Songfacts®:

• Following his guest vocals on hit tunes by Disclosure and Naughty Boy, Sam Smith officially launched his solo career with this song about resisting the lure of record label cash. He told the BBC the Two Inch Punch-produced upbeat cut was, "about someone in the industry who offended me recently and I had to get it off my chest."
• Sam Smith wrote the song about an artist who was doing the job for the wrong reasons. He recalled to Digital Spy: "I had two writing sessions booked in with someone in the music industry and on the first one we basically got into an argument and the person I was writing with was making music for the wrong reasons. They hardly wrote anything and they were also about the material things. They were just looking for money. He was basically asking me to write him a hit song, so I could buy him a new car. I didn't get too angry, except he got quite malicious about the whole thing."
  
  "I remember just thinking in the moment, 'I'm not going to do the writing session the next day with you, because this is just bulls--t'. So the next day I rang up Two Inch Punch and I actually went in with him and we wrote a song about that guy."
• Sam Smith launched his solo career with this song as he felt it was the perfect stepping stone between his hit collaborations with Disclosure and Naughty Boy and his more soulful In the Lonely Hour sound. "We all knew that it wasn't a song that was going to sell albums as such," he told Digital Spy. "It felt like a link."
  
  "I was very aware that I wanted to bring the audience that I had captured with 'La La La' and 'Latch' and bring them with me into my record," Smith added. "To do that, I think it was right not to jump straight into 'Stay With Me.' People would have thought, 'What the hell are you doing?' 'Money On My Mind', I feel, lyrically, set my audience up for the rest of the record. It's honest and brutal."