Meeting the real Myles Smith

“I think for me it was about balancing the album - showing that there's many more aspects to who Myles is, because I feel like it could be exhausting always being one,” explains Myles Smith from across a laptop screen. It’s a late spring morning and he’s bright and smiling on the other end of the video call, thoughtful and articulate as he discusses the journey that’s finally led to his long-awaited debut, My Mess, My Heart, My Life.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, by now, Smith should be on his second or third record. His singles have been omnipresent on the radio, played throughout shops and cafes, and soundtracked countless social media posts. Songs like “Stargazing” feel like classic cuts, such is his knack for writing instant and timeless hooks.

On top of his streams and airplay, Smith spent most of last year on the road, headlining his own shows as well as supporting his formative inspiration, Ed Sheeran. At any point, he could have dropped a record to a waiting audience. But for Smith, his debut needed to prove more than just his songwriting ability.

Growing up in Luton as the youngest of three, Smith quickly realised that his taste in music differed significantly from his siblings and peers. While the sounds around him were predominantly trap, rap and hip hop, he was obsessed with guitar music. “Early years and formative years, I found myself listening to the likes of Green Day or, even venturing into screamo with Black Veil Brides or wherever it may land. I just loved music - Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Mumford, Ben Howard and whoever it was. If you held a guitar, I probably loved you,” he laughs. “I think for me, that freedom and flexibility of being able to choose what I listen to was really amazing. I feel like that may underpin every decision I make in life - it's probably not the popular or most obvious decision, but I tend to stray to my own devices.”

A predominantly white, waist-coated genre of music at the time, that lack of representation didn’t bother Smith in his early years. “I think when you're that age, irrespective of background culture, what you look like, where you're from, you don't really pick up on that - it's more about what draws you in, and that's sort of the beauty of music. At the start it's faceless,” he says. “But when you venture into the history of the music and you go into where some of these genres or instruments originated from, it is fundamentally entrenched in black culture, which is also incredible.”

It wasn’t until his teens that the lack of representation really hit him. “I was like, wait a minute…” he laughs. “It's really hard to envision myself as being able to do this because my greatest inspiration was Ed Sheeran. I was like, I'm not a white ginger guy from Ipswitch, so I can't really see this happening. But then Labrinth comes about and I'm like, I can really do this.

“It's really nice to see the, I guess, reversion, and also evolution of the music and see how it's grown. It's awesome to see Shaboozey challenging some of these rhetorics that go on around country music, and looking at Labrinth at the way that he challenged pop music. It's such an incredible thing and hopefully within my own right, I’m doing that within the folk and pop space.”

Smith’s school was part of a government scheme that gave students the chance to learn an instrument. Embracing that opportunity, he taught himself every lunch break by watching tutorials on Youtube, until one birthday, his mum gave him his first guitar. “This £50 guitar, which is probably like 2mm of wood, was my first ever guitar, and I sat and just played and played and played,” he says.

He began playing daytime open mic nights from the age of twelve, until his friend and now guitarist, Joe Devine, would talk bartenders into letting him sneak in for the evening shows. “I used to go through all the back doors of pubs, play and then get out immediately as I was finished, and that's how I did it until I was of age,” he says.

As school ended, Smith was faced with a decision - pursue a career in music or go to university. “My mom was always great at being able to identify that it was truly a passion of mine. So, she allowed me to play as long as my grades were good,” he says. “We had a conversation between the summer of university and the summer of A Level about what I wanted to do. And she was like, ‘I'm more than happy for you to go and pursue music, but you got to be sure that if you do it, you put absolutely everything into it.’ I realised right then I wasn't ready to do music because I didn't want that pressure.”

Fresh from graduating, his consultancy business began to bloom, but again, it was Smith’s mum who had the words of wisdom. “We had that same conversation when she found I was doing super well at my consultancy, but wasn't necessarily happy,” he says. “This time round, she supported me and said, ‘If you want to quit your job, quit your job, but you better damn sure make sure that you're doing this music thing properly.’”

