‘I can finally reach out a hand to my ex. Let him know I’m over it’

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One particular lyric, from a song called
Million Years Ago, seems to point to an explicit malaise. “Around the streets where I grew up,” Adele sings, “They can’t look me in the eye/ It’s like they’re scared of me/ I try to think of things to say/ Like a joke or a memory/ But they don’t recognise me/ In the light of day...” This sounds like someone, I say, who’s stepped into a lot of rooms that fall silent. What does that feel like?

In the lounge at XL, we start to nod our heads, bounce knees, tap hands on available surfaces. Adele is playing a track called
Send My Love (to Your New Lover), all beat and belligerence, the kind of pointy revenge song (think I Will Survive or Beyonce’s Irreplaceable) that makes you want to go out and find an unfaithful bloke, just to be able to toss him out and sing this stuff at him down the driveway.
“Send my love to your new love-HUH-er/ Treat her better.”
Adele says, “This is my ****-you song.” It was written in reference to the last guy, that never-named ex who dumped her when she was young, inspiring the best and saddest songs on 21. “It sounds obvious, but I think you only learn to love again when you fall in love again,” she says. “I’m in that place. My love is deep and true with my man, and that puts me in a position where I can finally reach out a hand to the ex. Let him know I’m over it.”

She plays another track, one called
I Miss You, which Adele says she began to write one night while lying in bed, unable to sleep. “I miss you/ I miss you/ I miss you/ I miss you.”

When We Were Young – and it’s in me, already, demanding a repeat listen.
“You look like a movie/ You sound like a song/ My god this reminds me/ Of when we were young.”
The song has an irresistible ambiguity to it, mournful as well as hopeful, exactly the combo that made Someone Like You so special. When she played the track the first time, she seemed especially anxious about it, reaching to make minute adjustments to the volume, then planting her fingers in her mouth to massacre the glue-on acrylics. Second time around, she keeps her eyes shut, nodding gently.
This is the one, then – the Hit Expectant. I can’t help thinking Adele has smashed it, as she’d hoped. The song just has that feel – a standard in the making, only waiting to become a part of the fabric of the coming years, chosen again and again on karaoke machines, picked out for people to get married to and buried to, centrepiece of an album that seems sure (however much she flaps her hand and demurs) to rattle the world the way 21 did.

what I hear of the new record, today, it’s clear that Adele’s fans will be delighted by how it sounds – elegant, moody, a lot of E minor, with tight arrangements, leave-alone production, tons of pianos and bass, that inimitable cracked-concrete vocal. The lyrics, though, rarely plumb to misery. There’s none of the tight-jawed break-up analysis Adele has become known for. Where 21 sounded as if it was written while cradling an open wound, 25 comes over more like the study of interesting scars.

更多请戳：http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/15/adele-25-new-album-interview

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