Please, just let your songs do the talking...
Adele’s back with a hugely anticipated new album charting the breakdown of her marriage. But after a highly-personal interview with Vogue, our columnist JENNIFER SELWAY asks whether discretion is best
and should stars just let the songs do the talking?
ADELE, queen of the heartbreak ballad, has another heartbreak to share with us.
The Tottenham songstress not only has a new single later this month and a new album, called 30, in November, she also has a new look too.
She has refined the slimmed-down Adele to become the ultimate LA glamazon diva. There’s a honed new body and a face unrecognisable from that of the woman who burst on the music scene in 2008 with her first album, 19.
And interviewed in the currentvogue magazine (and the first celebrity to appear on the cover of both its UK and US editions) she says the new album is all about her divorce from charity executive Simon Konecki.
She hopes when her nine-year-old son Angelo is in his 20s or 30s it will provide him with an explanation of why she “voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness”.
How scathingly honest that sounds. How very Adele. But it also sounds as if her little boy is asking plenty of questions already, wondering why his parents don’t live together any longer.
Adele said: “It made him really unhappy sometimes.that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal.” Chances are he’ll be searching for explanations long before he’s in his 20s or 30s.and is an album, even an album by one of the world’s most successful artists, going to be adequate compensation?
It was even rumoured a few months ago that Adele had reached an agreement with her ex-husband that she would not write songs about their marriage. Fair enough when there’s a child involved.
The beauty of the songs in the early part of Adele’s career was down to their raw authenticity, the sense that this workingclass London girl was voicing the pain of anyone who has suffered from a broken heart and was transforming it into a triumphant, thundering ballad.
The autobiographical who, why and where didn’t really matter because the point of a great song is that it’s absorbed by the person who listens to it and who remakes it in their own image. James
Corden summed it up when he introduced Adele at the Brit Awards in 2011: “There’s nothing quite like the feeling of listening to a song by someone you don’t know, who you’ve never met and yet manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life. This next artist is able to do that time after time...if you’ve ever had a broken heart you’re about to remember it now”.
Then she sang Someone Like You. Not a dry eye...
Adele’s rags-to-riches story is compelling but her songs can and should stand on their own without the obligation to provide details of the experiences that formed them.what if she just kept shtum?
The 33-year-old already has a Garboesque quality and we haven’t heard much from her for five years or so.
Adele could have said nothing. If there was some sort of undertaking not to write songs about the break-up, that only matters if she actively states the songs are about the marriage. Because you can’t stop any writer using their own life as material. It’s what artists of Adele’s stature must do.
You can’t stop songwriters writing songs but must they bang on about them too? The sound of silence can be
very powerful.
Last night Adele aired a snippet of new single Easy On Me in an impromptu appearance on Instagram. Fans were impressed by the song that includes the lyrics: “I know there is hope in these waters, but I can’t bring myself to swim – when I am drowning in the silence, baby, let me in.”