Every Single Album - '19' | Every Single Album: Adele

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Adele is such a powerful artist she can ask Spotify to remove the shuffle button on albums. So how did we get here? Nora and Nathan trace her career from the beginning with her debut album '19.' They talk about her getting discovered on MySpace and her American breakout moment on Saturday Night Live (8:31), "Chasing Pavements" being the major hit off of the album (13:08), her most important collaborators on this album (35:51), and the songs they would cut (48:33). Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, long-time writer with the Atlantic Magazine on tech, culture, and politics. There is a lot of noise out there, and my goal is to cut through the headlines, loud tweets, and hot takes in my new podcast, plain English. I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know to give you clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. Plain English starts November 16th. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to every single album, Adele. I'm Nora Prince-Iotti. I am here with Nathan Hubbard as we begin our journey into the discography of Adele, one Adel Atkins. Nathan, how are you doing? I'm ready to do this. Excellent. So we are going to begin this journey that we're going to be on with 19, with Adele's first album. But it was interesting over the last couple of days. You know, we broke down 30 on Saturday. But shortly after we did that, we

found out we got the news that Adele had asked Spotify to take the shuffle button off of the album page 430, which was really, really interesting. And I just wanted to bring it up. One, because it was a news story that we weren't able to cover on the 30 reaction pod. We'll definitely get into it some more when we revisit that album and put it in context at the end of this journey. But it is sort of a fascinating thing to think about, especially as we look at how she broke as a star, her first album as an artist, her origin story, and just think, okay, we're going to get into where she started. Where she's ended up is this place where, you know, she can call up Spotify and say, hey, I want my album to tell a story. I want it to weave a narrative. And, you know, Spotify takes

that call and says, anything for you. We got you. I'll be taking flowers. What did you think of that choice? Even for her to make that request and then for it to be met with approval? One of the fun things about this journey is going to be studying the woman who, in a lot of ways, has shaped the music business over the last decade. And we're going to talk about 19 today,

but by the time 21 came out, it became really the largest album of the 21st century. And that gave her a disproportionate ability to put thumb on scale. One of the reasons that 21 and 25 did so well is she actually avoided a lot of streaming and had a real, I think, skepticism about the impact of streaming on albums as an art. Something we've heard before on every single album, as we talked to. about Taylor Swift. And I suspect that particularly coming on the heels of Red, which we know is now number one, which broke a lot of streaming records a week ago, you know, Adele is just a

massive star, but one of the reasons why she captured so many of those records was because her fan base went out and bought a physical album. And I can't see this move. without hearkening back to some of the choices that her team has made historically to try to protect the sanctity of the album, yes, but what that also does is it protects the data and the records and the stats. And when you have been big before,

you want that story when you put out a new album to be a continuation of record-breaking, new data that shows she's now got the most ever on this service, and by eliminating that shuffle button, it almost requires someone to, A, listen to the album in order. It doesn't lock you in and make you listen

to the whole album, but it does really put a focus on listening through the entirety of the album. And that has benefits surely for the art form, which we know she believes in, but it also has some ancillary benefits as we get in to the mind-blowing eye-popping stats and records. So I look at it with a little bit of skislery.

skepticism that it isn't part of what has been an incredibly powerful marketing campaign around the release of this album. My question is just, who's listening to an album that just came out on shuffle? I mean, I get it if you've heard it a zillion times and you just want to throw it on see what you get. That's why it was an easy give. Chaotic energy. Like, screw you and you're sequencing. I'm going to do it not even my way, but I'm going to let the algorithm decide. Let's roll the fucking dice. Babe me and whatever you so choose

tech overlords. Very strange choice. I would like to know who was like prevented from consuming this the way that they thought about consuming it. I think it's an easy give for Spotify to make. And in this era, there's a lot of competition

between Apple and Spotify and Amazon for subscribers. Every little bit that you can butter the bread of Adele, who, by the way, did a fairly long and extensive filmed interview with Zane Lowe of Apple music. So any bit

