Adele reigns as queen of the ugly-cry ballad
New album addresses her divorce.
When we talk about Adele’s singing — when we’ve talked about it over the past decade as she became the biggest pop vocalist on the planet — we’ve tended to marvel at her control, her finesse, her mastery of tone.
But in the most moving song on her long-awaited new album, Adele threatens to crash through all that.
It’s almost frightening, this song, in its intensity: A slow, stark, 6½-minute voice-andpiano ballad about learning to let go of trauma, “To Be Loved” — the next-to-last cut on the 12-track “30,” released today — climaxes with what can only be described as a howl of pain, Adele’s famous Godgiven instrument so volcanic that it’s hard to believe everybody in Los Angeles didn’t stop on the day she recorded it and wonder what they just heard.
In her televised interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday night, which drew more viewers than all the other pop stars combined did for this year’s Grammy Awards, Adele suggested that “To Be Loved” was inspired in part by her late father’s emotional neglect.
Yet the song also feels like the key to understanding “30,” the singer’s fourth studio LP, which addresses her recent divorce from her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, with whom she shares a 9-year-old son.
Yes, there are tunes here about how that relationship unraveled and about the toll it took — the toll it’s taking — on the former couple’s only child. “My Little Love,” a lush soul jam with echoes of classic Isaac Hayes, features voice-memo snippets of the kid asking his mom about her “big feelings”; it’s maybe a bit much, though any parent is sure to crumple at the innocence embedded in that high little voice.
Named, like all of Adele’s albums, after the age at which she began writing it, “30’ — the highest-profile in a string of white-woman divorce albums that also includes Kacey Musgraves’ “Star-Crossed” and Carly Pearce’s “29: Written in Stone” — also has songs in which she’s ready to move on from her breakup, most notably “Can I Get It,” which lives up to its frisky title with a boot-scooting acoustic groove a la George Michael’s “Faith.”
“I’m counting on you to put the pieces of me back together,” sings Adele, now 33 and linked romantically to sports agent Rich Paul.
More than gossip about Konecki or her new boyfriend, though, “30’ offers deep thoughts on love’s causes and consequences.
Needless to say, Adele’s singing — soaring yet pulpy, gorgeous even at its rawest (as in “To Be Loved”) — gives these musings the blood-and-guts believability her fans crave.
For all the dismantling of genres happening on the Hot 100, it’s worth remembering that pop listeners never really lose their taste for the kind of music Adele makes. Until people stop breaking one another’s hearts, we’ll keep needing ugly-cry ballads — and nobody does those better than Adele.