17 Things You Learn Hanging Out With Adele
She has no beef with Phil Collins, who was disappointed he didn’t get to write with her for 25 after she initially approached him.
“I met up with him and he was so nice,” she says. “He’s such a genius. But I met up with him in London super-early, like well before I was starting the record. And I had this song in mind and I can’t remember if I gave him a copy of the song or if I gave him a chorus or something, and then I just chickened out of everything. I went, ‘Oh, I’m not ready.’ And he called me a slippery fish [laughs]! I think he interpreted it that I decided I didn’t want to work with him, but actually I decided I didn’t want to write a record, period, at that point. But yeah, there’s no bad blood there, or certainly not on my half.”
She sings all of her own backing vocals on her albums.
“It takes me forever!” she says. (Adds “Hello” collaborator Greg Kurstin, “She is her own girl group, and she knows what she wants to do.”)
Adele has an odd, vivid association with “Hello.”
“I have this memory whenever I sing that song,” she says, “where I’m walking down my old road when I’m about eight, and you know when you walk alongside a fence, like with all the bars, and you just ripple your fingers along? I can feel the sensation in my hands so vividly when I’m singing it. It’s so weird. I don’t know why, nothing special happened that day. Like I’d been at the park with my mum. And at the end of our old road was like a dump, like an actual dump where you went to, like, dump stuff you didn’t want, and I remember walking past that and there being a line of traffic of people waiting to like drop old microwaves in and I remember it so vividly. So it’s really odd, and I don’t know why I think of it when I sing it ’cause it’s not about that moment. It’s so weird!”
She had intriguing conversations with U2’s Bono, who is a fan.
“He did seem genuinely intrigued by me,” she says. “He was always asking about my method and I was like, ‘I haven’t really established one yet!’ I was like, ‘I’m still like only two albums deep!” But he said the most interesting thing. I said to him, like, ‘How can you write so many amazing songs about one person?’ Meaning his wife. And he said they were all about God, which I thought was so fucking amazing. It never even occurred to me that you could write ‘With or Without You’ about God. And I’m not religious myself but I appreciate religion so deeply because when my grandpa died, I don’t think my nana would’ve got through it without her faith, so the comfort that religion gives people I’ve got all day long for.”
Having a kid has left her pretty much unable to hold a grudge.
“I’ve only got so much capacity to worry now,” she says. “So you have to really pick what you worry about because you just don’t have, like, the strength to carry all that fucking baggage. So I had to let go of a lot of stuff — and I don’t like letting go of anything! I like to hold a grudge! And 25 is an album about reaching out to everyone that I’ve ever loved in any way, shape or form and admitting that I was wrong sometimes.”
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