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  The next song on the album, ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, saw Adele again sway between competing emotions. It is, she said, a song about the contradictions of romance. She recalled the strength and warmth that her partner had given her. However, she then became wise to other sides of his personality that were unexpectedly less pleasant. She then flits between acknowledging that she cannot help but wish he would return, and hoping the fire will ‘burn’. She said she was ‘really heartbroken when I met who the song is about and he really brought me back to life and put me back together – and he was a dickhead as well’. Musically, it has a busy, heavy production, and is one of the more commercial tracks on 21. Yet, despite its mainstream sound, it was not picked for one of the early single releases. Most casual fans of Adele would not list it as one of her songs of which they are aware. This says something about the quality of her music.

  In the Rick Rubin-produced ‘He Won’t Go’, Adele repeats the trick of turning a lyric round so it is seen from each side of the relationship. It was about two real-life friends that she met, one battling heroin addiction. She became inspired by their lives. The song’s characters have created space between each other and, even though the girl is assured by her friends that she is better off without the man, she keeps stumbling over reminders of him and it prevents her closing the door completely. In the early choruses, she chants that she won’t go, insisting that she is not prepared to give up on the relationship. By the end, this is turned round. It’s the partner who won’t go, who has had the space to think about things and decided that he will take another stab at their relationship. After all, they conclude, if what they have is not love, then what is? Musically and thematically, this is something of an oddity in Adele’s canon of work: lively, imaginative and upbeat.

  Then came ‘Take It All’, one of the first songs written for 21. It had been a spontaneous creation: one day, writer Eg White played a single chord in the studio and Adele just began to sing lyrics to it. In the final product, she can be heard in full-on martyr mode, the phase that many people go through after a hard breakup. She has given everything she could to her lover and asks plaintively whether it was not enough. ‘It’s about devotion,’ said Adele, and how that devotion can be responded to by its focus ‘taking the piss out of me’ in return. She promises to change, pleads that she will change and thinks that, if only he knew that everything she does is for him, he might see it differently. In the end, in full drama-queen mode, she tells him not to look back at her but instead to take it all, with her love.

  ‘I was still with my boyfriend then,’ she said of the writing process, ‘which was obviously a sign that things were going downhill.’ That was the only track to emerge from the sessions prior to her split from her partner. It was once that split happened that the rest of the album came pouring out of her. Heartbreak, it once more proved, was a major creative spark for Adele. ‘It’s all tied together by my voice … I don’t have a definitive sound,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what I sound like yet, so, until I do, all my records will have a kind of mixtape vibe going on.’ Showing how comfortable she is with the gospel sound, Adele’s slightly husky delivery takes that genre to new, earthy places. That said, her most earthy vocal performance of 21 would come later in the album.

  Having thus waved her man off, did Adele leave the door ajar for him, for a possible future reconciliation? She did, in the next track, ‘I’ll Be Waiting’. Here we have a more contrite, apologetic Adele, singing that she was a child before and that in the future she will be different, if only he will give them another chance. The time had been wrong before, and they had a long-distance relationship but in the future things could be different. She has faith in what they have together. After dark times, she says the sky is blue and she sees her future with him again. This song was, Adele said, ‘almost like the soundtrack to my life’. While writing and working on it, Adele was very happy. When she spoke about the song, she reconnected with that happiness and it came across in her words. In terms of the sequencing of 21, ‘I’ll Be Waiting’ takes the album back up a gear. The energy was welcome and judiciously positioned.

  In ‘One and Only’, she moved from presenting her wishes for a reconciliation from a hope to expressing them as a dare. She was asking for one more chance from the subject of the song, but she was now daring him to drop his own objections and defences, presenting it as a challenge, perhaps to appeal to his sense of male competitiveness. Produced by Rick Rubin, this was, she said, ‘another happy song’, reflective perhaps of the fact that it was not about the figure who had inspired the majority of the songs on the album. Instead, it is about a man she had known for many years. Even though they had never been an item, despite their close bond, she predicted she might well marry him one day.

