Adele has spent the past 15 years doing two things very, very well: releasing four smash albums with titles tied to her age at the time of recording, and filling said collections with wildly powerful, titanic vocals. But in a new interview with NPR‘s Rachel Martin, the British pop superstar said she stopped doing the latter on her latest release, 30, out today (Nov. 19), and will not do the former in the future.
Unless she does.
“I think it’s definitely my most personal and most vulnerable record yet. And that’s saying something, because I feel like I’ve always gone there before,” she said, noting that the naked emotion on her sophomore album, 21, kind of makes her cringe now. “What was wrong with me?” she wondered. “I was taking it that seriously… that was a boyfriend. How the hell did I write that album? Like, you know?”
And while she has a well-earned reputation for paint-peeling vocal runs, on the new album she said her voice has matured and mellowed, likely because of the lyrics and the topic she’s covering has changed up her delivery this time around.
“I don’t feel the need to wail all the time anymore — my lower register on this album shines more than on any other record, I think. And lyrically, I wasn’t trying to write ‘better lyrics’ or anything like that,” she said. “I guess because of the subject matter, it came out in different ways.”
The contradiction is in keeping with the splashy roll-out of the universally acclaimed “divorce album” that the singer has been promoting like mad for the past two weeks. Despite the endless talk about the difficult personal travails that inspired the new focus and more eclectic sound on 30, Adele assured Martin is not what some have seen as a ring-spiking “you didn’t leave me, I left you” kiss-off.
“I think a lot of people tend to think that the person that leaves a relationship or leaves a marriage is fine, and that they’ve got the power of their choice,” she said. “That’s not the case at all, not that I ever expected to feel like that.”
To be clear, Adele said splitting with her ex-husband [Simon Konecki] required her to forgive herself after she “really went to town” on the decision to leave a stable scenario to find what she really wanted out of her life. “I really had to go on that journey,” she said. “And in the end, I’ve made so much progress that I wanted to share all of [these] songs that explored that.”
Of course, when you’re a global juggernaut whose sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, it’s likely that fans and critics will have some thoughts on your personal life, whether you like it or not. But as Adele told Martin, she chose not to comment publicly on the divorce, but instead addressed the break-up subtly in lyrics on songs such as “To Be Loved,” on which she sings the let it bleed couplet, “I will choose to lose/ It’s a sacrifice, but i can’t live that life/ Let it be known that I tried.”
“Normally I’m really good at not caring about [other people judging your choices],” she said. “But… there was a level of me feeling quite embarrassed by not being able to make my marriage work. That people would think that I didn’t take it seriously — and I did. But that ‘let it be known that I tried’ lyric was more because — obviously, [there was an] announcement that we were separating, just because I was trying to control my own narrative.”
Amid all the stories and tabloid reports chronicling the couple’s history, timeline and breakup, Adele said she purposely kept quiet and waited to respond in her own way. “It [the song] was more of me just being like, ‘Actually, this is my story, and this is how I felt, and this is how extreme it was,’” she explained. “So that’s what that lyric is. That is really me being like, ‘They said this is what actually happened, like what everyone else says, you weren’t there. You don’t even know us.’”
As for those earlier statements she’s made about this possibly being the final one of her “numbered” album titles, Adele promised one constant: she’s going to change her mind all the time. Which is totally fine.
“I can say, ‘I’m never going to do this’ and ‘I’m never going to do that.’ But am I?” she said confidently. “”I am just like everyone else in the world. I can change my mind. And I haven’t got to stay true to something that I’ve said — you know, I think the age thing is a bloody good idea. And so I want to keep going with [the titles]. Or I might not.”
