The Real-Life Loves and Heartbreaks Behind This Year’s Grammy Nominees

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For whatever news the wrangling over songwriting credits may make, “Stay With Me” remains of interest to most fans because of just how far out on his sleeve Sam Smith wears his heart when he sings it. Along with his talent, Smith’s emotional candor is why his chart-topping song and debut album, In the Lonely Hour, are favored to sweep the top categories at the Grammys Feb. 8.

Smith isn’t the only artist who won a Grammy nomination (or six, in his case) by spinning real-life heartache into musical gold. Artists ranging from Coldplay to Miley Cyrus to Toni Braxton also mined their breakups for musical passion. Amid all this sad confessionalism, John Legend stood out by getting a hit and a Grammy nod by parading his personal romantic bliss for all the world to see. Wouldn’t you like to just hit him with a wrecking ball?

Here are some of the real stories behind the tear-jerking verses:

SAM SMITH (In the Lonely Hour nominated for Album of the Year, Pop Vocal Album; “Stay With Me” nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Pop Solo Vocal Performance; Best New Artist)

Smith has said that he wanted “Stay With Me” to explore the feelings following a one-night stand. But most of his debut album was inspired by a one-way love that never got as far as a first night. “I’ve never been in a relationship before. I’ve only been in unrequited relationships where people haven’t loved me back,” Smith told Fader magazine last summer. “I guess I’m a little bit attracted to that in a bad way. In the Lonely Hour is about a guy that I fell in love with last year, and he didn’t love me back. I think I’m over it now, but I was in a very dark place… I told him about it recently, and obviously it was never going to go the way I wanted it to go, because he doesn’t love me. But it was good as a form of closure, to get it off my chest and tell him. I feel better for it. I feel almost like I signed off this part of my life where I keep giving myself to guys who are never going to love me back.”

In a subsequent conversation with The Sun, he revealed more about the object of his affections: “No, he’s not gay. Nothing ever happened between us. I know he loved me too, but not in that way… I’ve told him everything and our relationship is great now. But he’s very wary of how he acts around me… I feel nothing towards him now. I’ll always love him, but I’m not in love with him anymore.”

As 2014 came to a close, Smith seemed to have found that relationship he was looking for, with boyfriend Jonathan Zeizel, whom he met on the set of one of his videos. But on Jan. 20, he told a Toronto crowd that the romance was kaput. “This next song is a song that’s very, very dear to my heart,” he said, introducing “Good Thing.” “When I fell in love with the person who inspired the majority of this record, I had this fight in me to basically end it when I could’ve carried on and made In The Lonely Hour part two… The day before I wrote this song, I basically went on my phone and I deleted their number and I deleted everything. The reason why this song is very special for me today is that I’ve actually had to do a very similar thing today with someone I’ve been seeing. So bear with me with this one.”

Smith later tweeted thanks to the Toronto audience for lifting his spirits on “a really sad day.” If you hear a little extra throb in Smith’s voice when he performs on the Grammys, you’ll know why.

COLDPLAY (Ghost Stories nominated forPop Vocal Album, Music Film; “Sky Full of Stars” nominated for Pop Duo/Group Performance)

Ironically, the initial announcement of Coldplay’s latest album came via Gwyneth Paltrow’s website, GOOP. But by the time it came out, Chris Martin and Paltrow’s separation had been announced and fans were scouring the Ghost Stories lyric sheets for clues of disenchantment. The Washington Post trumpeted its album review with the provocative headline: “This is What a Conscious Uncoupling Sounds Like.” The paper’s critic called it “a historical document of a celebrity divorce as a slow-motion car crash” and added, “There has never been such a revealing relationship album written by one celebrity we felt as if we knew about another celebrity we also felt as if we knew, even if its revelations may not all be intentional. This isn’t just an album of garment-rending breakup songs, it’s an album with giddy newfound love songs. Songs written about someone who clearly isn’t Gwyneth Paltrow, by someone who was married to Gwyneth Paltrow at the time. So it’s awkward.”

