Here's an excerpt from Adele's Rolling Stone article that got left in the editing room.In it, Adele shares a lot of details about the relationship behind '21'....
As described by the guy who wrote it, "There were some things that had to get cut out of my Adele cover for Rolling Stone that I'd like to share.Adele talked to me about her relationship with the guy she dated & broke up with before 21—told me more than she'd told anyone else.There's a lot of interesting stuff about him & about how he changed her life & why that breakup was so crushing for her.It's really about how young stars can feel themselves losing their normal lives in becoming stars & Adele's attempt to get it back thru him.You see the pain Adele was dealing with: this guy took her into adulthood & gave her a lifeline to the normal non-industry life she craved.Most of us may not understand that a star can feel themselves losing their life bearings in becoming a star & fighting to have normalcy.Adele fought to have normalcy, this guy was a lifeline to normalcy for her. Losing that was mind-blowing. And the reason for the breakup was incomprehensible for her. He didn't cheat (like the guy who inspired 19). They just fell apart...."I started to bold parts of this for the lazies, but then i realized it doesn't really make sense to bold only parts of this. It's a story. Just read the whole damn thing, it won't take you that long...
They met through mutual friends. Adele and the guy who inspired her sophomore album 21. “He’s a proper geezer,” she says. “A man’s man. He likes sports and machinery. You know Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins? Just imagine a real version of that. He was like Dick Van Dyke.” The relationship started slowly. “We were friends for a few months and then it just evolved. It evolved over the space of a week. And then we were together.” For just over a year they lived at her place in South London.“As a girl who’s obsessed by love songs and love movies, I absolutely thought I was going to marry him,” she says. “But when I look back on it I don’t know why I ever thought that.”
21 is all about her breakup with the geezer and it’s one of the best breakup albums in recent memory and the most captivating album of 2011 so far. The failed relationship inspired a classic. It’s reminiscent of Amy Winehouse’s immensely loved Back To Black in that both albums feature British women singing about heartbreak and doing their take on 60s American soul but where Winehouse was so sassy and badass she seemed on the verge of caricature, Adele seems unvarnished and real. The songs on 21 are based on her genuine feelings in the wake of her breakup and thus transmit the sad but strong feelings of a young woman in the midst of a painful heartbreak, as if the songs were diary entries. “Her appeal,” said the legendary producer Rick Rubin, who worked on four of 21’s songs, “comes from her singing her truth with her heart open, it’s not a pose or a stance. Hearing someone bare their soul resonates. You know the saying ‘something rings true’? Her voice and words are that bell.” Sometimes her emotional honesty can make it difficult for her. Sam Dixon, a guitarist who’s backing Adele as part of her band, said,“All of her songs are based on real events and real people and it can be hard for her to sing those songs sometimes if she’s in a certain mood or has been reminded about a certain person she doesn’t want to think about. And it can really upset her. That’s happened a few times now.The most famous example would be at the Brit Awards where she sang “Someone Like You” and she got teary toward the end. She was almost crying at the end, you could tell she was upset.”
Adele’s voice is as big and powerful as any in modern music but it can also be a delicate instrument and you can tell she learned well from hours of listening to her heroes—Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill. But you can also feel her down-to-earth lack of airs. On or off stage Adele doesn’t quite carry herself like a superstar: in one of the stories she told me she was onstage with a, well, uh, maybe she should tell it: “I had a tampon on my thumb!” she says. “It was awful! I pulled a ghetto nail off my nail so I put a tampon on my…” Wait, what? “You make it hollow and put it on your finger. I do it all the time.” She chews Extra gum, curses a lot, talks fast, laughs easily, cracks jokes, speaks her mind, doesn’t hire yes men, smokes Marlboro Lights at close to a chain-smoker’s pace, and rightly calls herself, “a drama queen.” It seems like she hasn’t changed much from the person she was when she was a teenage waitress at a greasy spoon café in her hometown in Tottenham, England, even though now she’s actively shopping for a home in an affluent London neighborhood called Notting Hill because she’s a multi-platinum-selling, two-time Grammy Award winning star.