A friend showed him TikTok, and Smith began posting to the platform, cautiously at first. “I thought everything I'd seen online was just people dancing and clapping and playing pranks and I was like, I don't want to be on that app,” he laughs. “I tried it and pretty quickly I saw there was some movement and motion. I just stuck with it and then seven months down the line I was like, I could actually really make this work for a career. And the rest is sort of like history.”

Smith received a cold DM from US-based manager Eric Parker and the pair began working together on a growth strategy - just slowly building an audience. “It was definitely a test of patience. I think it's easier to be patient when you've already waited sixteen years to even be looked at. It's like, what's another few months, or what's another few years?” he says. “I feel like the exact same sort of mentality was applied to my album because I think most people would know that commercially it would have made sense to have ‘Stargazing,’ ‘Nice to Meet You,’ and run into an album. But I didn't want my career decisions to be based on critical mass - it just feels so unmusical and it doesn't feel like why I do what I do.”

Instead, Smith has built a solid fanbase off the back of a year and a half of non-stop touring, most notably opening for Ed Sheeran. One of the tracks on My Mess, My Heart, My Life, “Dublin Lights”, is a rush of trad storytelling that instantly brings to mind Sheeran’s infamous “Galway Girl.” “It's funny cuz I wrote that song with Ed. I've never actually put that together,” he laughs. “We were talking about Irish culture. We were on tour for quite a while and it'd be such a common theme. He grew up with a part-Irish family and spent a lot of time in Ireland. From the history of Jamaican and Irish people in Luton, all of my friends were Irish and I'd go and stay over there in Dublin or in Cork or wherever it may be, and they played such a big part in my life. Joe [Devine], he's from a completely Irish family, and so his family are playing trad on the track. It was my nod to the Irish element of my life, and I think the album tries to do that, tries to nod at a lot of things that people just don't know about me.”

Talking to Smith, not only is he genuinely interesting - intelligent and articulate - he’s also warm and easy to engage with. His similarities to Sheeran are more than just musical. “I think that's really what's at the core of Ed Sheeran. He's a human being,” Smith says. “I think you could be amazing at business and amazing at music, but if you're a terrible person, you're not going to go very far. I feel like that's what it's all built around, just being a good human. I feel like if you keep that at the center of your ethos, that's the most important.”

Across My Mess, My Heart, My Life, Smith introduces that humanity with songs that are steeped in emotional context and layered storytelling. Embracing that sense of intimacy helps balance the big hitter choruses with the quieter, more introspective moments. To try and create the most authentic songwriting experience, he delved back into years of old notes from therapy sessions, immersing himself in past trauma. “I think it was a really emotionally exhausting album to write, but again, I stumbled into that. I didn’t go - I need to write a debut album, I'm going to fetch out my therapy notes,” he says. “I got into some songs and I was writing from the perspective of being sixteen, twenty-one or twenty-three. It's like, I don't want to think about it retrospectively. I want to put myself back there. So it was a super cathartic experience and I think it was really needed because it enabled me to process so many things that I'd thought I'd processed, but not as an adult.

“I think therapy is a continual journey. You may figure all of your stuff out at eighteen, but hey, when you get to twenty-seven and life throws its stresses at you, it's going to hit you in another way. It's a continual journey.”

It was also important to Smith that he allow his fans to get to know the real person behind the music, not just the footstomping troubadour off the radio. “It's like, Ed Sheeran isn't just ‘Shape of You’, and he isn't just ‘Thinking Out Loud’, and he isn't just ‘Supermarket Flowers’. He’s sort of like all of them,” he says. “I think for me, definitely in the last three years, there's been days where I don't feel great. Singing ‘Stargazing’ on a day where you don't feel great is a really confusing experience. Singing ‘Nice To Meet You’ when you're going through stuff - it's a really confusing place to be. I think, having more of a catalogue to be able to pull from on how I'm feeling that day and having more of a catalogue for people to understand me from is definitely, I think, going to be helpful and make this a lot more sustainable than it's been.”