of breadbuttering that you can do if you're Spotify, hoping that the next time there is some exclusive content that you can then turn around to your subscriber base and say, see, this is why you are a Spotify subscriber seems to make sense. So it's nice to see this continuing trend

of power consolidating with the artist. And as we asked ourselves for 10 years, and we will ask through the course of this podcast. Adela is one of the most powerful artists in the music business. What's she going to do with it? I can't believe you didn't say bread buttering and your acclaimed British accent. Got a lot of feedback on that, Nathan. Got a lot of feedback over the last couple of days. Just don't let him do that ever again. I don't think I can stop him. But 19 is going to tell us about the origin of how we got

here because as big as the marketing campaign has been around 30 and as big as some of the albums were before it, this was the first one when she was literally just out of school, a virtual nobody at the time who was discovered, ironically, given some of the hesitation around the intertwining of technology and music, discovered on MySpace in 2006. And so this album really came to a out of nowhere, but she was not the star right away, was she Nora? No. So Adele had graduated, so 19 comes out in January of 2008. That's two years after she graduates from the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology in London, which is a free performing arts school. It's actually literally founded due to the inspiration of the movie fame,

which I think is hysterical. Awesome. She wanted to go into... you're going to do your British accent forever. Is that what that means? Just wait. She wanted to go into A&R, which I think is fascinating. How does someone with that voice go,

oh, I think I'm going to be behind the scenes? I think I'm going to be the person who makes other people's careers instead of just using my incredible instrument. She seemed to have a little bit of an apathy about it. And I think the more that we get into understanding her, we know that she's full, like any other human being, full of anxieties about getting in front of other people, and you can't help but wonder if the performance aspect is what, you know,

had her thinking, maybe I'll be behind the scenes instead of in front of the microphone. But she couldn't avoid it because it was a classmate who posted videos of her to MySpace, and that is how she was discovered by Excel recordings. Yeah, so the songs, Daydreamer, hometown glory, and My Sane, which are all on, on the album. They go up on MySpace.

They have their moment on MySpace, discovered somebody from the label hears them, gets interested in her. There is this tension, I think, between, you're right, like, she wasn't the one who put them on MySpace. A friend had to do it. Somebody else was being like, okay, other people need to hear this. This is crazy. And obviously, that's a sentiment that's shared by the people who, you know, eventually want

to work with her and manage her and represent her. she is, you know, she's in school. She's a classmate of Leona Lewis. Jesse J. Right. And then not in her class, but Amy Winehouse, notably, also went to school there. It's not as though she's not in an ecosystem

where, you know, talent is really, really incubated. Yeah. I mean, that's it, isn't it? She didn't toil away. I mean, she signed her label deal four months after she graduated from the school. So it's not like she had a long waiting period. This was, it wasn't instant fame and the journey took some time,

but it was instant talent and instant recognition. And I think, well, when we talk about the album, one of the things is you can kind of hear that both sides of that tension musically. I agree. Because the raw talent is absolutely there. Right. That said, this is not a person

who's necessarily taken all the lumps yet of figuring out what do I do best, what is my direction, what is my identity, in what modes am I putting on somebody else's voice, and in what modes am I really, really using my own? And there's something very sort of sketched out about this, even though, you know, hometown glory is one of the best songs on this album. It was the first song that she wrote. So I find that that... 14-year-old or something. Right. So you get it in a few different spots, where it's like how much of a finished product was she versus the second she's ready to use that voice,

she already has something. Well, as we go through this, she has, I mean, let's speak about 19 plainly. She herself has kind of shat on this album in a lot of ways. I'm not so sure that that is exactly how she feels versus maybe defense mechanism, but there was a time where she sort of said, you know, my back catalog is shit. And there it is.

Oh, no, there it is. There it is. There it is. Ding, ding, ding, ding. But I think there is some questions as we go through this about how great of an album this really is.

And that said, you hear all of the seeds of what is to come. I mean, she's playing the acoustic guitar. She's playing the bass. Right? It sounds almost like a collection of demos in some cases as much as it sounds like an album.

