Earlier this year, there was a half-serious conspiracy theory floated by fans on Twitter that Adele and Sam Smith were the same person.
Hear them out: Both are white 20-something Brits who use the musical conventions of the American South in the ’60s to craft sad, swingy ballads for people twice their age. Both have won many Grammys, and an Oscar each for singing a Bond theme. When Adele is on an album cycle, Smith, whose second album, “The Thrill of It All,” was released Friday, lays low, and vice versa. No one remembers seeing them in the same place at the same time.
But Adele is one of the only subjects that can be agreed upon in 2017, a Teflon-wrapped unicorn who can put across some very tepid pop songs through the sheer force of her personality, something Smith is unable to do. She can get away with anything; Smith has made a side career out of stepping in it.
An uneasy fame
Ever since his breakout feature turn on Disclosure’s 2012 hit “Latch,” Sam Smith and fame have uncomfortably coexisted. He sold more than 12 million copies of “In the Lonely Hour,” his 2014 debut. He came out as gay around the time of its release and took extreme care to avoid alienating mainstream fans with overt references to a male love interest, even scrubbing the gender pronouns from a cover of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.”