One constant across the record is his producer and writing partner Peter Fenn. He even provided inspiration for Smith. The song “Heaven”, a glistening cavalcade of melodic romanticism over a driving pulse, is about Fenn’s introduction to family life. The pair first met when Smith was on a writing trip in LA, and Fenn was transitioning from an artist career into the studio. “Honestly, it felt like meeting a long, long lost sibling from day one,” Smith says. “Within our first hour of meeting each other, we wrote this record called ‘My Home’, which was the first song that really gained traction for me. The relationship was so natural, so real, and so authentic. He's just become so integral to my world.”

Written and recorded in the midst of an impossibly busy touring schedule, Fenn was flown to wherever Smith had capacity to work with him. “Literally, we've written on buses, in dressing rooms, even in car journeys - I'll be driving and he'll be playing a little MIDI keyboard next to me with a voice note on. We just sort of write anywhere and everywhere,” he laughs. “I always say that this album was the most chaotic album to put together, but I think because it's us two in almost every environment, hopefully it feels cohesive.”

For all the big singles, like the explosive stomp of “Drive Safe” with Niall Horan, there are the softer, more intimate moments like album opener “My Mess”, Smith delivering diaristic catharsis over a delicate guitar riff. Just as Fenn’s production is a constant - crisp and rich in layered textures, Smith’s smooth and emotive voice leads every track. His ability to write songs that hook effortlessly and instantly is a rare talent, but it's in his storytelling that you find the real magic. Just like his contemporaries, and heroes, Smith paints vivid pictures in his lyricism. That artistry is particularly confronting when he deals with more uncomfortable topics.

On the impactfully sparse and intentional “Sertraline”, he tackles anxiety and depression. For Smith, it goes back to the dual burden of being a young black man in a position to speak openly about emotions often buried. “I never signed up to be a role model or I never signed up to lead the way with my lantern. But it's the reality of the place that I sit in. And I think being avoidant of that or dismissive of that would be an injustice to how my mom raised me. And she always raised me on the premise of, if there's positive change to be made, make it. And if you could say something, say it,” he says. “For me, this album was a real opportunity not only to tell my story and to be able to do a lot of the selfish parts in self-therapising and processing a lot of the trauma that I've been through, but a real opportunity to go - these are some of the things that I learned about myself. Hopefully, many people who come from where I come from and sound like how I do could relate to it.”

Another powerful moment on the record is “Mary’s Song” which brings together the stories of two of Smith’s friends who experienced domestic abuse. Juxtaposed with a bouncy earworm hook in the chorus, the song’s narrative creeps through on repeat listens, a slow emotional burn. “‘Mary's Song’ came from two women in my life, two friends who had been through super similar experiences. We're still really close to this day. The way they carried themselves with such resilience and such joy had always been so confusing to me, cuz they had every right to be miserable and every right to shut off the world and every right to be negative,” he says. “When I was eighteen I made the change of realising that the way that men and women navigate the world are completely different, and these were the two stories that sort of made me realise that. Having spoken to them and told them about what I wanted to write about and put on the album, and presented them with the song, they were both really happy that their experiences were being heard because a lot of these things happen every single day in silence, and the people to talk about them are the ones who are directly affected. Whereas the people who are perpetrating never actually take accountability. So I think a part of this is taking accountability on behalf of men, but also being able to share and voice experiences which are really important, I think, for people to understand and call out.”

With a full year of touring ahead, culminating in a sold out show at London’s O2 this November, Smith’s rollercoaster schedule continues to accelerate. My Mess My Heart My Life, with its genuine depth and open relatability will only serve as a catalyst. “I think the thing that I've learned now is the power of no, and that has been sort of like my best friend,” he says. “You come into this industry and I guess it’s a catch 22 - if you say no then opportunities quickly squander. So it's like, you say yes to absolutely everything and then you burn out. And that's sort of what I did. But now I'm understanding, and I guess I have the privilege to say no more and that's helped a lot.”

Staying true to himself has served him well so far. Now it’s time for the world to meet the real Myles Smith.