Out gay crooner Sam Smith has announced he will be taking a hiatus from his music career to find new inspiration for his sophomore album and to focus on dating.
“I am sad, but also it feels right,” Smith told ET backstage at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday, where he performed as part of CBS Radio's We Can Survive concert event in honor of breast cancer awareness. “It's my last performance in America, and it feels right to do it in such a beautiful setting.”
“I've been going now for three years nonstop and it feels right for me to just go home and just live my life and be a 23-year-old,” he said. “My love life, the downs and ups, it never stops, so I'm always inspired by stuff like that, but it'd be good to spend some time dating.”
Earlier this year, we reported that Smith was dating Jonathan Zeisel, who he met on the set of his music video, “Like I Can.” The pair broke up in late January.
Smith says that while he has some idea of what he wants to do in his follow-up to his Grammy Award-winning debut album, In The Lonely Hour, though he acknowledges he has a lot more work ahead:
“I have been writing a little bit,” he shared. “Already I have a little bit of a direction of what I want to say and what I want to do and the sound, how I want things to sound, but there's a long way to go.”