Plus Adele is a gifted songwriter who’s turned in a suite of story songs that take you into her real feelings about losing her geezer at a time when she so desperately needed him. She’s in pain on 21 but critically, she’s not a victim and she’s never flattened. In Adele’s songs she’s never saying “I’d rather go blind than see you walk away,” she’s saying “Nevermind, I’ll find someone like you,” or “I’ll be my own savior.” She wallows in her pain but always backstops it with a sense of resilience. “When the breakup happened,” she says, “I thought it was the end of the world and I wrote those songs to convince myself it’ll be ok. I like being told that.” Clearly, many other people also like being told that, because 21 debuted a t#1 in America and England and has sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. Indeed it seems the only person who’s not talking about 21 is her ex: she’s pretty sure he doesn’t know 21 is about him. “He probably doesn’t really link it,” she says. “He doesn’t read press so he wouldn’t have read the interviews and he’s been with me
when I’ve written songs before so he probably thinks it’s about someone I met one night at a bar.”
He’s about ten years older than her and artistic-minded and he changed her life. He inspired her to travel—she hates to fly but he still got her to take some memorable trips to Italy. He introduced her to fiction and because of him she read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. He empowered her to write poetry. He rocked her world. “I’m sure he changed me in some really bad ways that I’m not aware of,” she says, “and maybe that’ll come back and haunt me later on in life but before him I was living in my own little world and he kind of made me really hungry about literature and food and wine and traveling.I didn’t even like traveling and he planted that in me and made me more forgiving of myself and taught me how to embrace things and find charisma in things and flaws in myself and in my family and friends and things I do and politics and turned me into a bit of a sponge, really. And made me want to soak up the things and really made me believe that you only live once and you should try to cram as much as possible into it. Which is weird because if you look at him and you met him you’d never think that he would be like that but he was like that. He made me an adult. He made me come of age and put me on the road that I’m traveling on to who I’m becoming.”
He gave her confidence. “We were invincible when we were together,” she says. “And even for a while after it ended it still felt like I had this concrete wall around me because of him. Which was nice.”But the people around her didn’t care for him. “No one liked him,” she says. “All my friends, everyone I worked with, no one liked him. They all thought he was shitty. They didn’t like him because I acted different when I was around him. I think because I was so in love with him that I prioritized him the whole time and never found a balance between having time for my friends and having time for my family and having time for my girlfriends and having our time. I just always wanted to be with him.”But what those around her who didn’t like him couldn’t see was that for Adele the relationship was about much more than just love for a guy. It was wrapped up in Adele’s struggle to find herself inside her new life as a star.
In 2008 when Adele released her debut album 19, she was unknown and it entered the charts softly, finding some fans but not attracting a stampede. Some wondered if she’d ever catch on in America. Then she got picked to perform on Saturday Night Live. And then days before the show word seeped out that there would be an appearance by Sarah Palin, who was then John McCain’s Vice Presidential candidate. Suddenly a big opportunity had become a massive opportunity. “When I got to the show it was so electric,” she says. “Course it’s electric—it’s a live show—but this was a lot. And Alec Baldwin turned up. And Marky Mark turned up. And Tina Fey turned up. And Sarah Palin turned up. And I could feel it was buzzing. And I was sitting in my dressing room having my makeup done and I thought if you nail this, this could be one of those moments in a career. I didn’t know it but I could feel it. Like this show is gonna be big and if you do this, if you do a good job, it’ll be worth it.” Her manager Jonathan Dickins purposely didn’t tell her the stakes, in order to not freak her out, but just getting on SNL didn’t mean she was home free. “You can put someone on a very big show but they still have to connect,” Dickins said. “It’s not a given that anyone who goes on a big show, that means you’re gonna break. You have to go on that show and connect with people.” Adele says she is not happy with her performance on SNL but apparently she connected. “Somehow I nailed it and then everyone found out about me.” 14 million people watched that episode and Adele’s career was transformed. “SNL made her explode,” says Dickins. “Before SNL we were around 150,000 scan. We were playing to 2,000 people on both coasts. So there was a really good base that we were starting to develop. But what SNL did was completely accelerate that beyond anyone’s hopes really. When we did the performance on SNL we were at #40 on iTunes. The following morning we were at #8 at iTunes. I got on a plane to London and when I got off the plane we were at #1 on iTunes. It moved that quickly.”
