"Do I Go Home to Nothing or Stay Out for More?"

Boy...when Sam Smith warns us that a song isn't radio friendly and is dark, he is not playing around. I can see why Drowning Shadows wouldn't have necessarily fit with a lot of the other tracks on his platinum debut In the Lonely Hour. Despite it's depressing tone of the track, it's incredibly real and I'm glad the Zane Lowe edition of the track below includes a bit more of a back story to the genesis of how the song came to be. It's easy to glamorize the lives of these really talented artists like Sam, but at the end of the day, they're just people like us too. Back when he wrote this track he had to make a real decision every night about whether to turn left to go home and be lonely or turn right and head to the club for the prospect of a good time. It's a struggle that a lot of 20-somethings go through in their day-to-day lives and it struck me as real because he was just an average artist trying to make it big when he wrote this track. In summary, I'm glad he didn't drop this downer of a track on the first release, but now that he's releasing it as a deluxe version, it's much easier to appreciate in hindsight...#DrowningShadows

Sam Smith - Drowning Shadows