Divorce, weight, music, Judy Garland: Ten things about Adele and her new 30 album
Adele releases her new album, 30, on Friday, November 19.
Adele Adkins sighed and looked out the window of her Dublin hotel. It was January 2008 and the little-known 19-year-old singer was in Ireland to meet the media. She’d just been asked how she felt about potentially becoming famous. The thought filled her with disquiet.
“I don't really want to be a role model, to be honest,” she said. “It's a bit of a burden when that happens, because, the littlest thing you do wrong, you'll have people going ‘how could you? My daughter loves you.””
Of even bigger concern to her were the constant Amy Winehouse comparisons. In a way it made sense the two would be spoken of in the same breath. Both were working-class Londoners from non-show business backgrounds who had attended the BRIT school in Croydon. And who had broken through with old school songs brimming with regret and heartache.
And yet Adele was understandably anxious to step outside Winehouse’s shadow. “I love Amy Winehouse,” she told me when asked about the comparisons. “[But] it's a bit annoying when there’s an article about me and it says Amy Winehouse and not Adele in the headline. On the whole, though, I think other people are getting more annoyed by it than me.”
Thirteen years later, the only person Adele is compared to is Adele. On November 19 she releases her fourth album, 30. Her previous three – all named for her age at the time she was living the events about which she sings – have racked up combined sales of 120 million.
Her second, 21, is the century’s biggest seller, with sales of 31 million (25, from 2015, is his fourth place with 22 million). In other words, at a time when even major artists struggle to move units, Adele effortlessly sets tills chiming. But what can fans expect from 30?
Heartache has long been a driving force in Adele’s music. And that’s never truer than with 30, written following her divorce from charity entrepreneur Simon Konecki. The first single, Easy On Me, was addressed to her son Angelo – expressing the hope that when he is older he can forgive her for splitting from his father (the divorce was finalised just last March).
The theme of loss and self-renewal will seemingly carry through to the rest of the LP, with song titles such as Cry Your Heart Out, Love Is A Game, To Be Loved, I Drink Wine and Can’t Be Together. If these are any clue it’s going to be a weepie for the ages.
The song Hold On finds Adele wrestling with her feelings about being away from her child. “Right now I truly hate being me,” goes one line, Adele explained to Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview with the queen of chat.
“My friends always would say, ‘Hold on’ when I would feel like the lyrics in the verse,” she said. “But it was just exhausting trying to keep going with it. It's a process. You know, the process of a divorce, the process of being a single parent.”
With 14 tracks, 30 is Adele’s tour de force and her lengthiest to date. But, then, she had a lot to get off her chest, telling Rolling Stone that her split from Konecki left her “f***ing devastated”.
“If I can transform my strength and my body like this, surely I can do it to my emotions and to my brain and to my inner well-being,” Adele told Rolling Stone, revealing she had become a regular gym-goer. “That was what drove me. It just coincided with all of the emotional work that I was doing with myself as a visual for it, basically.”
After having Angelo, Adele says she became a stickler for punctuality and for being flawless at everything. However, while working on 30 she learned to become more relaxed and to embrace messiness as an aesthetic. She had been advised to reject the idea of flawlessness for its own sake by Inflo, aka Dean Wynton Josiah Cover, the mysterious producer behind the London group SAULT and a collaborator with Little Simz on her Sometimes I Might Be Introvert LP.
He advised her to listen again to classic records by Marvin Gaye, Al Green and the Carpenters. She told Rolling Stone: “He was like, ‘If you really listen, this is a mess. If you really listen, people are playing the wrong notes. They’re coming in at the wrong time. It’s all about the energy and the atmosphere that that creates. Why would you want anyone to do another take if you’ve just got the most perfect take that there is?’”
Adele lapped up the Renée Zelweggger-starring Judy Garland biopic, Judy. And she wondered why nobody was writing big, florid Garland-style songs any more. She decided to right this wrong with Strangers By Nature, the first track on 30.
“You know in the old movies when someone’s having a flashback or a memory to something else, and it’s almost like they’ll shoot a river or a pond and the water goes all ripply?” she said of the composition. “It reminds me of that.”
Adele has worried her new songs would be tied in the public imagination to the ongoing public health crisis. At the same time, she accepts that, as 30 is rooted in a specific period in her life, she need to put it out sooner rather than later. Otherwise, it risks becoming a museum piece with which she is unable to connect.
“No one wants to remember this period of time,” she explained to Rolling Stone. “Obviously, it’s way better than last year, but the day my album comes out, someone’s loved one will have died from Covid. For them, it’s going to be a reminder every time they hear Easy on Me on the radio.”
So while there will be a number of live shows, including two at Hyde Park in London in July 2022, she won’t be embarking on victory lap of the world’s arenas. “It’s too unpredictable, with all the rules and stuff,” she has explained. “I don’t want anyone coming to my show scared. And I don’t want to get Covid, either.”
Adele’s weight plunged after she began regularly going to the gym and cut out caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes. But she was shocked when this became a global talking point. In conversation with Oprah she insisted that her body image was for her alone to deal with and was really nobody else’s business. “I was body-positive then and I’m body-positive now. It’s not my job to validate how people feel about their bodies. … I’m trying to sort my own life out.”
Following the release of 30 on Friday, Adele will feature in an ITV special, An Audience With Adele. It airs on ITV/UTV at 7.30pm Sunday night and will be broadcast from the London Palladium.
- 30 is released on Friday November 19