Shortly after that Adele was nominated for four Grammys. “I thought it was a mistake that I was nominated because album sales were slow in America,” she says. “The industry knew of me but I don’t think anyone was bothered by me. And when I went I felt really uncomfortable being at the Grammys. It’s a secret members club that not many people, let alone, British people are let into.” But she got in—she won two Grammys: Best Pop Female Vocal Performance and Best New Artist. What was she thinking as they opened the envelope for Best New Artist? “I thought Jazmine [Sullivan], Duffy or Lady Antebellum would win. I didn’t think I’d win at all. And I was so unprepared I had gum in my mouth, my belt was undone, I had my shoes off, my phone was in my dress pocket on loud, I was so unprepared for it. I managed to not cry cuz like a week before Kate Winslett accepted her Best Actress award and I was so embarrassed by how much she cried and I just thought don’t cry, don’t cry. Then I went back and balled my eyes out.” (Her two Grammys are now in her dining room but for a long time they lived in her toilet. “They went a bit rusty because of the humidity in my bathroom.”)
A few months after the Grammys, 19 was double platinum worldwide: everyone knew who she was. That was something she wasn’t ready for. “My rise to popularity was so fast I couldn’t keep up with it,” she says. “I hadn’t had any time to adjust to how I felt about it and I hadn’t had a chance to find a balance between myself and how I felt about myself and my career and I needed to remember why I was doing it because it’s such a whirlwind. I forgot about why I was doing it.”
The whirlwind swept her up into a global swing of performances and appearances and commitments and she lost touch with her London friends. “During the 19 tour and campaign some of my friends got pregnant and got married to people I hadn’t even met and it’s like, wait you can’t get married to this person! I don’t even know who it is! And then I break down—oh I’m such a bad friend! I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way. Sometimes they might call me and be like, ‘Are you coming to my 21st birthday party?’ and I’m like, ‘No. I’m in Budapest.’” She was losing her ties to her normal life. She desperately didn’t want her career to become her whole world but was struggling to find a way to keep that from happening. “Everyone lives in a bubble in this industry,” she says. “All the artists. The people around them create this bubble and it’s not allowed to be burst while you’re working, you can’t be distracted, and I was desperate to have my bubble burst.” Then she met the geezer.
“He had nothing to do with my work which made it even more intense. Most of my life was my career but I had this little side project that was us. And it made me feel really normal again, which is just what I needed. I was becoming a bit doolally—a bit fuckin crazy.” He was what she needed to keep from becoming fully consumed by being an artist. “That’s another reason that some of my friends didn’t like him,” she says. “He didn’t really talk much. Quite isolated, I guess. He never wanted to be part of my proper life.” Their relationship was a necessary island within her life. He was unimpressed and uninterested in her show business life and she liked that. “He doesn’t really care about my career and my path,” she says. “He understood what I was going through but he was totally unfazed by it. I don’t even know how he was unfazed by it cuz it was pretty fazing and I was completely like what the fuck is going on, this is ridiculous but it wasn’t his world. It wasn’t his world at all. And I don’t go home and talk about my career. I don’t go home saying, ‘So the statistics are in, this strategy’s happening…’ I do not take my work life into my home life.”