  The middle eight of ‘One and Only’ was, Adele said, ‘cheesy’. It was inspired by a scene in the Drew Barrymore movie Never Been Kissed, in which the world slows down in the moment of a kiss. ‘It’s like a fairytale,’ Adele said of such a moment, adding that ‘One and Only’ was ‘like a daydream song’. It was one of the finest vocal performances on the album and of her career to date.

  Moving away from her own material, she went on to cover ‘Lovesong’ by the Cure. In doing so, she returned in spirit to the first live concert she ever saw, when her mother took her along to the Cure in Finsbury Park, London. It was suggested that Rubin had originally rearranged the track with the intention of recording it with Barbra Streisand, who decided not to pursue it. And so the idea was passed to Adele. The lyrics declare the sense of completion, freedom and cleanliness that the protagonist gets from being with their partner. It closes with a declaration of eternal love. ‘It’s a really touching song,’ Adele said. She was missing home when she recorded it in Malibu. She felt overwhelmed by the experience of being so far from everything she knew. Those emotions come across in the raw take on the song that made its way on to 21. ‘I felt quite heavy,’ she said, ‘and that song really set me free.’ She described the recording as ‘stunning’ and ‘amazing’. This was due in part to the fact that she had lost her voice a bit on the day she recorded ‘Lovesong’. She felt that really suited her version.

  The album’s closer was the iconic ‘Someone Like You’. Here, Adele was at her most gut-wrenching and empathy-inducing. As she said herself, the emotions and sentiments of this song did, in a way, contradict those expressed in ‘Rolling in the Deep’, 21’s opener. It meant the album had gone full circle. For some listeners, ‘Someone Like You’ provided a sense of emotional closure to the album as well. The listener followed Adele on a poignant journey from defiance, to heartbreak, to pleading. In ‘Someone Like You’, she wishes her ex-partner well. Though she begs him to not forget her, she seems as serene and resigned to the facts of the album’s story as she could be. However, Adele insisted that this was the sound of a woman on her knees. In being so raw, it was not just the standout song of the album, but of her career to that point. It was reminiscent of the closing track of 19, ‘Hometown Glory’. And those fans who came to the studio version of ‘Someone Like You’ having heard her live performance at the Brits might have found the recording to be a surprise in some senses. The studio version is less sad than the performance she gave at the Brits. The chorus seems even more sincere. She said she had aimed to balance the perception of her ex-partner. She felt he deserved to be shown in a positive light as well. ‘If I don’t write a song like this, I’m just going to end up becoming a bitter old woman forever. It was about putting us at peace, and coming to terms with the fact that, though I’d met the love of my life, it was just bad timing.’

  Even long after the release, the standout song continued to be ‘Someone Like You’. Could any of the team behind it have known quite the extent to which it would capture the public’s imagination? Indeed, they insisted that they had consciously avoided trying to go down the everyman route too heavily with the song. ‘We didn’t try to make it open-ended so it could apply to “anybody”,’ said co-writ
er and producer Dan Wilson. ‘We tried to make it as personal as possible.’ It certainly came across as deeply personal to its listeners.

  For Adele, it was therapeutic. ‘After I wrote it,’ said Adele, ‘I felt more at peace. It set me free. I’m wiser in my songs. My words are always what I can never say [in real life]. But I didn’t think it would resonate … with the world! I’m never gonna write a song like that again. I think that’s the song I’ll be known for.’

  The relationship that much of the album is about brought positivity as well as hurt. ‘It changed me in a really good way,’ she said. ‘It’s really made me who I am at the moment,’ she added. ‘I can imagine being about 40 and looking for him again and turning up and he’s settled, he’s got a beautiful wife and beautiful kids, and he’s completely happy and I’m still on my own.’ It was a thought that haunted and scared her.

