The miracle of Adele’s return (and everything that’s led us here)
Adam Fiertl traces Adele’s return journey back to the spotlight and reviews the megastar’s new single.
It’s been 6 years since Adele’s last ‘Hello’: a tear in our timeline finally mended only by her grand return on October 15. It is true, the wait for Adele’s return has been as long as it felt. For perspective, some major world events that occurred in the time before her comeback last Friday include the all-female Ghostbusters hitting the theatres with much hate and controversy, the Hamilton Original Broadway Cast Recording hit number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, Harambe’s humble spirit being memefied and Pokémon Go sweeping the globe as an achingly unavoidable quench for our innate need to hunt. So, yeah, it’s been a hot minute.
So where were we 6 years ago? To set the stage for the North London queen, in 2015, on the eve of Adele’s announcement that she would be releasing her 3rd studio album entitled 25, a slew of mega stars with albums slated for release in the upcoming months scrambled to avoid the drop. Justin Bieber, Little Mix and One Direction all pushed up or back their respected albums to avoid placing at number 2 against the Someone Like You singer. Adele’s album debuted at number 1 and sold 3.38 million copies in its first week of release, the largest of any album debut to date. A force to be reckoned with, Adele was simply unavoidable for two years following the release of 25, as was the mention of her every time a phone would ring.
With these numbers in mind, the imminence of Adele’s 2021 return naturally spooked a couple of her superstar comrades once again. Even Taylor Swift pushed up the date of her upcoming re-release RED (Taylor’s Version) in an attempt to avoid the immutable power of Adele’s comeback. It’s clear that Adele’s hiatus has done nothing to quench fans’ thirst for her powerful ballads and, like moths to flame, they’ve awoken.
To illustrate, on October 1, images of gold lettering spelling ‘30’ were projected globally on national landmarks. Adele’s chokehold on the heartbroken generation plus our yearning for her return had her name trending within an hour despite there being no confirmation of her connection to the projections at all. Six days later, the Rolling in the Deep singer took to Instagram to announce her first single in six years, Easy On Me, to be released the following Friday. Becoming her most liked post after 37 minutes, it was safe to say the world had not forgotten Adele.
A maiden of heartbreak, Adele has become renowned for wearing her heart on her sleeve. Easy On Me does the same, but differently. The song itself is classic Adele, simply put. More eloquently, though, Easy On Me is a lullaby to her son. A gift-wrapped warning of her fragility and a preemptive apology for her failings as a mother. The chorus sees Adele tap into her usual arcane magnificence, her singing of ‘go easy on me, baby’ for she was ‘still a child’ allows us listeners a peek into her accountability and struggle for sense. It is a struggle between life in the lights of stardom or by the lampshade of her son’s youthful iridescence. Turning over a new leaf, Adele begs her son Angelo to forgive her for coming up short and marrying a man she knew she would eventually leave. Her gusto and vulnerability in telling him that she ‘didn’t get a chance to feel the world around [her]’ invites us into the retching struggles of pop stardom, her being thrust into celebrity status while trying to find her path through womanhood and embracing this duality.
Perched atop a delicate yet painstakingly-poignant piano melody, Adele’s vocals are as strong as ever. Painted in voice cracks and yearning moans, the Hometown Glory singer captures the tumultuous and unwritten path of motherhood. Easy On Me does not stray sonically from what Adele has become known for. As a followup to Hello, perhaps it lacks the aching, grandiose punch that will identify it as a worldwide hit, but as a song and as a message, Easy On Me forefronts Adele’s emotional growth: her devotion to ensuring a future with her son. Her vocals are as experimental as ever, though, as she dances and leaps through the second verse and meanders wistfully in the bridge. ‘I had good intentions and the highest hopes’, she sings as she bounds between chest and falsetto, soulfully delivering the aches she’s felt since we’d last seen her.
Adele’s albums act as snapshots of her life in their irrespective titles: 19, 21 and 25. If Easy On Me is anything to go by it seems that Adele is set to be as open as ever in her new album 30 which is set to be released November 19. Much like 25, Easy On Me channels a melancholia of the passage of time. The poetic nuance of the lead sets a strong course for Adele’s album rollout, indicating perhaps a move away from mourning the hole in her heart and instead on mending it - starting by sharing it with her son.