Adele didn’t know she was going to write 21. Not right away. After the wave of success that was 19, she mostly just sat around twiddling her thumbs, waiting for life to knock her over again. “I really didn’t feel ready to write a record,” she says. “I had to sort of sit, twiddling my thumbs, wait for life to suddenly hit me.” Spoiler: it did.
That sucker punch came in the form of a relationship that went “rubbish,” despite once being “the most amazing, brilliant, breathtaking relationship ever.” There was no infidelity, no fight—just a grown-up love that quietly collapsed under its own weight. “I found that more devastating than being like, ‘Yeah, well, you f*cked that girl.’” She laughs, but only a little.
The heartbreak turned into fuel. Big, cinematic, Grammy-wrecking fuel. “Rolling in the Deep” felt like fire from the first moment it landed. Well, to everyone but Adele. “I thought it would be more like a tastemaker thing. A viral internet blog thing.” The fact that it ended up everywhere—including, apparently, every radio station in the world—still blows her mind.
Her gut told her it had to be the first single, even though the album itself wasn’t anything like 19. “It’s very different. And I think that’s completely personified in ‘Rolling in the Deep.’”
Rick Rubin pushed her into covering The Cure’s “Lovesong,” though she’d originally wanted to tackle INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart.” Turns out, she couldn’t sell it. “I didn’t believe a single word I was singing,” she admits. “When INXS do it, I’m on my knees crying. When I did it, I just sounded like a liar.”
It was a gut thing, again. “Lovesong” landed better. “I was really missing home, and the lyrics went straight through me.” So did Rick Rubin, apparently. But in a good way.
And that gorgeous black-and-white video for “Rolling in the Deep”? That came courtesy of Sam Brown—who also did Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One”—and lives two minutes away from Adele’s house in London with his four kids. “Turns out he’s this Jewish guy, not some hip-hop big shot.”
Also perfect? That Jamie xx remix of “Rolling in the Deep,” which Adele says took her a minute to get used to. “I’ve got my own dance routine to it now,” she grins. “I love it.”
Whether she’s dancing to remixes or cutting out her heart and smearing it across vinyl, Adele’s just following her instincts. It’s not a formula. It’s a feeling. “I just had to wait until I felt it.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
