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Adele · S1 E6
The Guitar
She teaches herself from YouTube videos in her bedroom. By fourteen, she is writing songs that sound like they were written by someone twice her age.
The arena goes completely silent. Adele stands alone at a microphone at the 2011 Brit Awards, tears running down her face, and sings "Someone Like You" to an audience that has collectively stopped breathing.
Someone Like You -- Adele, live at the Brit Awards 2011. Just voice and piano, no backing band, no production tricks. This is the performance that turned a hit single into a cultural moment.
Someone Like You
Co-written with Dan Wilson in a single afternoon, "Someone Like You" is built on one of the simplest chord progressions in pop music. Piano, voice, nothing else. Wilson has said Adele arrived at the session still raw from her breakup with a man she has never publicly named and wrote the lyric in real time, barely pausing. Listen for the way she delivers the title line in the final chorus. Her voice breaks on the word "you," and she lets it break. She does not correct it or smooth it over. That moment of exposed vulnerability is what makes the song land like a physical impact.
The Brits Performance
On February 15, 2011, Adele performs "Someone Like You" at the Brit Awards at the O2 Arena in London. The performance comes near the end of a loud, flashy ceremony full of pop spectacle. Then the lights drop, the arena goes quiet, and Adele walks to the microphone alone. By the time she finishes, the audience is in tears. The song goes to number one in the UK the next day.
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened the morning after the Brits performance?
The O2 Arena
The Brit Awards ceremony where Adele delivered the defining performance of her career. The O2 Arena in Greenwich, London holds 20,000 people, and every one of them went silent.
Bonus Listening: First Love
Written during Adele's bedroom songwriting period in West Norwood. A raw, unguarded song about teenage infatuation, built on simple guitar chords and a vocal that already has the warmth of someone twice her age. The distance between this early sketch and "Someone Like You" is only a few years, but it sounds like a lifetime.
What happened to "Someone Like You" on the UK charts immediately after Adele's 2011 Brits performance?
One performance turns a hit into a phenomenon. But the album behind it is about to become something nobody predicted. Next: 21, the record that shatters every sales milestone of the modern era and sweeps the Grammys.
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