Adele Talks New Album & Mentions Amy Winehouse and Beyoncé

[RAMROD 110,040]

 

Some songs were mentioned:

 

The first song she plays is the first song on the album, a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad, the chorus of which goes: “Go easy on me baby / I was still a child / Didn’t get the chance to / Feel the world around me.” Her voice does different impossible Adele-ish things with the refrain “go easy,” and although it starts to take on a euphoric tone, by the end, I feel pummeled.

 

 

She queues up another one. “The next song is the one I wrote when I went to the studio the day after Angelo said I can’t see you.” A certain combination of elements—sexy ’70s groove, heavy strings, heavier lyrics—immediately calls to mind Marvin Gaye. (What’s Going On was a “very big reference” on the album, turns out.) “My little love,” Adele sings in a low, smoky register. “I see your eyes / Widen like an ocean / When you look at me / So full of my emotions.” Between verses are snippets of conversations she had with Angelo during the Year of Anxiety, recorded at her therapist’s suggestion. The song ends with bits of a raw, teary voicemail she left for a friend. She was inspired to incorporate voice notes by Tyler, the Creator and the British rapper Skepta, she explains. “I thought it might be a nice touch, seeing as everyone’s been at my door for the last 10 years, as a fan, to be like, Would you like to come in?”
 

 

The next one is cathartic, a soulful promise of new love that has her repeating variations of: “I just want to love you for free / Everybody wants something from me / You just want me.” The fourth song is downright upbeat, meant to be a laugh-while-you’re-crying respite from the heaviness—“Otherwise we’d all kill ourselves, wouldn’t we?” 
 

 

Then comes a joyous anthem. Over gospelly organ she sings: “Let time be patient / Let pain be gracious.” Toward the end a chorus of her friends chimes in, chant-singing, “Just hold on, just hold on,” over and over. “The thing that they’re all singing is what my friends used to say to me,” Adele explains. “That’s why I wanted them to sing it, rather than an actual choir.”
 

 

The last song she plays is the final song on the album. It was written and recorded while a TV in the studio played Breakfast at Tiffany’s on mute, she explains. “As it finished, we were trying to work out how to end the song, and I said, We should write it as if we were writing the soundtrack—you know, at the end of the movie, where it pans out.” The arrangement is whimsical and wall-of-sound retro, full of strings and vibrato and midcentury romance, but the lyrics deliver a subversive twist. The first line: “All your expectations of my love are impossible.”
 

She wrote both the piano ballad and the song about Angelo with Greg Kurstin, with whom she wrote “Hello.” 

The friend-chorus song and the Breakfast at Tiffany’s song were written with Inflo, the producer from North London who works a lot with Danger Mouse. 
 

A handful of others worked on songs I didn’t hear: the Swedish pop wizards Max Martin and Shellback; the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson; and the Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., on a “very powerful song” she describes as “an Édith Piaf-y moment.” As with her previous albums, the vocal tracks are original demos because, she explains, demos have a charisma and an urgency that get lost if you rerecord them. “I never redo my vocals. Never. Never ever.”

 

On Beyoncé:

What role did music play in that Adele’s life? “It was my friend,” she says. “Music was literally my friend. I was an only child. Music was my sibling I never had. That’s why I love Beyoncé so much. She would put out music so regularly, it would be like seeing her. It really felt like that for me. It made me feel a lot of things.”

When she brings up Beyoncé, I ask about her 2017 Grammys acceptance speech, the one in which she tearfully paid tribute to Lemonade. It is a measure of how seriously Adele takes music, and women, and music made by women, that after hours of recounting the most painful events of her life, Beyoncé is the only topic of conversation that brings her to tears.

“My personal opinion is that Beyoncé definitely should have won,” Adele says. She assumed Beyoncé would win, up until the awards show started. And then: “I just got this feeling: I ****ing won it. I got overwhelmed, with, like, I will have to go and tell her how much her record means to me.” Adele’s voice starts to crack. “I’m getting a bit emotional.”

Adele went to Beyoncé’s dressing room. On a first visit, she didn’t get it off her chest, and after she left, she burst into tears. Konecki dragged her back, and Beyoncé’s publicist cleared out the room. “I just said to her, like, the way that the Grammys works, and the people who control it at the very, very top—they don’t know what a visual album is. They don’t want to support the way that she’s moving things forward with her releases and the things that she’s talking about.”

Asked why Lemonade deserved to win, Adele says: “For my friends who are women of color, it was such a huge acknowledgment for them, of the sort of undermined grief that they go through. For her to nail that on the head, and also bring in the entire globe? I was like, This album is my album, she just knows what I’m going through. That album was not written for me. But yet I could still feel like, This is the biggest gift.”

She did not mean to break the Grammy onstage, by the way. “I was wringing my hands and the gramophone bit came off.” But a funny thing happened later. The award they give you onstage is a mock one, and when the real one arrived by mail, it was broken. “It got broken when it was getting sent to me.” Adele did not have it fixed. She put it on a shelf, and wedged a piece of fruit into the broken part: “There’s a lemon in it.”

 

On Amy Winehouse:

“I got really famous right as Amy Winehouse died,” she says. “And we watched her die right in front of our eyes.” Adele was worried that she too could spiral out of control. “I’ve always had a very close relationship with alcohol. I was always very fascinated by alcohol. It’s what kept my dad from me. So I always wanted to know what was so great about it.” But different characters come out when you’re drunk, she says, and once you look a little reckless, the press really wants to make a story out of you. “They descend, and descend, and descend on you, which drives you ****ing mad.”

Winehouse’s death was a defining moment. “It really offended me. I picked up the guitar because of Amy’s first album. She means the most to me out of all artists. Because she was British. Because she was amazing. Because she was tortured. Because she was so funny. I’m not having these people I don’t know take my legacy, my story away from me, and decide what I can leave behind or what I can take with me.”

 

Full article: https://www.vogue.com/article/adele-cover-november-2021

[Flawless 2,234]

Her whole interview is amazing. She talks a lot about her divorce and how she and her son are dealing with it. She hinted at some new songs on the album and her struggles. A good reading!

[Fanta 5,019]

Adele really is that girl. I can't wait to hear her album. 

[Anderson123 38,715]

I'm loving these interviews. I'm also loving anything that keeps people talking about Amy Winehouse. She truly was one of a kind and died so damn young. Amy deserved more.