Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Adele · S4 E1
The Breakup
The relationship that ends in 2009 and produces the biggest album of the decade. She never names him. She doesn't need to.
2009, a flat in London. Adele picks up her phone, calls her ex-boyfriend, and realizes from the tone of his voice that he has already moved on. She hangs up and starts writing.
Adele, "Don't You Remember" (live at Largo, Los Angeles). A raw, pleading ballad about asking someone who left: don't you remember the reason you loved me before? Written in the immediate aftermath of the breakup that produced 21, this is the sound of someone who hasn't finished processing what happened.
Don't You Remember
Co-written with Dan Wilson (who would also write "Someone Like You"), "Don't You Remember" strips away the production ambition of most 21 tracks and leaves just a voice and a piano asking one question over and over. The vocal delivery is closer to speaking than singing in the verses, as if Adele is rehearsing a phone call she'll never make. The chorus is where the restraint breaks and the full power arrives. It's the quietest devastation on the album.
The End
The relationship ends in 2009. Adele has never named the man, and she never will. What matters is not who he was but what his absence produced: a fury, a grief, and a creative focus that turned a twenty-one-year-old with one album into the biggest-selling artist of the decade.
“"I was completely off the rails. I was drinking too much, not looking after myself, and I was so angry. And then I just started writing."”
TAP TO REVEAL: How quickly did Adele start writing after the breakup?
What has Adele consistently refused to do regarding the relationship that inspired album 21?
Ain't No Sunshine, Bill Withers
From Bill Withers' Just As I Am (1971). One of the greatest heartbreak songs ever recorded, and the kind of raw, unpolished soul that runs through everything Adele does. Withers recorded this in his early thirties after working in a factory. The famous 'I know, I know, I know' repetition was supposed to be a placeholder for a lyric he planned to write later. He never did. That instinct, leaving the imperfect moment in the recording, is exactly the approach Adele takes on 21.
Ain't No Sunshine, Bill Withers (1971)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Twenty-six words of 'I know' in a row, a placeholder that became the most famous vocal repetition in music. Withers' philosophy of leaving the raw take in the recording is the same one Adele follows on every album.
The Breakup
The anger is fresh and the songs are pouring out. Next episode: a single afternoon in a Notting Hill studio with Paul Epworth, a stomping beat, and the forty minutes that produce the biggest hit of the decade.
0 XP earned this session