Three days ago, literary legend Zadie Smith got on the BBC and did something that made the internet collectively sit up straighter: she sang. Not just a soft backing ooh or a polite harmony – she performed Vivid Light live with Dev Hynes, the Blood Orange mastermind and her longtime friend, sounding uncannily like someone who’s spent a lifetime in music.
Which, honestly, she kind of has. We just haven’t been paying attention.
What was her recent performance?
Smith and Hynes' BBC Live Session was intimate, glowing, and full of the unspoken shorthand that happens only between artists who genuinely understand each other (which makes sense given they're long-time friends and formerly NYC neighbours). Dev and Zadie delivered vocal lines with a warm, steady vibrato that matched the version on Essex Honey, the album she’s featured on. And suddenly everyone was asking: Wait… is Zadie Smith a singer now?
Will she release her own music?
Right now? No. And historically, singing has been something she’s treated as a private joy – an outlet rather than a career lane.
But something feels different this time. Her contribution to Essex Honey wasn’t incidental. And that BBC performance proved her performance prowess. Could she release her own project someday? An EP? A set of standards recalling her jazz years? We do know she feels strongly about music – she even said as much to Hynes in their chat via Interview Magazine back in August of 2023:
"The reason people are so crazy about music, the reason they’re throwing things at musicians onstage, is because it really matters to them, whereas literature doesn’t matter in the same way. I know because I love literature and I love music, but at my funeral I’m not having anyone read out chapters of a book. It’s going to be songs."
Has she released music before?
Not officially – but this is not some sudden left turn. Smith has had music woven into her life for decades.
As a teenager, she was deeply into musical theatre – the expressive, big-voiced, full-feeling kind. Later, at Cambridge, she actually sang jazz. It was a part of her life that existed before fame, before first novels, before she became Zadie Smith™.
And across the years, music only grew more personal for her. She and Hynes have been musical friends and collaborators for ages. Her ear is serious, too: she’s spoken often about the artists who shaped her, none more than Tracy Chapman, whom she wrote about in a 2025 Guardian essay with something close to reverence.
Chapman’s 1988 performance at the Free Nelson Mandela concert, Smith recalls, was life-changing. Not just musically, but existentially. Chapman looked like the people Smith grew up with, sang about working-class struggle, and did it with a poetic directness that Smith has been chasing in her own work – fiction or otherwise – ever since. When Zadie sings, you can hear shades of that influence: the clarity, the honesty, the refusal to perform artifice.