Privacy-craving Chris Martin categorically refused to refer to his wife by name when they were still happily wed, so he wasn’t about to open up to interviewers about just how close to home Ghost Stories really hit. Inquiring minds were left with lyrical crumbs: “Used to be you here beside me/Used to be your arms around me/Your body on my body.” “Wait for your call, love/The call never came.” “Cut me into two/And with all your magic/I disappear from view.” No doubt about it: He was feeling spectral.

KATY PERRY (PRISM nominated for Pop Vocal Album: “Dark Horse” nominated for Pop Duo/Group Performance)

Chris Martin wasn’t the only one preoccupied with ghosts. In the song entitled simply “Ghost,” Perry sings, “You sent a text/It’s like the wind changed your mind,” referring to the reportedly marriage-ending text message Russell Brand sent her at the end of 2011. Another even more anguished song, “By the Grace of God,” referred to suicidal thoughts. “That song is evident of how tough it really was at a certain point,” she told Billboard. “I asked myself, ‘Do I want to endure? Should I continue living?’ All the songs are real-life moments. I can only write autobiographically. I put all the evidence in the music. I tell my fans if they want to know the real truth about stuff, just listen to the songs.” In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, Perry said, “What I wanted to call this record at first was Adult Reality. Teenage Dream was me so high on that cotton-candy cloud, and then it’s like I got punched in the face and kicked down the stairs a couple of times.”

But Brand was not the sole focus of the album’s songs. Several songs — both cheerful and not — were written about her then-current relationship with John Mayer. Perry wrote “It Takes Two” about her first breakup with Mayer, but they’d gotten back together by the time she recorded the tune — hence his guitar appearance on the track. (“I wrote it while we were still apart, and… he was really moved,” she told Elle U.K.) For the songs about her second bust-up with Mayer, and any early-stages odes to current beau Diplo, we’ll have to wait for Perry’s next album.

ED SHEERAN (X nominated for Album of the Year, Pop Vocal Album)

Of all the revealing songs on Sheeran’s sophomore album, X, which is up in the Grammys’ top category, the most sensational is “Don’t,” with a bleeped chorus that tell women what not to do with his love. The Pharrell Williams-co-produced track finds Sheeran dishing out lyrical justice to a cheating gal pal. “The last album was more young and dewy-eyed and innocent,” he told Billboard. “I’ve still got very nice songs on this record. But some of them are bite-y. The story in ‘Don’t’ is 100 percent true. I could have gotten nastier; there was more s--- that I didn’t put in. I was seeing someone for a bit of time, and then they ended up physically involved with one of my friends in the same hotel that we were staying in, while I was downstairs. And I feel like: Treat people how you want to be treated. If I show courtesy and respect to someone, I expect to receive it. When we’re in the same hotel, and I’m downstairs at my party and you’re upstairs doing that, that’s disrespectful.”

Who was doing the X-rated disrespecting? Virtually 100 percent of fans believe it to reflect a very short-lived relationship with Ellie Goulding, who was rumored to have taken up even more briefly with One Direction’s Niall Horan. Sheeran refused to name names for Billboard (or anyone else), but said she’d know who she was. “If you date a songwriter, be prepared to have songs written about you. If you do nice things, you’ll have nice songs. And if you do f—-ed-up things, you’ll get a horrible song.” The horrible-ness was wonderful, fans agreed.

MILEY CYRUS (Bangerz nominated for Pop Vocal Album)

Cyrus didn’t actually write the song “Adore You,” but with lines like “We’re meant to be in holy matrimony,” it seemed clear that she meant to allude to her failed engagement to Liam Hemsworth. She eventually confirmed that not just that song but the entire sequence of the Bangerz album told the recent story of her life. “I think it says that with starting with ‘Adore You’ and ending with ‘Someone Else,’” she told Ellen DeGeneres a month after the album was released. “I feel like you can really find like this arch of, like, growth.”

