Songfacts®:

• This soul-infused gospel ballad features Timbaland on production duties, and comes complete with a full-fledged, choir backing.
  
  Maybe I'll pray, pray
  Maybe I'll pray
  I have never believed in you, no
  But I'm gonna pray
  
  As a teenager, Sam Smith attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Bishop's Stortford. Though he admits on "Pray" to having turned his back on the Christian faith, it seems he has not forgotten the lessons he learned at the religious educational establishment.
• The song was prompted by time spent in Iraq with the charity War Child. Smith told Billboard:
  
  "I spent five days in Mosul and came back ­embarrassed that I had known so little about the world and other people's lives. 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."
• Smith performed this as the Grammy Awards in 2018.
• Sam Smith teamed up with Logic for a remix of "Pray", which features the Maryland rapper spitting a guest verse. The new version was released as the third single from The Thrill of It All.
• A video for the Logic-featuring version of the track was shot by director Joe Conner. It was filmed at Italy's famed Villa Erba, a 19th century villa near Lake Como.