FEATURE:
Groovelines
of Adele’s Hello. It was released on 23rd October, 2015 and was the lead single from her album, 25. Written with the song’s producer, Greg Kurstin, Hello was a huge global success, topping the records charts in a record-setting thirty-six countries, including in the United Kingdom. To mark a decade of this globe-conquering song from one of music’s biggest names and most incredible talents, I wanted to bring in some interviews and reviews. A lot though we get a lot of hype today about Pop artists and new albums coming out, there was something more natural in terms of the excitement and anticipation that greeted Adele’s Hello. I am going to start off with an interview from Rolling Stone from November 2015. Adele opened up about her private life, runaway fame and long-awaited new album, 25:
“As Adele steers through a South London high street in her four-door Mini Cooper, with her toddler's vacant car seat in back and the remains of a kale, cucumber and almond-milk concoction in the cup holder, a question occurs to her. "What's been going on in the world of music?" she asks, in all sincerity. "I feel out of the loop!"
The only possible response is way too easy: Well, there's this one album the entire industry is waiting for...
"Oh, fuck off!" Adele says, giving me a gentle shove and letting loose the charmingly untamed laugh — an ascending cascade of forceful, cartoonish "ha's" — that inspired a YouTube supercut called "The Adele Cackle."
"Oh, my God, imagine," she continues, green eyes widening. "I wish! I feel like I might be a year too late." It's as if her last album, 2011's 21, hadn't sold a miraculous 31 million copies worldwide in an era when no one buys music, as if it hadn't sparked the adoration of peers from Beyoncé to Aretha, as if it hadn't won every conceivable award short of a Nobel Peace Prize.
"But genuinely," she says, "I've lost touch with music. Not, like, all music" — she's a fan of FKA Twigs, loves Alabama Shakes, snuck into the crowd at Glastonbury to see Kanye — "but I feel like I don't know what's going on in the charts and in popular culture." She laughs again. "I've not lost touch with, like, reality. Just with what's current." Her Cockney accent is softening lately, but she still pronounces "with" like it ends with a "v."
She's driving under a sky that is gray and dismal even by the standards of early October London afternoons. Rain is coming, threatening Adele's plans to take her three-year-old son, Angelo, to the zoo later. No one in the passing vehicles recognizes her. They never do, not in this car. "Maybe if I went out in full, done-up, hair-and-makeup drag," she says. "Which it is: borderline drag! I'm not brave enough to do it." Instead, she's dressed like a grad student who barely got up in time for class, in a drapey blue-black sweater made of some hemplike fabric — it could almost be from Kanye's dystopian fashion collection — over black leggings and white low-top Converse. Her golden hair is gathered in a loose bun, and she's wearing twin hoop earrings in each ear. Her makeup is minimal, and though she claims to be developing a wrinkle or two, she looks strikingly young, with a clotted-cream complexion worthy of the cosmetics endorsements she's turned down.
Adele is fresh from a rehearsal with her backing band, where she perched on a chair facing the musicians and sang her first-ever live version of "Hello," the melancholy, surging first single from her third album, 25, due November 20th. (She turned 27 in May, but named the album after the age when she began work on it: "I'm going to get so much fucking grief: 'Why is it called 25 when you're not 25?'") "Hello, it's me," she sings at the beginning of the single, as if there could be any doubt. When she finally puts the song out a couple of weeks later, it will rack up a record-setting 50 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours.
With a young child to raise, Adele took an unhurried approach to making the album. A full six months passed between writing the verses of "Hello" and nailing the chorus. "We had half a song written," says producer/co-writer Greg Kurstin, who didn't know if Adele was ever going to come back and finish it. "I just had to be very patient."
The lyrics sound like she's addressing some long-lost ex, but she says it isn't about any one person — and that she's moved on from the heartbreaker who inspired 21. "If I were still writing about him, that'd be terrible," she says. "'Hello' is as much about regrouping with myself, reconnecting with myself." As for the line "hello from the other side": "It sounds a bit morbid, like I'm dead," she says. "But it's actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties."
Adele still hasn't decided whether she'll do a full-scale tour behind 25 — right now, the rehearsals are for TV performances. Her band has a few new members, and she's especially excited to have a percussionist for the first time, an addition inspired by her childhood idols: "The Spice Girls had a mad percussionist," she says”.
I am going to move on to an interview from The New York Times. At such a crucial and exciting time in her career, Adele also reflected on a certain sense of pressure on her shoulders. As someone who released a massive album (21) and was releasing new work, it must have been nerve-wracking and anxiety-inducing trying to create an album that could match it. Arguably, 25 is Adele’s standout album:
“The question that loomed over Adele in her four years between albums was how — or if — she could follow her blockbuster with something equally striking. “There is no beating or redoing ‘21,’” said Ryan Tedder, another producer and songwriting collaborator for both “21” and “25.” “You’re lucky if at one point in your life you stumble across a unicorn in the woods. The odds that you find a second unicorn are extremely remote, and she’s aware of that. I think that ‘25’ will be enormous, regardless of anything. But that wasn’t the goal. She wanted to put out the best thing that was the most honest.”
