With every lyric, Adele has earned the right to negotiate both her fame and career on her own terms. Now she wants her life to follow suit.
There are people who need an introduction – and then there’s Adele. The mere mention of her name holds weight, evoking several emotions. She’s a once-in-a generation kind of artist whose music has likely featured on your heartbreak playlist, holding your hand through a particularly memorable moment in your life.
Adele’s soulful, regal voice stands in direct contrast to her brash, North London accent reminiscing that larger-than-life woman in a pub whose laugh fills the whole room.
Such is the duality and intrigue that the songstress embodies – she is at once a friend you’ve had over several times for a drink and an icon who transcends the musical genre.
And after four albums, 16 Grammys, over 460 concerts and several chart topping songs to her name – she’s decided to press pause. This isn’t the first time, though. In April 2012, Adele announced that she’d be taking some time off. “There were a good two years between my first and second albums, so it’ll be the same,” she told French broadcaster NRJ at the time. Later that year, she gave birth to her son, Angelo, so it was easy to understand why she’d want to step away from the limelight for a little while.
But this time seems different. “My tank is quite empty at the minute,” she told German broadcaster ZDF ahead of her last series of August shows in Munich. “I don’t have any plans for new music at all. I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things just for a little while. You know, I don’t even sing at home at all. How strange is that?” For someone whose life has been filled with music, the rhetorical question is deeper than it appears at face value.
I WAS ALWAYS AVAILABLE TO THE WAY THAT MUSIC MADE ME FEEL FROM A VERY YOUNG AGE
Hometown glory
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham and raised in London by single mom Penny Adkins, who worked in furniture restoration. “I was lucky that my mum was really into music,” she told Zane Lowe in an interview. “She was so young when she had me that she was still at that point of being somewhat fanatical about music like the way you love an artist – and that really rubbed off on me,” she shares. “There was more music playing in my house when I was little than there is now.” Adele began singing as early as 4 years old, and music was more than just ambience but a trusted friend, too. “I was an only child,” she reveals.
“And I was lonely a lot of my childhood, whether it be actually or I just felt it, and I was always available to the way that music made me feel from a very young age. The budding singer would later enrol in the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon – sharing a class with the likes of Leona Lewis and Jessie J. By the time she was a teenager, Adele had learnt to play the guitar and would often be found playing music, writing songs or singing in Brockwell Park. “It was the most reliable friend I’ve ever had in my life. There is a song for every emotion, there is a song for every feeling – it’s just consistency.” After graduating in 2006, the three-song demo that Adele recorded for a school project gained traction on the social media site MySpace. This led to a recording contract with XL Recordings. The following year she’d make her first TV appearance on the show Later … with Jools Holland, where she’d debut her first single ‘Hometown Glory’ – a song she wrote when she was 16.
Adele wasn’t shy to tap into what she was feeling and put it into her music, resulting in her debut album 19 – which earned the singer two Grammys including Best New Artist. After embarking on her first world tour ‘An Evening with Adele’ in 2009, the next decade or so seemed to fly by and each subsequent album, intentionally or not, served as a timestamp of what Adele was going through at any given point in time.
“I was drunk as a fart on 21; I really don’t remember much, I just remember being really sad,” she revealed in a 2021 interview with British Vogue. “On 25, I was obviously sober as anything, because I was a new mum. That one, I was sort of more in tune with what I thought people might want or not want.” During this time she had also married Simon Konecki, the father of her son Angelo. “With this one,” she says of her most recent album 30, “I made the very conscious decision to be like, for the first time in my life – actually ‘What do I want?’”
This question would come to be a catalyst in Adele’s life, and as with most catalysts – something drastic has to happen for it to render change.
Rolling in the deep
“When I was 30, my entire life fell apart and I had no warning of it,” she shares. The realisation that she was no longer happy in her marriage led Adele to make the tough decision to file for divorce. “We’ve been trained as women to keep trying, even by the movies we watched when we were little,” she says. “At the time it broke my heart, but I actually find it so interesting now. How we’re told to suck it up,” she shrugs. “Well, screw that.” The notion of staying strong to save the family unit was not lost on Adele, but she found that her feelings around the divorce had more layers that she realised.
“I got really angry after I left my marriage,” she reflects. “It was really interesting because l’ve never had arguments with any of my boyfriends, let alone in my marriage – it was very calm. I got this rage afterwards and I think it was frustration at me ignoring myself for such a long time, and me feeling like I was falling back into my old habits. It was scary to me. Once l realised what it was, why that would happen, everything really started changing.” Thus began Adele’s extensive work on improving herself – not just in mind through therapy, but in body – and no, this was no quest for a ‘revenge body’.
“Working out, I would just feel better. It was never about losing weight, it was always about becoming strong and giving myself as much time every day without my phone,” admits the singer. “I got quite addicted to it – I work out two or three times a day. I was basically unemployed when I was doing it and I do it with trainers. I needed to get addicted to something to get my mind right,” she continues. “It could have been knitting, but it wasn’t.”