She thanked Hemsworth in the album credits, using his “FeFe” nickname, although there may have been a bit of irony intended: “I could not have made this album without one person… FE. Thank you for inspiring me.” Did she mean to thank her famous ex for prompting lyrics like these? “It seemed like everything was going fine, then I accidentally saw a few things in your cell/I don’t really have much to say/I was over it the second that I saw her name/I got two letters for you/One of them is F and the other is U/Because what you gotta do is get yourself a clue.

TONI BRAXTON & BABYFACE (Love, Marriage & Divorce nominated for R&B Album)

There’s just something about a title like Love, Marriage & Divorce that screams “non-fiction.” And in the aftermath of this unusually candid pairing, Braxton and Babyface were up-front about having gotten material out of their former marriages to Keri Lewis and Tracey Edmonds, respectively. “The reality is that there was a connection that wasn’t really there,” Babyface said of his ex in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about the album. “We loved each other but we weren’t really in love with each other. It was more the idea of it falling apart and me holding onto the image of what I thought we were.” He didn’t confirm who specifically he had in mind when he sang, “I did you wrong so many times yes/So I know why you crossed the line/Oh but girl I never dreamed you’d cheat on me.” 

Braxton, for her part, told Billboard, “My divorce wasn’t final when Babyface and I were working together. Because I was angry and hurt, there were still some I-hate-you moments for me. But they were short-lived.” Later, Braxton got in a little bit of trouble with an off-handed racial remark she made while discussing the album’s subject matter on the TV talk show Bethenny. “I am in L.A. and my ex-husband is there but we get along great. We are very caucasian, very white, about it,” she quipped, to not-quite-unanimous acclaim.

RYAN ADAMS (“Gimme Something Good” nominated for Rock Performance, Rock Song; Ryan Adams nominated for Rock Album)

Adams is closed-mouthed about all things personal, to the point that last fall he hung up on a radio personality who pressed him on the air for details about the rocker’s marriage to singer/actress Mandy Moore. So there’s little chance of any confirmation that any of the songs on his self-titled album from last year were about the dissolution of their union. Still, some found a clue in the fact that on Jan. 23, just hours before the couple’s separation was announced, Adams was in the Late Night With Seth Meyers studio taping an acoustic performance of “Gimme Something Good” that Relix called “gut-wrenching.” Sample lyrics of the doubly Grammy-nominated song: “I can’t talk/My mind is so blank/So I’m going for a walk/I’ve got nothing left to say…/I was playing dead/It didn’t make a sound/Holding my breath/Going underground.”

Maybe Moore will be more forthcoming about the subject of the songs when she gets around to making another album. That may be delayed, though. Just two months prior to the announcement of the split, she told E! News that “I’m going to work with my husband on it and make it at his studio, so his influence will be all over it.” Now that Adams probably won’t be producing it, can we still recommend a cover of… “Gimme Something Good”?

JOHN LEGEND (“All of Me” nominated for Pop Solo Performance)

After all that aching, how about a Grammy nominee who opened up his songbook to confess that he’s… happily married? Legend wrote “All of Me” for his wife, Chrissy Teigen, whom he married in 2013, six years after she modeled on the set of his “Stereo” video. It became the biggest hit of his career and, hard as it is to believe, the first time he’d reached the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100. “Don’t even get me started,” Teigen told an interviewer. “It’s the worst because every time I try to complain about him my friends are like, ‘Yeah, but he did that song.’ I’m like, ‘Who cares!?’… It’s a great song and I love it, it’s beautiful and I cried, but trust me, at the end of the day, he’s still a man and he’s still going to anger you.” In Vibe, she sounded more appreciative. “It’s so personal for me, I don’t really listen to it like a song,” she said. “I listen to it as like, ‘Oh, that’s my husband, he’s singing about us.’” If you need any more reason to be jealous of the impossibly sexy power couple, check out their glamorous photo spread in the current issue of GQ for more haterade fuel.