But I do think, you know, for her being so young as she's recording this, you're right. She hadn't taken all those lumps. We know that her origin story, like her parents were, her father left the family at a very young age. But it really took until the last two weeks for us to totally understand the traumatic impact that that had on her, the way that that shaped her feelings about being a parent, the way that that shaped her feelings ultimately about divorce and the guilt that came with that. And a lot of the healing that she went through with her father, that doesn't happen for quite some time. This album does not touch on any of that pain. And so much as we've talked about 30 being a divorce album,

this is definitely a breakup album of sorts, isn't it? But it does feel like she is still. finding her way, even though the instrument is so clearly there. Right. All right. Shall we kick it off and get into these categories? It's time. So, biggest hit, I think, is a clear one for here. I've got chasing pavements. I've made up my mind. Don't need to think it over. If I'm wrong, I am right. Don't need to look no further. Me too. But my question to you is,

what the hell does chasing pavements mean? Okay, we're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. But in the UK, chasing sidewalks would be how you would Americanize that. Yeah. But this was clearly the biggest hit that she had. It was the second single released after hometown glory,

which feels like a hidden gem on this album. them. But it was the song from this record that ultimately is what propelled her, not just to start them in the UK, because this song made its way to number two on the charts, and then 19 comes out and goes immediately to number one. But it is eventually, after a long period of time, what ultimately became her hit in the U.S. But that didn't happen overnight, Nora, right? I mean, this was a big artist in the UK who was a relative nobody in the U.S. for quite some time. Well, so 19 comes out in the UK. She does have, she had a little bit more of that grassroots.

You know, she'd been on MySpace. People were talking about her. There was at that point in time this sort of strange rush on, for lack of a better word, like white female soul singers, like British. soul singers. Yeah. And the new British invasion. Particularly because Amy Winehouse had had the best selling album in the UK the year before with Back to Black, there was this sense of, oh, let's try to find the next one.

And we know from, you know, tons of examples throughout music history, including Taylor Swift, that there's always something sort of silly about chasing that. But there was a lot more scaffolding for her to break in the UK, and she had an easier time there. The album comes out in the U.S. It doesn't initially make the same kind of impact. I mean, you could go even further to say, if you're the label, you're pretty close to giving up on this cycle. You put it out. You didn't have any success. This is when artists start to get pissed at their labels because their labels kind of give up. They poured some marketing resources into it, it didn't happen. And as you were going to say, then, I do want to take this opportunity to say live from New York. It's Saturday night. October 18th, 2008. She'd at least done well

enough in the U.S. to be booked on Saturday Night Live with none other than Sarah Palin making an appearance to comment on the Tina Faye impression. I really wish that had been you. Yeah, Lauren, you know, I just didn't think it was a realistic depiction of the way my press conferences would have gone. Yes, but it's obviously a heightened reality. Why couldn't we have done the 30 Rock sketch that I wrote?

Honestly, not enough people know that show. That episode of SNL gets 17 million viewers. Right in the heart of the election cycle, as Obama is running for president, right? So we're a month out. from the November election, not even, we're just a few weeks out,

and hear this woman under incredible scrutiny and the butt of a hell of a lot of jokes and really what put Tina Faye into the stratosphere is her Sarah Palin impression. Also, Josh Brolin hosted that episode. Like, did Josh Brolin have that much juice? Seems like a big episode. You're really going to blow that on Josh Brolin hosting?

There's a great, yeah, there's a, I think it was probably, pre-booked because she was such a second edition Sarah Palin was. But there's a great... Okay, fine. But then she... I mean, I get that the timing is how it fits into the campaign. But really? You're like, oh, yeah, put me on the Josh Brolin episode. That'll be great.

There's a great Twitter account where it shows celebrities introducing the musical host and it's just all these celebrities saying, ladies and gentlemen, you know, Adele, I got to go find the Josh Brolin introduction. You know the best one, right? You know the best one. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen. in the weekend. Okay, good. Just making sure. Just making sure. They're even better ones, though. Like, weird-ass hosts introducing epic musical guests and then vice versa. It's like, oh, God, what happened to that person? It would be fun to find

Josh Boland saying, ladies and gentlemen, Adele. Ladies and gentlemen, Adele. But, so here's the thing. And we were speaking recently about how difficult that stage can be for performers and for singers to just sound good on. Adele does chasing pavements and cold shoulder, and she sounds incredible. By the time you get the first chorus of chasing pavements, you're just going, oh, this is a different thing we've got going on right here, isn't it?