Adele’s weight loss was seen as drastic, with social media having various opinions as to how she did it. “I think one of the reasons people lost the plot was because actually, it was over a two-year period,” she says. “People are shocked because I didn’t share my ‘journey’. They’re used to people documenting everything on Instagram, and most people in my position would get a big deal with a diet brand. I couldn’t give a damn. I did it for myself and not anyone else.” And to those asking about her diet? “No intermittent fasting. Nothing,” she asserts. “If anything, I eat more than I used to because I work out so hard.”
I’VE COME A LONG WAY, BUT YOU DON’T ALWAYS NOTICE IT WHILE YOU’RE LEARNING
While enjoying the fruits of her labour on holiday in Jamaica last year, Adele posted a photograph of herself at an outdoor party wearing Bantu knots and a bikini top made from Jamaican flags. “I totally get why people felt like it was appropriating,” she says in hindsight. At the time she reasoned that: “If you don’t go dressed to celebrate the Jamaican culture – and in so many ways we’re so entwined in that part of London – then it’s a little bit like, ‘What you coming for, then?’ I didn’t read the room,” she admits. “I was wearing a hairstyle that is actually to protect Afro hair. Ruined mine, obviously.”
Social media opinions are one thing, but being single in Los Angeles proved to be tougher waters to navigate. “I never experienced dating as a grown-up really, but also everyone knowing who I am,” Adele reveals. “Watching my friends, it was all casual sex and everyone had slept with each other,” she told Zane Lowe in an interview. “And I said I’m not doing that – I left my marriage to go forwards, not to go backwards.” While being more decisive about how to go through this new chapter in her life seemed simple, sifting through her emotions was the ultimate challenge. “Sometimes just knowing you’re a hot mess – once you do realise it, it gets easier,” she says. “I definitely lost hope a number of times that l’d ever find my joy again. I didn’t belly-laugh for about a year and my laugh is such a big part of who I am,” she reveals. “The fact that I’ve been able to identify all these feelings I’ve been having – I’ve come a long way, but you don’t always notice it while you’re learning. Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get.”
With a community of friends to keep her on the right path, Adele made a conscious choice to decide what she would take away from this challenging period in her life and use it to pave the way forward into her future. “My personality, I took with me but my traits and my habits – all those things that were handed down to me from other people in my family, I just thought: I’m alright,” she says. “Showing up for the things I promised that I will do for myself means I’m so much more useful to my friends.”
And as life would have it, the ground was ripe for a new love to enter Adele’s life – enter high-profile sports agent and Ohio native Rich Paul. “I’ve never been in love like this. I’m obsessed with him,” she gushed to Elle magazine in an interview. They started out as friends for some time, then made their relationship public in 2021, when they stepped out for an NBA Finals game. “It’s quite incredible watching him do what he does,” she told Oprah in an interview, also emphasising that it’s the first time she’s “loved myself and been open to loving and being loved by someone else.” After three years of dating, the couple is now engaged.
Easy on me
But she wouldn’t be the Adele we know and love if she didn’t channel all her emotions into her music. The divorce and all her experiences thereafter became the seed of her latest album 30, which is primarily dedicated to her son, Angelo. “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his 20s or 30s, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,” she explains. “It made him unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal,” she reveals. “I definitely did lose my connection with my own music and how it made me feel, but it came back to me on this album because I needed it so badly.”
What separates Adele from her counterparts is the raw vulnerability she pours into each song – it seeps out of every lyric and every note she sings, offering comfort to every listener including herself. “I don’t think there’s any expectation of sincerity left in music from artists. I believe that artists are sincere, and I think to be an artist – like an actual artist – it comes from deep within us that; it’s a necessity that we have to put it out.” This is why, in a rapidly changing industry, Adele remains resolute in her lane. “The conversation of Tiktok came up a lot. They’re like: ‘You know, we got to make sure the 14-year-olds know who you are and I’m like: ‘but they’ve all got mums!’
And they’ve been growing up listening to my music. If everyone’s making music for the TikTok, who’s making the music in my generation? Who’s making the music for my peers? I will do that job, gladly!” she vows. “I’d rather cater to people around my level in terms of the amount of time we’ve spent on Earth and all the things we’ve been through. The 30- and 40-year-olds who are all committing to themselves and doing therapy – that’s my vibe because that’s what I was doing, you know, so I’m more concerned with how this record can help them.”
We’ve had the pleasure of Adele the artist for over a decade, with a catalogue of music to keep us company for a lifetime. To pull out complex emotions is to feel them time and time again – and she has, we all have. Every melody, whether heartbreaking or uplifting, has been hard-earned. At her final show in Munich, the 36-year-old shared her heart: “I have spent the last seven years building a new life for myself and I want to live it now. I want to live my life that I’ve been building, and I will miss you terribly.”
By: Geraldine Amoko
Photographs: Gallo/Getty Images
