Senior Writer Brittany Spanos on how she discussed Adele's divorce for the new Rolling Stone cover story.
and her audience was hungry for something new. And what’s a better album prompt than a high-profile divorce?
Adele wanted to be settled and happy, in a home full of loving, organized chaos. She never really felt that, or at least she never felt truly present in it. “It made me really sad,” she recalls. “Then having so many people that I don’t knowthat I didn’t make that work … it fucking devastated me. I was embarrassed. No one made me feel embarrassed, but you feel like you didn’t do a good job.
The next day, she woke up to the California sun pouring through her curtains and “saw this tsunami of emotions” coming toward her. She thought that maybe she would try to be busy. Instead, she stayed in bed and started watching“I was like, ‘This is going to be really fucking up-and-down,’” she says. And it was. But after the great birthday and rough comedown of a morning after, she decided to spend 2019 trying new things.
Their time in the studio would begin with a “six-hour therapy session,” Adele says, when the pair would unpack what she was going through at the moment and then spend two or three days pulling out a song that cut to the heart of her emotional tsunami. Adele has started to wonder about society’s expectations for mothers, how they’re always just moms while dads can be many things at once. Much of that is what reinforced her feelings of failing Angelo after leaving Konecki. “I might not have been emotionally there all the time, but I never wasn’t there for him,” she says, defending herself against her own fears.
Fast-forward to this September, a full year after the original release date. Adele is enjoying a poke bowl in a Burbank rehearsal space and relishing a different kind of tweetstorm than the one she witnessed after her separation announcement. Her name had been trending after a radio host spread a rumor that she was about to drop her album imminently. A fake track list started to spread, including imaginary duets with Beyoncé and Ariana Grande.
She could delay the album only so long. “If it wasn’t coming out now, I think I probably would never put it out,” she admits. Given the very specific point of her life she’s singing about, she reckoned with the fact that an album has as much of a shelf life for the artist as it does for the audience. “I know I would’ve changed my mind and been like, ‘It’s moved on. Let’s start the next album.’ And I couldn’t do that to this album. I feel like it deserves to come out.
The song is conversational, with Adele pulling a “Barry Manilow trick,” where every chorus is sung differently. She put on different characters while recording the background vocals, too, to give it a sarcastic Sixties vibe . “It made it less intimidating,” she continues, “because some of the things I’m talking about really hit home for a lot of people.
When you’re an A-lister, dates tend to be sterile — NDAs, hiring out the whole restaurant. Still, she’s recently found ease, stability, and security with boyfriend Rich Paul, an agent for prominent athletes like LeBron James. Paul and Adele met on a dance floor at a mutual friend’s birthday party years ago. She doesn’t remember which song they danced to, but she assumes it was something by her close friend Drake.
Adele has “chilled out” in Los Angeles, with her core group of friends helping her find a life that feels both private and full. In fact, she has come to love the city so much that she even got it tattooed on her arm, the L.A. skyline in the middle of a ringed planet, to represent the Saturn return she experienced while living there.on her journey of personal reckoning. It was back in the U.K., where her father was losing an eight-year battle with cancer.
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