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Adele · S3 E5
Saturday Night Live
October 18, 2008. She performs on SNL the same night Sarah Palin appears. 17 million people watch. Her album goes to #1 in America the next week.
It is October 18, 2008, and a twenty-year-old British singer nobody in America has heard of is about to perform on Saturday Night Live. The episode draws 17 million viewers because of the other guest: Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.
Adele, "Chasing Pavements" (live on the Late Show with David Letterman, 2011). Performing the song that broke her in America, on one of America's biggest stages. The confidence compared to her first US TV appearances just three years earlier tells the whole story of what SNL started.
Chasing Pavements (US Live Performance)
By the time Adele performs "Chasing Pavements" on American television, the song has already done its work: it turned 17 million accidental SNL viewers into fans. The live arrangement is fuller than the studio version, with a confidence that the original recording, made before anyone outside London had heard her name, deliberately lacked. The difference between the two versions is the sound of someone who now knows the whole room is listening.
TAP TO REVEAL: What lucky accident made Adele famous in America?
The SNL Moment
Adele performs two songs on Saturday Night Live on October 18, 2008. The episode is the highest-rated SNL in fourteen years, but not because of her: Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression draws 17 million viewers during a heated presidential campaign. Millions tune in for the comedy and stay for the music. By Monday morning, 19 has jumped to number one on the US iTunes chart.
After SNL
Bonus Listening: Crazy for You
A teenage crush song written in West Norwood, dripping with the energy of being fifteen and overwhelmed by someone you see on the bus every morning. The guitar is acoustic, the production is bare, and the lyric is so precisely observed it could only have been written by someone still living inside the feeling.
Crazy for You, Adele (2008)
Read the lyrics while you listen. A teenage crush song written before any of this happened. The girl singing about a boy on a bus in South London has no idea that in a few months, 17 million Americans will hear her voice for the first time.
What made Adele's October 2008 Saturday Night Live episode the highest-rated in fourteen years?
America knows her name now. But the heartbreak that will fuel the biggest album of the decade hasn't happened yet. Next: the breakup, the tears, and a performance at the Brit Awards that silences an entire nation.
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