At this rehearsal, with a journalist in the room, Adele was a musician above all. She moved decisively through new songs and old ones in preparation for TV appearances and a Radio City Music Hall concert (and NBC TV taping) on Tuesday, Nov. 17, three days before the worldwide release of “25” (XL/Columbia). And she sang in full-throated glory, capturing the vengeful bite of past hits like “Rolling in the Deep” and the hushed suspense and pealing chorus of her new one, “Hello.” Her stage arrangements echo her albums; she wants the songs familiar enough for fans to sing along.
Adele had largely maintained public silence while recording “25.” Her reticent re-emergence was a brief, anonymous television advertisement, first shown on Oct. 18 during “The X Factor” in Britain. It was the beginning of “Hello”: just somber piano chords, Adele’s voice and the lyrics — “Hello, it’s me/I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet” — with no other information.
Unlike most other pop hitmakers her age, Adele barely uses social media. It’s one of the many charmingly old-fashioned aspects of her career. But she does have a Twitter account, and she couldn’t resist looking online to see if her voice had been recognized. When she did, she saw only three tweets.
She panicked. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, I’ve missed my window,’” Adele said over a cup of tea a few days after the ad. “‘Oh, no, it’s too late. The comeback’s gone. No one cares.’”
But then, she recalled, her boyfriend, Simon Konecki, joined her at the computer and showed her that thousands of other tweets were pouring in. Once “Hello” was released on Oct. 23, more than 1.1 million people bought the song as a download in its first week in the United States alone, and tens of millions streamed the audio and watched the video clip.
“Hello” doesn’t just introduce “25”; in many ways, it sums up the album. On “25,” the rage and heartache of “21” are replaced by longing: for connection, for youth, for reconciliation and for lifelong bonds. Like other songs on the album, “Hello” is filled with thoughts of distance and the irrevocable passage of time, of apologies and coming to terms with the past. Musically, “Hello” has verses with just voice and piano followed by huge, ringing choruses; similarly, the album as a whole switches between organic, unplugged ballads and booming modern pop”.
As you can imagine, a decade ago, there was a lot of critical excitement and intrigue around Hello. Perhaps you would not quite get the same sort of press intensity for a new song from Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. Maybe you would, though you did not get as much of that in 2015. Hello was an event rather than a single release. The Guardian shared their view on the lead single from 25:
“Rumours have been circulating about Adele’s third album for months now: at one stage, the erroneous belief that 25 was due to be released in mid-September apparently led a selection of record labels to frantically change the release dates of their own forthcoming big albums lest they ended up trying to compete with it in the charts. But perhaps the most striking thing about the gossip is the sheer eclecticism of the supporting cast reported to be involved in the follow-up to the biggest-selling album of the 21st century. You might expect it to feature her longstanding producer Paul Epworth and blue-chip songwriters-for-hire Max Martin and Ryan Tedder – the latter co-wrote 21’s Turning Tables and Rumour Has It – but further down the list, things got more intriguing: Pharrell Williams, producer Danger Mouse, acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr, Damon Albarn and, most improbably, Phil Collins were all reputed to have been involved. Understandably, this provoked a degree of speculation about what an album that somehow finds room for all of them might sound like, particularly given that the artist at its centre clearly has carte blanche to do what she likes: who’s going to argue with someone whose last album sold 30m copies?
Albarn was recently roundly criticized as churlish for suggesting that, far from a radical departure, 25 was going to be “very middle-of-the-road”. On the evidence of Hello, he had a point. It’s the sound of someone understandably declining to fix something that wasn’t broken: Hello could have been on 21, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about its sound and its quality. It’s precisely the kind of lovelorn epic ballad that made Adele one of the biggest stars in the world. It even comes complete with a video that features that classic signifier of grandiose musical heartbreak, the singer belting it out while being tousled by a wind machine.
Anyone disappointed that Adele hasn’t returned bearing an Albarn collaboration featuring Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, his old mates from the Chinese opera and the Yacouba Sissoko Band can console themselves a little with the thought that Hello is a superior example of type, built to stand out from the vast tranches of similarly-minded stuff on Radios 1 and 2. Adele sounds great: she sells the song without over-singing it, leaving the melismatic vocal fireworks to the inevitable spate of X Factor cover versions. The opening is striking – it’s quite witty to open your first album for five years with the words “Hello, it’s me” – and the chorus sticks after one listen”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Theo Wenner
There is another interview that I am including. This one came from DIY. I can remember the buzz and wave of positivity for Adele in 2015. Sure, not everyone was on board and was that kind, though I think Hello signalled the arrival of another incredible album. One that confirmed her position as a remarkable British talent with few peers:
“After disappearing entirely from the public eye for three years, Adele returned with three words. “Hello, it’s me” - in an X Factor ad break, of all places. It was enough to send everything into a frenzy, and no surprise. It’s a very amusing, and a very ‘Adele,’ way to return. Lets remember that we’re talking about a woman who successfully rhymed “skyfall” with “crumble,” here, not to mention that an estimated 1 in 6 households in the UK apparently have a copy of her last album ’21’ resting by the stereo. Yet, here she is. No fanfares, no pomp, just a brief greeting.
