Sam Smith's new album, The Thrill of it All, will be coming out November 3. He already released "Too Good At Goodbyes," and this week he shared the album's second single “Pray.”

 

Smith explained that “Pray” was influenced by his trip to Iraq with the ­charity War Child.

 

“I spent five days in Mosul and came back embarrassed that I had known so little about the world and other people’s lives,” he said. “I went back to that great Nina Simone quote, that it is important to speak about the times you live in. I hadn’t done that; I’d just written a bunch of songs about love. So I wanted to write about how I’m now starting to open my eyes, at 25, to what is going on in the rest of the world, and that it’s not always pretty.”