FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Alasdair McLellan for American Vogue
Part Seventy-One: Adele
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IN this feature…
that spotlights great women in music who are going to be idols of the future, it may seem a bit late down the line to include Adele! Many will say she is already an idol. This is true…though I feel she is going to be a legend of the future. Because there is talk of her fourth studio album at the moment, I wanted to include Adele in this feature. Her last studio album, 2015’s 25, was well-received by critics. The new album is going to be called 30 – rumour has it. She shared a teaser clip of the first single from the album, Easy on Me. That is out on Friday (15th). To spotlight and highlight a modern-day treasure, I am going to quote heavily from an interview Adele conducted with British Vogue recently. She talks about her upcoming album as one of self-redemption. It will be interesting to hear! Before getting to that interview, Entertainment Weekly reviewed 25 in 2015. This is what they had to say:
“There’s only one artist whose return, after a nearly five-year absence, is powerful enough to tilt pop culture on its axis like this—which can make it hard to bring the expectations for her new third album, 25, back down to human scale. The singer herself has already said in numerous interviews that she would be crazy to try to match the astonishing success of 2011’s 21, the sophomore knockout that went on to sell more than 30 million copies and saturate airwaves so thoroughly that the final notes of “Someone Like You” are probably still ricocheting off the surface of some distant planet.
Instead, she’s made a record that feels both new and familiar—a beautiful if safe collection of panoramic ballads and prettily executed detours. The album opener and lead single, “Hello,” is one of the most 21-esque tracks here: a lush, skyscraping anthem with goosebumps in every note. (Unsurprisingly, it’s also a smash; no other song this year sold faster.) The one that follows, an airy little postcard to an ex called “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” makes a sharp left turn, though the swerve is not nearly as outrageous as it could be considering that Swedish pop titan Max Martin is at the controls. Over a swooping refrain—“We’ve gotta let go of all our ghosts/We both know we ain’t kids no more”—and a hiccupy acoustic backbeat, she sounds glad to be in the business of forgiving, if not exactly forgetting.
The palatial piano ballads “Love in the Dark” and “All I Ask” feel much more expected: classic vehicles soaked in stately production and minor-key melancholy. But this isn’t the wronged woman of 21, pouring out the pain of her pulverized heart; it’s Adele at 27, a happily partnered young mom who can still access the most tender emotions—and knows too how much that catharsis means to her listeners—but is coming now from a calmer, more peaceful place. Her toddler son’s happy gurgles usher in the intro to “Sweetest Devotion,” and the voluptuous, slow-rolling “I Miss You” is as explicitly seductive as anything she’s ever done. (“Bring the floor up to my knees/Let me fall into your gravity/And kiss me back to life to see/Your body standing over me.”)
If anything, her sadness has transferred from lost love to lost time: The flamenco-guitar-kissed “Million Years Ago,” the Danger Mouse-helmed holy roller “River Lea,” and “When We Were Young,” penned with Canadian indie-rock wunderkind Tobias Jesso Jr., are all heavily steeped in nostalgia for the past. It’s easy to give her a hard time for that; is she even old enough to pine for anything further back than the hazy days of the early ‘00s? But she clearly means it sincerely, and the songs also happen to be three of the album’s best.
The hundreds of words already written here notwithstanding, there’s something about 25 that resists analyzing. Its lyrics and stylistic flourishes strive much more for simplicity than singularity, so in some ways it can be strange to watch such frenzied energy surround an artist who offers herself so transparently. Adele has always been a little bit of an anomaly, though: She’s an analog girl in a digital world, a pop colossus whose songs don’t conform to anything else on pop radio, an instantly recognizable star who prefers, most of the time, not to be seen. When she does appear in public, she’s a pro—funny and charming and toweringly glamorous. But unlike her peers (if you can call them that) she rejects almost all the perks and trappings of fame; her music is, for the most part, the only piece of her for sale, and even the songs themselves feel secondary to how she sings them. Her voice is a national monument, a ninth wonder; whatever she chooses to wrap it around is transformed and taken over. If that’s not the definition of a once-in-a-generation talent, what is?”.
Adele gave different interviews to U.S. and British Vogue. I am going to quote from the U.K. version. You can check out the U.S. edition. When speaking with British Vogue, she was asked about her new music. I have selected some portions of the (extensive) interview that caught my eye:
“She recorded it – like a lot of the album – for her son, she says, as, already a touch damp-eyed, I hand back her earbuds. “My son has had a lot of questions. Really good questions, really innocent questions, that I just don’t have an answer for.” Like? “‘Why can’t you still live together?’” She sighs. Gone are players and cads as song fodder (mostly). This is the deep sea of motherhood. “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness. It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal.”
