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Adele · S2 E5
XL Recordings
Richard Russell signs her to XL, home of The White Stripes, M.I.A., and Radiohead. She is the only artist on the roster who sounds like she belongs on a different label entirely.
2006, an office in West London. An eighteen-year-old girl from West Norwood sits across from Richard Russell, the founder of XL Recordings, the label that put out The Prodigy, The White Stripes, and Radiohead, and plays him a song on an acoustic guitar.
Adele, "Turning Tables" (live at Largo, Los Angeles). Co-written with Ryan Tedder, this is a song about reaching the end of an argument where you realize you're never going to win, and choosing to walk away instead. The vocal builds from a hushed piano opening into a sweeping orchestral arrangement.
Turning Tables
"Turning Tables" is about reaching the breaking point in a toxic relationship, the moment you stop fighting to fix things and decide to leave. The song captures the realization that some battles aren't worth winning. Ryan Tedder's production layers strings beneath the vocal without ever overshadowing it, giving Adele room to escalate from a whisper to a roar across the song's four minutes. The key moment is when the drums enter: the whole track shifts from vulnerable to defiant in a single bar.
The Strangest Signing
XL Recordings in 2006 is home to M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal, The White Stripes, and Radiohead. Its roster is built on artists who push boundaries, not singer-songwriters who play acoustic guitar in their bedrooms. When Nick Huggett, the A&R scout who found Adele's MySpace demos, brings her to Richard Russell, she is the most unlikely signing in the label's history.
Sources
Chas Newkey-Burden, Adele: The Biography (2012)
TAP TO REVEAL: How did XL Recordings first discover Adele?
XL Recordings
The independent label in West London where Adele signed her first record deal at eighteen. The building that housed The Prodigy and Radiohead was about to add a soul singer from a council flat.
Which of these artists was NOT on XL Recordings' roster when Adele signed in 2006?
Strangers By Nature
From 30 (2021). The album's opening track, co-written with Ludwig Goransson, is a cinematic, string-laden overture that sounds like the beginning of a film. In the context of an eighteen-year-old walking into a label that housed Radiohead and The Prodigy, it captures the feeling of entering a world where you don't quite belong, knowing that somehow you will.
Strangers By Nature, Adele (2021)
Read the lyrics while you listen. The opening track of her most personal album, and it starts with a declaration about being a stranger. For a girl signing to a label where she's the odd one out, these words feel like they were written fifteen years too late, about a feeling she's carried since the beginning.
The Deal
She has a label, but she doesn't have a team. Next episode: Jonathan Dickins, the manager who takes the call from XL and never leaves her side, through every album, every silence, and every comeback.
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