You’ve probably seen this clip before, but if you haven’t, I’ll summarize it. Adele has been entered into a contest for Adele impersonators. With the help of makeup artists, prosthetics, and gloves to cover up her tattoos, Adele is no longer Adele, but a soft-spoken nanny named Jenny. She commiserates backstage with the other Adeles, listening to each contestant sing her cover of “Make You Feel My Love.” She jokes about Adele taking her time on the new album. She looks fondly upon a drag performer belting out his version: “I think she’d like him.” She fakes stage fright, and when she takes the stage, she misses her first cue.
Then she begins to sing, and before she finishes the first verse everybody knows.
Adele’s voice is it. It is jet-engine powerful, yet capable of subtle, heartbreaking emotional nuance. It is so richly textured you feel as though you could run your hand along its surface like fine, heavy mahogany. It is influenced by the entire history of divas and torch singers–Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Dusty Springfield, Amy Winehouse, to name just a few–yet it is recognizably her own from the first syllable. What people might have felt listening to “Respect” in 1967 or “Vision of Love” in 1990, they felt listening to “Rolling in the Deep” in 2011: a generational talent had arrived, and the paradigm was about to shift.
The trouble with Adele is that her songwriting hasn’t always been as distinctive as her voice. Make no mistake: despite the Album of the Year Grammys and placements on various Rolling Stone lists, none of her first three albums are strong from front to back. The singles are uniformly excellent, and there’s usually at least one good deep cut per album (“Daydreamer,” “I’ll Be Waiting,” “Million Years Ago”), but the rest are largely indistinguishable piano ballads. How often do you get the urge to listen to “Don’t You Remember?” “Take It All?” “Remedy?” Her voice can paper over many flaws, but not all of them.
So when I say that 30 is Adele’s best album by some margin, that’s because it’s her most creative and least formulaic album while still being her most Adele album.
Although it’s certainly not a grand departure–this is not the drum & bass album Adele joked about making–it showcases different sides of her artistry and her persona, unlike what we’ve heard before yet still undeniably her.
Take “My Little Love,” an honest-to-god quiet storm song, inspired by smooth soul classics as well as the London electronic musicians who sampled them. Through a fog of uncanny “oooh” harmonies that sound like something Jamie xx might have assembled, Adele sings, tenderly and honestly, to her son Angelo. She worries that she hasn’t been a good enough mother, and about how her own baggage might affect her relationship with her son: “do you feel the way my past aches?” Some eyebrows might be raised about making a song for your son in a genre known for its love-making jams, but smooth soul has never been about sex: it’s about intimacy and vulnerability, and that’s precisely what “My Little Love” gets across.
“Strangers by Nature,” the opening track, is a collaboration with Academy Award-winning composer Ludwig Göransson, and it sounds even more cinematic than the song Adele won her Oscar for. Göransson’s string arrangements evoke the starlit romanticism of Alfred Newman or Nelson Riddle, while Adele’s voice croons like Judy Garland. It’s the kind of swooning, traditional pop sound that we don’t hear often anymore, and when we do it rarely feels this rich and resonant. But just when you’ve settled into the throwback vibe, the song is led out by electric-smooth harmonies that provide a pleasantly disorienting dose of modernity.
There are obvious singles, too, some of which work well (you’ve already heard “Easy on Me”) and some of which don’t (the shallow, whistling “Can I Get It” is an obvious swing for a hit, and it’s the album’s worst song.) But by and large, 30 is Adele’s deepest album; perhaps spurred by a changing landscape where categories like “singles” or “album cuts” have become outdated, 30 isn’t built around three or four big songs like its predecessors. Any of these songs could conceivably be someone’s favorite from the album. That’s not to say that every song is equally good, but it does feel like they were all written with equal care.
Most crucially, we get a better idea of what Adele values as an artist.
Some parts of 21 and 25 sound better to me now in hindsight: lyrics that previously registered as overwrought, dishonest cliche now feel like iffy execution of good ideas. We now know that Adele can show restraint and real vulnerability when she wants to: “My Little Love”’s phone recordings between Adele and Angelo might have come across as mawkish if it weren’t for how honest they are. Angelo asks his mother if she likes him; Adele admits that she’s feeling confused and lost; neither of them directly talk about her divorce, but it hangs in the air. It’s subtle in a way Adele often isn’t.
That subtlety makes lines like “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart,” the opening line of “Strangers by Nature,” feel more purposeful. It also makes lyrics that could feel thuddingly obvious, like “love is a game for fools to play,” ring true. Adele has never been afraid of painting with broad strokes, but while that’s served her well her entire career, she pulls it off best here. It’s melodramatic, but it’s melodramatic like Douglas Sirk movies: they’re broad and occasionally campy, but only because that’s what makes it sink into you so deeply.
“To Be Loved,” 30’s penultimate track, is where all this clicks into place. We’ve listened to the throwbacks, the ballads, the pop hits, the Elton John homage (“I Drink Wine,” excellent), and now we arrive at the heart of the matter. “To Be Loved” was written alongside Tobias Jesso, Jr., who also co-wrote 25’s “When We Were Young,” and on both songs you can hear the wry heartsickness that served him so well on 2015’s Goon. But “To Be Loved” is Adele’s song, where we hear every bit of what makes her special: her honesty cloaked in shopworn tropes, her old soul tempered with self-awareness, her voice. Adele has said that she won’t perform “To Be Loved” live, but she doesn’t need to: she got it in one. And besides, she has the rest of this great album to perform.