  Looking over the album as a whole in an interview, she compared the Adele of 21 with that of 19. In the debut, she said, she sounded ‘really naive and childish’, despite the fact that people have long described her as wise beyond her years. However, by 21 she felt she was ‘more grown-up and mature and sincere’. Among the lessons that have informed that maturity was the one at the centre of ‘Someone Like You’, the concept that you have to move on and wish people the best. It was something she learned in recovering from heartache. She said she felt ‘better and lighter’ for the realisation. ‘I wanted the songs not to have anything glittery or glamorous about them, like an organic tapestry rather than like a Gaga album,’ she told Rolling Stone. ‘I mean, I love Gaga, but I didn’t want to get wrapped up in all that European dance music.’ Instead, she looked more to country for her inspiration. Having spent so long on the road in the US, she had become fascinated with several country artists. Lady Antebellum and rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson were particularly strong influences. ‘I’ve really gotten into that kind of stuff over the last couple of years,’ she said. ‘One of my American tour-bus drivers was from Nashville and he would make up compilations of all his favourite country, blues, bluegrass and rockabilly songs.’

  Thinking logically, her newfound affiliation with country acts made a lot of sense. So many of these acts wrote music that reflected the heartache and other obstacles that they had to face in their lives. This was, literally and metaphorically, music to Adele’s ears.

  ‘She’d definitely been exposed to things that opened her eyes musically,’ said Paul Epworth. ‘So much of the music from the US over the last century was formed from various trials and tribulations and I think that’s reflected on Adele’s record – that she identified with these artists singing about their lives.’

  Epworth was just one of a world-class team of producers and songwriters to have worked with Adele, a group which also included Rick Rubin, Ryan Tedder and Francis ‘Eg’ White. There was a definite sense that 21 was a project about which she very much meant business. Of Rubin, she said, ‘I like how he thinks about music and how he bases all his decisions about music on how it makes him feel.’

  However, Rubin wasn’t the only one in the production frame. The album had almost been helmed by former White Stripes frontman Jack White. ‘We were doing a lot of collaborations, but we never got around to it,’ said Adele. She recorded a version of ‘Many Shades of Black’, originally by another of White’s bands, the Raconteurs. Jack White himself was involved in the session – ‘I met him and it was lovely’ – and after the 2009 Grammys they were due to reunite. ‘We were going to finish some tracks in Detroit and then it never happened. It’ll happen at some point, though. I definitely want to follow it up.’

  A future musical collaboration between these two musical talents is a tantalising prospect. White’s songs with the much-missed White Stripes had been indie tunes fused with blues and country. Working with Adele, he could potentially produce some material which straddled many of the sounds that influenced her as a child.

  Meanwhile, on the brink of 21’s release, she declared she was less tense than she had been prior to the release of 19. ‘I was nervous and uptight because it was all brand new,’ she said, remembering how she felt when her debut hit the shops. ‘The reception was so unexpected that everyone just sort of went along with it. Not that I’m saying I’m a professional now. But I’ve learned to sit down and enjoy it all. I feel more free than I ever have.’

  Industry experts were already purring with appreciation having heard the album, even before any reviews were published. ‘She’s got a little more swagger now,’ said executive vice president of music and talent relations at VH1, Rick Krim.

  When the reviews came in, it was apparent that critics were almost unanimous in their admiration for the progress in her work. Will Dean wrote in the Guardian that Adele ‘comes of age sounding as wise beyond her years as she did in 2008’. Noting the two-year gap between 19 and 21, Dean concluded, ‘A progressive, grown-up second collection, it ought to ensure Adele is around for 23, 25, 27 and beyond.’

  The Daily Telegraph gave 21 five stars and heaped corresponding amounts of praise on it. ‘Where previously her slight, observational songs seemed barely able to carry her powerful voice, the emotional and musical heft of styles enables her to really spread her vocal wings,’ wrote Bernadette McNulty. ‘And her voice is a thing of wonder.’

