She’s one of the most revered and beloved pop-ballad Divas of the modern age, but even Adele has admitted her first efforts at songwriting for her new album were crap.
In an interview with i-D Magazine – her first interview in three years – Adele admitted that some of her first stabs at penning songs for 25 were a bit dismal at best. After she came up with Remedy for the new album with producer Ryan Tedder, things went down hill.
“Because Remedy is so great, and I loved singing it so much I got excited like ‘I’m on a roll!’ I weren’t on a roll,” Adele told interviewer Hattie Collins. “So I started knocking out some shit songs – they weren’t shit.”
“They were good pop songs, but I was just trying to bang it out, I didn’t want to think about it. And, you know, it got rejected. My manager was like, ‘This isn’t good enough.’”
Even record producer and former co-president of Columbia Records, and maybe the greatest living producer today, Rick Rubin, was convinced that this was Adele at her best.
“Yeah, it knocked my confidence a bit, but I also knew, you know. And then I flew Rick Rubin over, to play him the songs and he was like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ That’s my worst fear: people not believing me. So I went back to the drawing board.”
The interview, which comes at about one month before the highly anticipated release of 25, was full of revelations about the new album, as well as personal observations of her own. Most of all, the singer wishes she hadn’t seen the documentary about idol Amy Winehouse. Her fatal overdose in 2011 affected Adele deeply
“I wasn’t going to [see it]. I loved her and I went through my own massive grieving process as her fan. I’d finally got to a place where I felt really great about the impact she’d had on my life, in every way …”
Adele didn’t want to have the last image of the her friend coming from a documentary about her tragic demise.
“I felt like I was intruding so I actually felt a little bit uncomfortable and that ruined it for me. I love watching her, but I kind of wish I hadn’t seen it. But you know, I love Amy. I always have, I always will.”
And after much speculation, the singer revealed that Hello was not a follow-up to Someone Like You, the super soppy, worldwide smash hit that managed to elicit moist eyes from all who heard it. “That’s over and done with, thank fuck. That’s been over and done with for fucking years,” she explains brassily. In fact Hello is about missing home.
“It’s about a yearning for the other side of me. When I’m away, I really, really miss my life at home. The way that I feel when I’m not in England, is…” Adele says, “desperation. I can’t breathe anywhere else.”
It’s drawn hilarious comparisons the eponymous single of the same name by Lionel Richie (who Instagrammed a mash-up of the songs) and baffled fans trying to work out why an archaic flip phone manages to appear in the video. But if the phenomenal success of leading single Hello is anything to go by, then 25 will surely be one of the biggest albums of the years – even with such a late year release.
Adele’s last album 21 sold an incredible 11 million copies in the US alone as of 2014. Hello itself managed to accrue a whopping 27.7 million views in the first 24 hours on Vivo, obliterating Taylor Swift’s previously held record for Bad Blood, which had 20.1 million views. Hello Adele, goodbye Taylor.
Checkout the track list for 25 below:
Tracklist
- Hello
- Send My Love (To Your New Lover)
- I Miss You
- When We Were Young
- Remedy
- Water Under The Bridge
- River Lea
- Love In The Dark
- Million Years Ago
- All I Ask
- Sweetest Devotion
25 is out November 20 via XL Records