Songfacts®:

• Jay raps about his mom Gloria Carter during this song's first verse. Gloria married Adnis "AJ" Reeves at a young age, and together they had four children. However all the time she was hiding her real sexual feelings ("Had to pretend so long that she's a thespian") and eventually Gloria came out as gay to her family.
  
  This marks the first time that Jay has spoken publicly about his mother being a lesbian and we hear him come out in support of her same-sex relationship. That's Gloria Carter herself on the outro.
• Throughout the remainder of the song, Jay raps about turning pain to triumph. He explained to iHeart Radio:
  
  "'Smile' is just what it is. There are gonna be bad times, and those bad times can do two things: they can get you in a place where you're stuck in a rut, or it can make your future that much better because you've experienced these things."
• This samples throughout the song Stevie Wonder's 1976 Songs In The Key of Life track "Love's in Need of Love Today."
• Chicago beatsmith No I.D. produced the entire 4:44 album. Their collaboration started with No I.D. asking Jay for a playlist of music that he listens to from which the producer chose several to sample. "Love's in Need of Love Today" was one of the songs on the playlist.
• Jay-Z recalled during a Rap Radar Podcast interview how he had to convince his mother to let him release "Smile."
  
  "We had a beautiful conversation, and it lead to me making that song, and I didn't have the permission to make the song," he said. "When she first heard the song, she was like 'absolutely not.' I was like man, this is so important. So many people in the world, hiding, and things like this, and this'll help you."
• Though Gloria Carter initially balked at her son going public with her secret, once Jay-Z won her over she presented him with a poem she wrote about her hidden homosexuality.
  
  "It changed the dynamic of our relationship," Jay said during an appearance on LeBron James and Maverick Carter's HBO show, The Shop: Interrupted. "When she first heard that song she got super defensive."
  
  "I was in LA and she flew out to LA and then she left and was like, 'No. We talked through it. And then when she flew back to LA, she had written a poem," he added. "She wrote that on the plane. It came with the American Airlines note pad... I was like, 'You got bars, ma!'"
  
  Jay-Z featured his mom reciting her poem as this song's outro.
• This is the second time Jay-Z has featured his mother, Gloria Carter, on one of his songs, following his "December 4th" track from The Black Album.