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Adele · S2 E4
The MySpace Demo
A class assignment: record three songs, upload them to MySpace. A&R scouts find them within months. She is seventeen.
A BRIT School student uploads a three-track demo to MySpace as a class project. Within months, the most respected independent label in British music is on the phone offering her a record deal.
Adele, Carpool Karaoke with James Corden (2024). Nearly two decades after uploading a three-track demo to MySpace, Adele sings her own hits in a car while millions watch. She has four albums of hits to draw from, and the ease with which she moves between them shows how far the MySpace demo girl has come.
Carpool Karaoke (2024)
The 2024 edition reunites Adele with James Corden years after the original became the most-watched Carpool Karaoke in history. The format hasn't changed: a car, a microphone, and Adele singing along to her own songs while being disarmingly funny between tracks. What has changed is the catalogue. She now has four albums of hits to draw from, and the ease with which she moves between them shows just how far the MySpace demo girl has come.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did XL Recordings first discover Adele?
The MySpace Demo
In 2006, a friend posts Adele's three-song demo on MySpace as part of a class project at the BRIT School. The songs are rough, recorded on basic equipment, but the voice is unmistakable. Within weeks, Nick Huggett at XL Recordings, the independent label behind The White Stripes and Radiohead's later albums, hears the demo and contacts Adele directly. She is eighteen years old.
Sources
Chas Newkey-Burden, Adele: The Biography (2012)
The Deal
Bonus Listening: Melt My Heart to Stone
An overlooked track from 19 about emotional coldness and someone who cannot be reached. The lyric describes the exact sensation of loving someone who is not there. Listen to it as a first draft of a theme she will return to for the next fifteen years.
Melt My Heart to Stone, Adele (2008)
Read the lyrics while you listen. An overlooked track from 19 about emotional coldness and someone who cannot be reached. The lyric describes the exact sensation of loving someone who is not there.
Who uploaded Adele's demo to MySpace, leading to her discovery?
She has the label, the voice, and three songs that prove she belongs. Now she needs an album. Next: recording 19, the debut that announces Adele to the world at an age when most people are still deciding what to study at university.
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