  Elsewhere, there were further accolades. Holy Moly said, ‘We can’t imagine we’ll hear a better album this year.’ Remember – this was said in January. The BBC website’s review said, ‘21 is simply stunning. After only a handful of plays, it feels like you’ve always known it… Genuinely brilliant.’

  In the NME, Chris Parkin said that 21 ‘flattened all memory’ of 19. He added that the opening two tracks, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Rumour Has It’, were superior to the music on her debut album. For him, this raised an issue. ‘They’re light years ahead of the supermarket-brand hurt Adele bled all over 19, which begs the question Why allow that pastel-pink mush to reanimate in the opener’s wake?’ The website Consequence of Sound also questioned the sequence, saying, ‘The album suffers from a somewhat uneven feel overall – the track order just seems off.’

  One of the more critical reviews was in the Observer, which had been very glowing in its review of 19 and had featured and promoted her work in other ways. Writer Kitty Empire complained that ‘the shivers don’t come as often as they should’ on 21. She imagined that the producers had been ‘working with a sign saying: “More than two million albums sold; don’t screw this up” taped on the mixing desk. Too many songs start promisingly, then swell to a predictable, overdramatic billow (that’s you, “He Won’t Go”).’

  In the US, the album went down well, perhaps in part due to the apparent American influence. Jon Caramanica, in the New York Times, compared 21 with its predecessor and liked what he saw. The new songs were, he wrote, ‘as sturdy as before, helped along by a small cavalcade of classicist producers and writers with an ear for careful tweaks. Where 19 could feel like a period piece at times, 21, the rare breakup album as scornful of the singer as her subject, aims to show just what sort of odd details those frames can support.’

  Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune was less impressed. While he agreed 21 was an improvement, he felt it was not improvement enough. He noted that she had some fine producers working with her, but said, ‘Too bad the songs themselves aren’t better. It’s only the sheer conviction of Adele’s voice that prevents “Don’t You Remember” from drowning in its own sap or the tortured turns of phrase in “Set Fire to the Rain” from collapsing.’

  Rolling Stone summed up how Adele had changed since 19, by saying, ‘[She] has toughened her tone, trimmed the jazz frippery and sounds ready for a pub fight.’ Although the reviewer had criticisms, he gave 21 four-and-a-half stars and concluded, ‘When the grooves are fierce, Adele gives as good as she gets.’

  Barry Walters of Spin magazine was more favourable and more eloquent. He wrote that the weakness of 19 had been too many ‘folksy guitar ballads’ and chee
red, ‘Those have vanished; ditto Adkins’ Tottenham accent. Instead, she wails harder and writes bolder, piling on the dramatic production flourishes to suggest a lover’s apocalypse. If you’re looking for a record that’ll make you wanna trash your beloved’s belongings and have make-up sex amid the ruins, 21’s your jam.’

  Margaret Wappler of the LA Times looked further ahead and hoped Adele would stay faithful to one of the production team. ‘Who knows what damage she’ll exact for 30, but let’s hope Epworth is along for the ride,’ she wrote.

  The New York Daily News, a popular Manhattan tabloid, was the most positive of all. Indeed, in describing 21 as ‘perfect’, it could scarcely have been more admiring. One can only imagine Adele’s delight when she read this review in which Jim Farber said her album ‘floats beyond countries and time’. His review was full of glorious, laudatory phrases about Adele, casting her as someone with ‘handsome tone’ and ‘ample lung power’. He showered 21 with admiration, writing, ‘From start to finish, it shows Adele in alpha mode, ready to outshout any bigmouth singer of the last two decades, from Celine to Christina to (sigh) Whitney.’ Praise indeed. In conclusion, he aimed to lay down a gauntlet to other stars. 21, he wrote, ‘draws an unequivocal line in the sand that announces to every other diva around: “Beat this”.’