She exhibits that rare combination of confidence and shell shock; a person emerging from a long period of self-examination. “It’s not like anyone’s having a go at me,” she says, “but it’s like, I left the marriage. Be kind to me as well. It was the first song I wrote for the album and then I didn’t write anything else for six months after because I was like, ‘OK, well, I’ve said it all,’” she says. The opening vocal, she explains, came to her when she “was singing a cappella in the shower” one day in 2018… Hang on, 2018? The years are hard to tot up. For the uninitiated, the thinking is that Adele Adkins wed Simon Konecki (founder of the charity Drop4Drop, her long-term partner and the father of their now nearly nine-year-old son) at some point in 2016 (she called him “my husband” when picking up a Grammy in early 2017), and they split in 2019, finalising their divorce earlier this year. But as with almost everything we think we know about Adele’s life, the reality is altogether different.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alasdair McLellan for American Vogue
She does love to keep us guessing. In February last year, she was filmed at her best friend’s wedding telling guests, “Expect my album in September!” “I know,” she cringes, her features settling into a what-am-I-like smile. “I was wasted. And I officiated the wedding…” News soon leaked she was ready, but then of course 2020 happened and everything was put on hold.
Image may contain Dance Pose Leisure Activities Human Person Adele Clothing and Apparel
Embellished silk-mix dress, and gold and diamond rings, Louis Vuitton. Poloneck body, Wolford. Tights, Falke. Studded patent-leather shoes, Valentino Garavani. STEVEN MEISEL
Yet the source material had already happened. “I assumed it would be about my divorce but it’s kind of not. Well,” she self-corrects, “that song obviously is.” (Over the course of our hours together, she will play me four more songs – they all sound pretty divorce-y to me.) She hands over the earbuds again and hits play on her phone. What follows is the discombobulating experience of listening to one of popular music’s greatest emoters singing an absolute belter of a relationship takedown while she watches for reactions.
Written about her first forays into dating post-marriage, the failings of men are writ large. Laziness, opaque emotions, remoteness, as she implores its subject to give her a bit more goddam respect. “No, but say what you really mean,” I laugh somewhat nervously when it’s over, and she looks pleased. “The chorus is like… with receipts!” she nods happily. “Can you imagine couples listening to it in the car? It’d be so awkward. I think a lot of women are going to be like, ‘I’m done.’
“That one is obviously about stuff that happened, but I wanted to put it on the album to show Angelo what I expect him to treat his partner like, whether it be a woman or a man or whatever. After going through a divorce, my requirements are sky-high. There’s a very big pair of shoes to fill.” Was the ending more drift than implosion? “Yeah,” she says, again carefully. “It just wasn’t… It just wasn’t right for me any more. I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first. But, yeah, nothing bad happened or anything like that.”
And yet: “My anxiety was so terrible, I’d forget what I had or hadn’t said to Angelo about separating.” Her therapist at the time suggested she record voice notes of their conversations so she wouldn’t wake up scared in the mornings, wondering what she’d told him (a snippet of one will appear on an album track dedicated to him). “Obviously Simon and I never fought over him or anything like that,” she says. “Angelo’s just like, ‘I don’t get it.’” She sighs. “I don’t really get it either. There are rules that are made up in society of what happens and doesn’t happen in marriage and after marriage, but I’m a very complex person. I’ve always let him know how I’m feeling from a very young age because I felt quite frazzled as an adult.”
She saw the effect in her own childhood. “My parents were definitely frazzled,” she says. Her mum, Penny Adkins, and dad, Mark Evans (who died earlier this year), broke up shortly after she was born, and her relationship with her father was strained through the years, to put it mildly. It’s taken a fair chunk of her adulthood to process it – and she partly blames too much walking on eggshells. “It’s not bad decisions that f**k up our kids,” she says, referencing the modish self-help guru Glennon Doyle (a favourite of hers), “it’s indecisions.” I ask how her anxiety is now. “I definitely learnt a lot of tools in my therapy, but I also just go with it. I find the anxiety gets worse when you try and get rid of it.”
“But I was terrified,” she says, of her lowest patch. “People were everywhere, trying to get stories, and I just hated it. I was embarrassed. I was really embarrassed. That thing of not being able to make something work. We’ve been trained as women to keep trying, even by the movies we watched when we were little. At the time it broke my heart, but I actually find it so interesting now. How we’re told to suck it up.” She shrugs. “Well, f**k that. Shall we go in and see the show?”.