And the next day, literally the next day, 19 is at the top of the iTunes charts, flying off the shelves, and chasing pavements was the song that was driving. most of that. And now she goes on to get nominated for four Grammys. Best new artist was she wins.

And then record of the year, song of the year, and best female pop vocal, which are all for chasing pavements. She does also win best female pop vocal. So she actually, I think it's pretty clear that that's the biggest song from this album.

The real question to me is, do you think that that's deserved? Because she has said that she prefers hometown glory. But that was not. not the song of this album. I think it is deserved. I love hometown glory, but I just think,

you know, the record starts with Daydreamer and Best for Last, which they really do sound like demos. Like, you're sitting, there's a, you know,

there's a weird, very popular... Plucky, yeah. No, listen, there's a weird, very popular steakhouse in L.A. called Mastros.

We're like, if you go in there at the bar, there's always some very accomplished, you know, duo playing music in the bar. And there's like weird people all around. And sometimes the celebrity comes in there. The place has kind of jumped the shark at this point, potentially. But the first two songs, you're like, is this a performing, like, did I see this woman at Mastros? You can find him.

And then you get into chasing pavements. And the verse, the first verse, starts a little bit in that mad moment. But as soon as it shifts into the chorus, You're like, whoa, we just went from me to diva in the matter of seconds. The strings rise. There's just something grandiose about the song and the flex and her vocal, the range, the tone, the duration. She's holding notes. And then it's over.

I mean, sometimes this album to me feels like they ran out of budget or something. But the first two songs, you would think that, like, maybe she was running away from the Amy Winehouse comparisons. But by the time we get into here, you know this is something that stands on its own. what this song is about, we can come back to it. I mean, I've seen explanations that it was maybe about being in love with a gay man. I've seen explanations that maybe it was about finding out that her boyfriend cheated on her and she went down to the bar and punched him in the face.

And by the way, that would be resonant with what she talked about on Oprah, telling Oprah that she was a great boxer and could throw a punch. She got a left hook that could kill. She does. And so I think I do believe that this is the song. It is actually not my favorite. song. My favorite song on this album is Feel My Love. But I do think that this was her biggest hit. I'm with you that it should have been. All respect to Adele. I think hometown Gloria is the song that I go

back to and go, this was the raw thing that was there that tells you that, you know, there's plenty of rough edges on this album where they're trying to get her to do weird stuff. And it sounds like a demo. And yes, she sounds like a lounge singer in certain moments when it's not working. But that is the song where it's, it doesn't even have to be quite as big, but you just hear this thing and you know that it's something special. Even though the only thing about hometown glory, it always head fakes me because the piano that kicks in like 50-ish seconds into the song. It sounds like the scientist by Coldplay to me and I can never knock that. But it's a great song. I think chasing pavements

deserved to be the bigger one. Does it bother you that Machine Gun Kelly sampled chasing pavements for a song of the same name on his album? Just trying to get to this point. But no matter how hard the road gets,

you got to stay the course, man. Keep chasing these pavements until you don't got to run anymore. Something that is very important to me as a person is to not be bothered by things that Machine Gun Kelly does because I just couldn't get up in the morning, Nathan, to be honest with you.

I get it. Well, but hometown glory has been sampled by a lot of people. Childish Gambino, Chance the Rapper, French Montana. So I think there's, there is a sort of grassroots attraction to that song. Again, she wrote it when she was very, very young. Chasing pavements, we have to just say, she didn't write that one by herself. She wrote that with a producer named Egg White, and she, which is just a ridiculous. name, first of all.

