Adele has a lot of big feelings in long-awaited album
When a song makes you cry, are you crying for the singer? For the story the song tells? For the way it reflects your own experiences and memories? On “30,” her fourth album, Adele Adkins pushes for all of those at once, counting on her untrammeled musicality to pull together the empathy of pop with personal sympathy for a performer who’s grappling with motherhood, fame and changes of heart.
It’s an album, Adele has said on Instagram and in her Nov. 14 concert-and-interview TV special with Oprah Winfrey, about her divorce from Simon Konecki, the father of their child, Angelo. It’s also about the aftermath: guilt, drinking, depression, loneliness, self-doubt and, eventually, moving on. The split is apparently amicable; Konecki shares custody and lives across the street from Adele in Beverly Hills.
Adele chose to divorce because, she told Rolling Stone, “I didn’t like who I was.” She addresses it most directly in “I Drink Wine,” a crescendo of confession and self-help underpinned by churchy piano and organ: “How can one become so bounded by choices that somebody else makes?” she sings. “How come we’ve both become a version of a person we don’t even like?”
In her six years between albums — a gap extended by the pandemic — Adele has largely stood aside from the miniaturization and gimmickiness of current pop hitmaking. She can; she’s one of the few remaining stars with ardent fans across multiple generations and she keeps her ear on pop’s history more than on fleeting trends.
Adele ended her televised concert extolling “real music,” “live music” and “real artistry,” virtues of the vanished analogue era. While many current streaming hits are just two minutes long, half of the songs on “30” run longer than five minutes, including extended stretches of piano and voice alone, taking their time and savouring dynamic, nonmetronomic ups and downs. Adele doesn’t rule out electronics, but she makes clear that she doesn’t have to rely on them.
Her voice — cooing, declaiming, arguing, teasing, imploring, quivering, breaking, shouting — is rightfully at the centre. Even as she sings about desperation and uncertainty, on “30” Adele’s voice is more supple and purposeful than ever, articulating every consonant and constantly ornamenting her melodies without distracting from them. Details are fastidious; in “I Drink Wine,” she sings “I’m trying to keep climbing up” while her voice rises in an upward arpeggio. Her emotion is always matched by her concentration.
The songs on “30” can be extravagantly theatrical. The album begins with “Strangers by Nature” and ends with “Love Is a Game”: leisurely, string-laden ballads that evoke bygone Hollywood opulence. Yet their lyrics frame the other songs on “30” with a new, grown-up skepticism and ambivalence about love itself: In “Love Is a Game,” Adele belts, “What a cruel thing to self-inflict that pain.”
The album’s longest track, “To Be Loved,” is also its most minimal, exposed production: just a livesounding duet with Adele’s co-writer, Vancouver’s Tobias Jesso Jr., on an echoey piano. Slowly, almost hesitantly, and then with growing solidity and vehemence, Adele grapples with what it means to share her life, trying to work out where trust and dependence turn into self-erasure: “To be loved and love at the highest count/Means to lose all the things I can’t live without,” she sings, then vows, “I can’t live a lie.”
Her phrases swell, tremble and spill over into melismas, and her verses crest with two different peaks. “Let it be known that I cried,” she sings, but later she trumpets, so loud it overloads the microphone, “Let it be known that I tried.”
It’s awash in regrets, but decisive; it’s high drama and a musical tour de force. And it’s clearly not the end of the story.