A ‘Hello’ is all that’s needed to cement her return. Picking up four years later, the reluctant well-wishing coursing through ‘Someone Like You’ and the angered regret of ‘Rolling in the Deep,‘ are both replaced by more reflective, retrospective sadness. “After all these years,” Adele’s asking nobody in particular if there’s any way she can say she’s sorry, move on and put the whole thing to bed. All she wants is closure, but the phone line’s gone dead.
Typically, Adele doesn’t faff about with lyrical flouncing or overblown poetic statements. She’s not offering to raise mountains, walk halfway across the world, or summon thousands of shooting stars for anybody. Instead, it’s all very confiding, and straight-forward in a way that makes the emotional clout all the more pronounced. The heart and soul that comes from her voice - painstakingly controlled but flipping out into acrobatics like she’s sitting right on the edgeof composure - is there, still, as we always knew it would be, and blimey o’reily, can she still write a heartwrencher. Hello, Adele. It’s good to have you back”.
I will wrap things up with a feature from Houston Press. They asked why Hello was a hit. What was it about this song that meant it ticked all the boxes and was a number one single in so many countries. It couldn’t just be that this was Adele and there was that loyal fanbase already there. Hello connected with new fans and followers. The album that followed, 25, also was purchased by those who were not previously fans of Adele:
“Because Adele’s Songs Are One-to-One
Adele’s songs adeptly set aside the trappings of modern life to home in on the triumphs and tragedies of two people in a world of billions. Her songs contain an intimacy that many of us have traded in for following friends’ and strangers’ exploits on Facebook and Instagram. How many times have you tuned out your own partner’s words to read a rambling post about politics, sports or why Adele’s new song is a stunning success? She’s got anthemic, empowering stuff like “Rolling In the Deep,” but maybe we crave the interpersonal closeness of songs like “Hello” and “Melt My Heart to Stone” so much that we’re drawn in like lovers’ lips when she returns with new, one-to-one material.
Because Adele Is Not What Passes for Pop Music Today
Go to Spotify’s new-releases page and allow the player to shuffle through the latest and greatest. I did this over the weekend, and at least two-thirds of what scrolled up was someone rapping over or cooing to electronic beats. I’m not averse to this sort of music, just as I’m not averse to a good zombie movie. It’s just that when there are so many out there, it’s hard to differentiate between one walking dead and the next. And, as we all know, the classic that was Night of the Living Dead sadly spawned Zombie Strippers and Zombeavers. It’s the law of diminishing returns, people. Thankfully, we occasionally can still hear and appreciate the far less common instances of Auto-Tuneless singing set to piano.
Because Adele Doesn’t Believe Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
I watched the Vevo with my wife, and she believes the song has gained traction because it’s about asking for forgiveness. This is a common theme in music but not in real life, she reminded me. How many people do you know who love each other and share history (think family relationships for best results) who have some wedge between them presently, some wall that is keeping them apart and further wasting the valuable and finite minutes we’re allotted? Maybe the song is a brilliant reminder that, difficult as it might seem, there’s a single word that can put all these wayward relationships back on track, one as simple as “Hello”.
Actually, I am not quite done. The final thing to include is an article from The Guardian. Perhaps inevitably, Hello became the fastest selling single of 2015. A decade later, and there are few singles that gathered the same sense of occasion and majesty. This was a huge moment in modern music history. Now, with Adele stepping away from the stage and her latest album being 2021’s 30, there is no telling when and if she will release another album:
“Adele’s Hello is set to become the fastest selling single of 2015.
The British soul singer’s comeback became a viral smash when it was released online on Friday 23 October. The video has already clocked up 107m YouTube plays, 27m of which occurred on its first day of release, breaking all existing records.
At the halfway point in the week, the lead single from Adele’s new album 25 is way ahead of its nearest rival – Justin Bieber’s Sorry – with combined sales and streams of 165,000. This figure includes 156,000 downloads. The current record for first week’s sales this year is held by Ellie Goulding’s Love Me Like You Do, but that figure of 173,000 is likely to be eclipsed by Adele’s sales.
Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company, said: “It is a huge challenge for any artist returning after such a huge last record – as 21 and its singles were. But Adele has smashed it right out of the park with a fantastic single, which has connected with British music fans comprehensively. She already looks set to be the queen of quarter four.”
Adele has also been giving interviews to promote 25. She told i-D that motherhood was far tougher than she expected: “It’s fucking hard. I thought it would be easy. ‘Everyone fucking does it, how hard can it be?’ Ohhhhh ... I had no idea. It is hard but it’s phenomenal. It’s the greatest thing I ever did”.
On 23rd October, 2015, Adele’s Hello came out into the world. I wanted to look back at a decade at this big moment in music. One of Adele’s very best songs, I do hope that we hear more from her in the future. Go and listen to Hello and check out its video. Even if you cannot remember a decade ago and everything that happened around the release of Hello, you will be able to appreciate the strength and quality of the song. Hello is a song that will stay nestled…
IN the mind and heart.