that the version of Sam Smith showing up now is one who has done real work to get here.
They’re still protecting their privacy. They’re still saying no to selfies. But according to Smith, the people on the other side of that “no” don’t have to feel like they’re getting fewer of them. If anything, Smith seems to be suggesting they might finally be getting the realest version yet.
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