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Adele · S3 E6
Make You Feel My Love
A Bob Dylan cover that becomes one of her most-streamed songs. She sings someone else's words better than almost anyone sings their own.
2007, a studio in London. A nineteen-year-old sits at a piano and sings a Bob Dylan song so well that the producer stops the session, turns to the engineer, and says: we're not going to beat that take.
Adele, "Make You Feel My Love" (official music video, 2008). A Bob Dylan cover stripped to piano and voice. There is nothing else in the arrangement: no drums, no strings, no backing vocals. Just a nineteen-year-old singing someone else's words and making them sound like a confession.
Make You Feel My Love
Bob Dylan wrote this in 1997 for Time Out of Mind, and Billy Joel actually recorded it first. Adele's version, produced by Jim Abbiss, takes it lower and slower than either original. She stays in her chest voice for almost the entire track, giving it a warmth that the Dylan version, gravelly and detached, deliberately avoids. The final verse is where she lets the vocal crack on a sustained note. She doesn't fix it. That crack is the whole philosophy of her career: honesty over perfection.
Someone Else's Words
Covering a song is a gamble. You're inviting comparison with every version that came before. Adele's "Make You Feel My Love" doesn't just survive the comparison with Dylan's original. It replaces it. In the UK, her version has outsold and outstreamed Dylan's many times over. It has become the default version played at weddings, funerals, and every emotional moment in between.
TAP TO REVEAL: How many times has Adele's version of "Make You Feel My Love" re-entered the UK charts?
“"When I first heard the Bob Dylan version, I didn't even know it was a cover. I thought it was just a song. Then I heard it and thought, I can do something with this."”
Which artist actually released a version of "Make You Feel My Love" before Bob Dylan's own album came out?
Make You Feel My Love, Bob Dylan
From Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind (1997). The original. Dylan's voice is gravelly, worn, almost spoken rather than sung. The contrast with Adele's version is the entire point of this episode: same words, same melody, completely different emotional temperature. Dylan sounds like a man looking back on love from a distance. Adele sounds like she's in the middle of it, still burning.
Make You Feel My Love, Bob Dylan (1997)
Read the lyrics while you listen to Dylan's version, then go back and listen to Adele's. The words are identical. Everything else is different. That gap between the two recordings is a masterclass in what interpretation means.
Make You Feel My Love
The album is out, the cover is a hit, and the Critics' Choice is on the mantelpiece. But on the other side of the Atlantic, America still has no idea who Adele is. That changes on one night in October 2008, thanks to a comedian and a vice-presidential candidate.
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