But then, after almost a year, things started to fizzle. He never cheated or did her wrong. It somehow, mysteriously, stopped working. “It just stopped being fun,” she says. “I couldn’t work out why. And neither could he. But we didn’t talk to each other about it, either. Which is the main reason that we fell apart so dramatically. It stopped being fun and we stopped wanting to hang out together and we stopped wanting to do things that we’d loved doing together. We didn’t want to do them together any more. We didn’t talk and we’d just bicker over a cup of tea or the fact that my lighter wasn’t working and just start moaning and bitching at each other but for no reason. We just fell out of love and it was horrible and that’s the first time it’s ever happened to me where there’s nothing but you just grow apart and become different people and we couldn’t work out why it was. I’m still as confused as I was when we broke up.” She harbored no anger toward him and how could she? He did nothing wrong. Their bond just disintegrated. “I wasn’t pissed off at him, I was pissed off at myself for not making it work,” she says, sadly. “I didn’t make it work. I should’ve made it work. I don’t blame him at all. Life happens, innit? Shit intervenes.” Still, she was an emotional wreck. “It was the worst breakup ever,” she says. “I’ve never been so affected by losing someone before.” I say “He left you feeling like shit…” and she cuts me off: “No, we left me feeling like shit.”
The morning after things officially ended she went into the studio to work with producer Paul Edgeworth. It was the beginning of a nine month period in which she left home only to go to the studio. At home she would sit in the dark and cry and write sad songs about her ex. “I don’t want to be around anyone when I’m in pain or miserable and that’s when I write songs because I’m not distracted.” When she saw friends she cried so much they couldn’t deal. “I lost all my friends cuz I was useless.” But she insisted on continuing to work because she needed that. “I felt like the world had fucking ended,” she says, “but I think it’s important to be productive out of a bad situation. That makes me feel like I get the last say. And I want to be a believable artist so I tried to embrace it.” But she was in a bad state. “I was like sobbing to Paul in the studio,” she says, “and I said let’s write a ballad and he said, no, let’s times it by 120 bpm! Let’s write a stomping, fierce, bitchy song! And it made me stronger from it.”
Edgeworth said, “She was obviously quite fragile. And very open about what had happened. But she definitely seemed like she had fire in her belly. She’s so real in an age when everything else is so manicured. She’s really singing her honest feelings about what’s going on but she’s like I’m gonna get through this. That’s what connects. Her songs are such a reflection of who she is and her experiences. There’s no façade. It’s like a breath of fresh air, innit?”
Adele writes her songs but still lets her producers guide her and in this case Edgeworth sensed they could shift the song she’d written from yet another Adele ballad into something spicier. And thus they made the song that would become 21’s rollicking first single, “Rolling In the Deep.” She says, “It’s about suddenly having this lightblub moment of I’m gonna be fine, but we could’ve had it all. We coulda been the best couple ever. And you know you put up that brave face, like I don’t need to be with you, but I want to be with you and you try to be strong but really you just want to be in their arms again.”
From there Adele continued pouring her pain about her ex into the songs that would form 21. And then a few months after they’d broken up, she got more painful news. She was in Malibu, working with Rick Rubin, when she found out her ex was engaged. “I was absolutely devastated,” she says. “Absolutely devastated. It wasn’t like, we coulda done that, it was more like, that quickly? How have you managed to meet someone that quickly? How have you moved on? I was like, you never know what could happen. We might get back together. We might realize… I missed him and I just assumed he missed me and still loved me too much to be able to commit to someone else like that. I was quite shocked how quickly I was replaced because he hasn’t been replaced. Even now.” She hasn’t seen anyone since it ended. “I’m not ready to,” she says softly. “I’m not ready to. I think I’m a bit flimsy right now. I think it’s bad to try and be with someone when you love someone else a little bit. I’m not in love with him, but I love him still, ya know?”
He’s moving into family life and not thinking about her while she’s still constantly thinking about him. “I’m still very, very fond of him and every little thing I do there’s always something in it that I do because he told me that I should do it. Even stuff to do with my career or something in a shop I’ll see or a food I’ll eat or a smell I’ll smell and it reminds me of him.” She stops. “Yeah. There’s a huge hole in my life. Absolutely.” What if she could say something to him? “I hope you’re happy,” she says with genuine care about his emotions. “I really hope he is happy,” she says gently. “I hope he doesn’t feel as shit as I do. As long as one of us is superhappy out of our relationship.”
Thank you Adele, for making me feel a little less frustrated with my current emotions.
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