Why Lily Allen was “embarrassed” while writing ‘Smile’
With nearly two decades of hindsight, no song seems more perfect for 2006 than ‘Smile’ by Lily Allen. A perfect fusion of soul and pop, ‘Smile’ hit right as fellow Londoner Amy Winehouse dropped her iconic sophomore LP, Back to Black. A new revolution in music was taking over, one when 1960s horn sections and retro-fuelled odes to terrible partners were all the rage. Allen even recorded the song in Simlish. For the singer, it was capturing lightning in a bottle on her first go-around.
“When I set out to do this I knew I wanted to make songs that sounded a) up to date and now and b) really organic,” Allen told Michael Hubbard in 2006. “Because you can’t get really good players without spending loads of money these days, the only other option is to sample. The first song I ever wrote was ‘Smile’.”
“We just went through about seven or eight sample lyrics, found a beat, put it all in,” she added. “Then when it comes to writing lyrics I write… like a rapper would, I suppose, with absolutely no melody involved whatsoever, I’m just getting my flow sorted. Then I write the whole text of the song and then ad-lib the melody into the microphone. It’s not terribly clever!”
“I remember writing the verse and the chorus and then them going, ‘OK, we just need a middle eight,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ So I had to run out of the studio and call my manager. I was so embarrassed,” Allen explained in Daniel Rachel’s The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters.
Allen wrote the song with Iyiola Babalola and Darren Lewis, professional songwriters whose credits would later include songs by Shakira and Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger. The latter credit would prove somewhat ironic when Allen lashed out at the Pussycat Dolls following the banning of ‘Smile’ from MTV due to language.
“I got really offended when my single ‘Smile’ got banned [during after-school hours] from MTV in the UK because it had the word fuck in it,” Allen told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. “They said, ‘We don’t want kids to grow up too quickly.’ But then you have Paris Hilton and the Pussycat Dolls taking their clothes off and gyrating up against womanizing, asshole men, and that’s acceptable. You’re thinking your kids are gonna grow up quicker because they heard the word fuck than from thinking they should be shoving their tits in people’s faces?”
‘Smile’ might have catapulted Allen to worldwide fame, but in the immediate aftermath of the single’s success, it would become something of an albatross for the singer. When Allen appeared at the 2007 South By Southwest Festival, she admitted to the crowd that she had grown tired of what was to be her signature song. Even when Allen scored additional number one hits in the UK with ‘The Fear’ and ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, ‘Smile’ was still the song that was most associated with her.
Check out ‘Smile’ down below.
