Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Adele · S6 E3
25
Named after her age, for the third time. Written about nostalgia, motherhood, and the guilt of having everything and still feeling lost.
November 20, 2015. Album 25 lands in record shops and on iTunes, and within seven days it has sold 3.38 million copies in the United States alone, more than any album in a single week in the history of recorded music.
Adele, "Water Under the Bridge" (live in New York). The fourth single from 25 and the track that proves the album isn't only about looking back. Over a driving pop-rock arrangement, Adele sings about fighting to keep a relationship alive instead of mourning one that died. It's the most optimistic song in her catalogue.
Water Under the Bridge
Co-written with Greg Kurstin, "Water Under the Bridge" started as a slow acoustic sketch before Kurstin pushed it into something bigger: layered drums, electric guitar, and a chorus built to be sung at full volume. The vocal doubles in the pre-chorus, creating a call-and-response with herself. It's the rare Adele track where she sounds like she's choosing to stay rather than grieving someone who left.
25
Named after her age at the emotional turning point, 25 is an album about nostalgia, ageing, and the fear that the best years might already be over. It is not a heartbreak record like 21. It is something harder to write about: the quiet anxiety of growing up, of becoming a mother, and of wondering whether the person you've become is the person you wanted to be.
TAP TO REVEAL: Why did Adele refuse to put 25 on Spotify at launch?
“"My last record was all about ending a relationship. This one's about all the things that happened since, which is basically growing up."”
Whose first-week sales record did album 25 shatter in November 2015?
Landslide, Fleetwood Mac
From Fleetwood Mac's Fleetwood Mac (1975). Written by Stevie Nicks at 27, about the terror of getting older and wondering if you've made the right choices. The thematic DNA of album 25 starts here: the same questions about time, identity, and whether the person you've become is the person you wanted to be. Nicks wrote it alone in Aspen, Colorado, staring at a mountain. Adele wrote 25 in a house in Sussex, staring at a life she didn't recognize.
Landslide, Fleetwood Mac (1975)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Stevie Nicks was 27 when she wrote this. Adele was 25 when she started writing her album about the same fears. The central question is identical: can I handle the seasons of my life? Forty years apart, two women asking the same thing.
25
The album is out and the records are falling. But one song from 25, written with Tobias Jesso Jr. in a single afternoon, is about to make an entire label cry. Next episode: "When We Were Young."
0 XP earned this session