Clearly, there has been a professional evolution to match the personal one. Musically, the range on the new album – from her usual singer-songwriter gear to midnight chanteuse to chilled Balearic club at sundown – has never been more eclectic. As ever, she is proud of the secrecy around it and her plans for its roll-out. “I think I’m actually one of the most punk artists around,” she says, a minxy glint in her eye. “My music, absolutely not. But the way I move is very punk.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Meisel for British Vogue
She thinks back to the creation of her past smash hits. “I was drunk as a fart on 21; I really don’t remember much, I just remember being really sad. On 25, I was obviously sober as anything, because I was a new mum. That one, I was sort of more in tune with what I thought people might want or not want. With this one,” she says of the upcoming release, “I made the very conscious decision to be like, for the first time in my life, actually, ‘What do I want?’”
She gathered some of her closest collaborators: producer Greg Kurstin, who worked with her on 25; supreme pop hitmaker Max Martin; and her new favourite, Inflo, the London-based producer known for his work with Little Simz and Sault. She even pulled in Swedish composer and producer Ludwig Göransson, who won an Academy Award for his Black Panther score and has worked closely with Childish Gambino. Once again, however, for anyone out there waiting for that Beyoncé duet or Kendrick verse, there are no featured performers on the record. We may live in the era of the big-fish collaboration, but when you’re one of the biggest fish of all it seems it’s never quite worth it. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she says, airily. “It’s not calculated. It’s just never been right for some reason.”
Ultimately, perhaps, the work is just too personal. Is pouring your life into your music the therapy it’s cracked up to be, I wonder? “I definitely feel like when my life is spiralling out of control I want to be in the studio because no one can get me,” she replies, staring at the road ahead. “I don’t have to deal with any issues, any problems. I think it’s less, ‘My world is falling apart, I need to go and write about it,’ it’s more just my safe space.”
Letting off steam sounds pretty crucial. The quintessential childhood show-off, Adele – born and, mostly, raised in London by a single mum, who worked restoring furniture and in adult-learning support – was brilliantly gifted from the get-go, leapfrogging from playing guitar in the park to music classes to The Brit School to a publishing deal and recording contract in a short span of her teens. By 20, she was famous, that exquisite voice making its way out of radios across the world. Soon she became a record-breaker with a clutch of Grammys, Brits and an Oscar. Today, Adele has sold more than 120 million records globally – a feat almost unthinkable in the modern era, especially off the back of only three albums.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alasdair McLellan for American Vogue
Some days, she says, she can still feel like that girl with a guitar in Brockwell Park. I tell her that I was sorry to read about her father’s death from cancer earlier this year. Theirs was a fraught relationship, characterised early on by absence and latterly by his habit of giving paid interviews about her to newspapers. “We actually got our peace, again contrary to reports,” says Adele. “I played him my album just a week before he passed, over Zoom. One thing that definitely happened in my divorce was that it humanised my parents for me. Big time. I went to hell and back!” she exclaims. “And in that I found the peace to forgive him. He was ready to go and he lasted a long time with it. So thank you.”
She feels deeply connected to London still. Her support for Grenfell United – the charity that works with survivors and bereaved relatives of the 2017 tower-block fire in west London – is well documented, although I hadn’t realised that she had been down there day after day at the beginning. “It was just absolute despair, and I’m telling you no one who should have been helping was helping. I just couldn’t believe there was a building on fire in the middle of central London and it didn’t cause more outrage.” Having lived in social housing as a kid, she couldn’t fathom the response. “There are still a lot of buildings clad in that material. Grenfell aren’t asking for money, they’re just asking for that to be taken off the walls. I haven’t seen people as resilient as them in my whole life.”
She’s quick to admit that she doesn’t always get things right. Who can forget Carnival-gate? On holiday in Jamaica last year, dreaming of being at the annual Notting Hill celebration (cancelled because of Covid), she posted a photograph of herself at an outdoor party wearing Bantu knots and a bikini top made out of Jamaican flags. “I could see comments being like, ‘the nerve to not take it down,’ which I totally get. But if I take it down, it’s me acting like it never happened,” she says. “And it did. I totally get why people felt like it was appropriating,” she says now. Her read had been, “If you don’t go dressed to celebrate the Jamaican culture – and in so many ways we’re so entwined in that part of London – then it’s a little bit like, ‘What you coming for, then?’” She pauses. “I didn’t read the f**king room.” Karma came for her anyway, she adds, drily. “I was wearing a hairstyle that is actually to protect Afro hair. Ruined mine, obviously”.
A salute to Adele ahead of the release of her highly-anticipated fourth studio album. She is certainly an artist who is an idol and will inspire many others soon enough! One of her our very best artists, I will end with a career-spanning playlist. She is gearing up an album that, by all account, is a change of direction. In the light of her divorce from Simon Konecki it is inevitable that this, in some form, will be included on the album. Judging by the short teaser clip she posted online for Easy on Me, it is going to be an interesting album. The impending and very interesting release of 30 is one many are…
EXCITED to hear.