SJP: First of all, congratulations! I’m so excited to be talking with you. When the first single came out, I was completely gobsmacked, and the album is just magnificent. I expected nothing less, but I feel like you’re the real troubadour of our time.
SS: Aww, thank you so much. I’m so happy you like the new music. I’ve been so nervous about keeping fans from the first record onto the second.
SJP: A sophomore album must be very scary—all your own expectations and what you want your audience and fans to experience. You sort of disappeared for a period to take time for yourself, write, and record. How do you maintain that relationship [with fans] and also move forward as an artist and as a young man growing up, whose ideas about himself are changing?
SS: The key to getting back into a creative space in the last year and a half was home. I needed to be around my family and friends again. After the success of the first record, and especially after the Oscars and everything, I felt like my job and life weren’t relatable to my family and friends, and that really scared me. It was important for me to prove to myself that I could get back to normal, and then, I could write music from a real place again. I went home, living with my best friend and my sister, and we did the things that you do at age 25. It was very, very boring [laughs]—a lot of nights just sitting around, watching TV, and talking. But I got a crash course in being my age again. I grew up a bit too quickly, getting a record deal and with what happened with In the Lonely Hour. I got a lot of money and I didn’t know how to deal with that. All of my other friends who are 25, they don’t have money, they’re still struggling to pay their rent in London.
SJP: The relationship with money is so curious, strange, and complicated.
SS: As a kid, I was very lucky: For five or six years of my life, my mom came into a lot of money. The opposite also happened, where she lost a lot of money and we didn’t have anything. So, I experienced two different sides. When my family hears about the money I make, they’re not celebrating like, “Oh my God. This is incredible.” If anything, they’re helping me try to figure out how to deal, because I find it scary. I get to travel, eat in beautiful restaurants, and take my family on amazing holidays. I feel so lucky and blessed, but I also am very aware that money is scary and it can change people. I’m not a massive spender. My friends and I love chill- ing at Nando’s [laughs], this really good chicken shop where we just watch TV and eat chicken. It’s about getting back to the simple things. Pretending that I was just a normal 25-year-old guy, I kind of convinced myself that I am.
SJP: Well, I think you are. Everyone has a version of normal. Your intense desire for connection, for finding who you are in the world—developmentally speaking, those are spot-on mid-20s questions. You are such a great interpreter of love, loss, and solitude, and there’s this interior monologue on your first album. But your second album feels sort of like an exorcism [laughs]. You talk about love in a very different way, like you’re more in control of it. You’re not cynical at all, but you sound less naïve. Did that coincide with things happening politically in your country, in our country, and to you maturity-wise?
SS: Oh, completely. In the past few years, I became a gay man properly. When I wrote that first album, I was in love with a straight man, he didn’t love me back, and I was very comfortable in my longing. With this record, I became a gay man. I started having proper relationships with men. Sometimes they were in the wrong and treated me in a bad way, and sometimes I was in the wrong. Being gay also falls into politics and what’s happening in the world right now. In the time I [took a break], Trump became president. I also went to Iraq, to refugee camps 40 minutes from Mosul, with a charity called War Child [an NGO that works to assist children in conflict zones]. It was the most unbelievable experience of my life. I’m very ashamed that as a kid, I didn’t read the news that much. I was more bothered about going out with my friends than about what was going on [politically], because the news was just depressing to me. After that trip, I felt a huge amount of guilt. I feel like a grown-up, and I’ve opened my eyes to what’s going on in the world. Also, with what’s happening politically, as an artist and songwriter, I always go back to what Nina Simone said about writing about your times and using our voices. I feel like art in general can really save us all right now.
Read the full interview at V Magazine.
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