Well, Egg is a nickname, but it's hysterical. But it's just ridiculous. 1G, egg white. But, and she sort of acknowledged that she brought him some sort of broken chords and that he helped bang that one into shape. But I say that because, you know, this album overall, I don't think you come away. We'll talk about lyrics in a second, but feeling like this is this incredible collection of songwriting.

you do come away feeling like this is a number of vehicles to showcase her voice. This song and hometown glory you come away saying those are real songs. Well, and I think the chasing pavements gives you that because you get the story, but you also, the way that it's written, the way that they wrote it together, it just ends up being a really, really effective vehicle for her voice, and then you kind of understand the sentiment that's going under it. I think hometown glory, the reason, that it resonates with so many people and the reason that it's worthwhile to even have this discussion,

even though we both feel that chasing pavements deserves to have the life that it did over hometown glory, even if Adele maybe feels a little bit differently. Hometown glory has, it has a story. You understand the nostalgia for a place that you feel so attached to but are wondering if, you know, if you go away to university, or in her case, I think now you read it as she goes away and becomes a big star and lives in Los Angeles. Right. To what degree do you remain of that place? And I think a lot of people can relate to that. And that's not something you get in every single Adele song. There's a lot of these songs that you have to listen to five or six or seven or more times. And even then,

you might be kind of like, what is this about? I'm not totally sure. That's one where you don't have that. Well, so is it her best song on this album? So, and I'm going to make you choose a different best song because I don't know that you can choose make you feel my love for this one. Why? Why? It's not her song. But that's instructive that it is the best song on the album. Okay. Because I think, I think she was at this point in time a very early developing songwriter and more of a like Mastro's lounge singer than she was where she's going. And part of her musical journey for me,

and this may have happened through her manager, who by the way is the guy who turned her on to this song, but it may have happened through the label, but she got connected with a number of songwriters and producers who helped sort of tap into that inner voice. Now, again, from that Oprah special, She was pretty self-deprecating in talking about her own depth. And she felt, I think, a bit confused and mystified by where her creativity,

the well from which her creativity is drawn. It's not something that even to this day it feels like she's particularly in touch with. And she's done a really good job of opening herself to co-writing and working with other partners. On this album, she wrote almost all the songs. She was young. And it sounds that way. Yeah. Okay.

I redact my point that you can't choose this. I think you've convinced me with that argument. And you do see if you go through the credits on the track listing for this album, the ones where everything is just her, they do tend to be the weaker songs. It just seemed like this was a point in time where it was worthwhile to have, you know, somebody else in the room, somebody else's influence, whether that's as a producer, co-writers. I will say a song that I really, really love is Melt My Heart to Stone.

And she's totally doing Amy Winehouse, like the little vocal cracks in words that I made up. And I hear your words. The way that, you know, she practically shrieks the word say and say my name. She does. But I really love the song. I think she sounds great on it. I think that it's another one where even if you're not getting a lot of detail from the lyrics, you are getting a story. I think the concept is pretty clear to me of somebody who you're so wrapped up in that it actually makes you sort of cold and hardened because it softens you and you're so vulnerable.

And then the hurt that comes from that just makes you want to ball up and never experience any of it again. Like I like that drama of a 19 year old going through a breakup. That's pretty good. That's good to me. And some of the writing, like even, you know, as you tear your, way right through me, I forgive you once again. That's a good line. Like, that's a better line than there are

on a lot of these songs. And it's just big. It might be her. It might be Eggwhite. It might be just sort of the collaboration gives her some, some, you know, safety to open that up. But like, that song for me, I think Eggwhite actually fell asleep during that thing.

Stop saying Eggwhite. I know it's his name. I just can't handle it. It's, just take it. This is her, she worked with a guy named Eggwhite. not let it go. But it, the song starts clipping on the vocal mic. Like, she, it starts freaking out the compressor at some point. And I sit back, like, she's doing these amazing vocal calisthenics, but like, can we get a better microphone on her here? Like, did, I think Egg White, or the sound

engineer at least, fell asleep a few tracks ago. I don't understand what's going on. You don't think they did that on purpose to make her sound more like Amy Whitehouse. I mean, I think it was a absolutely effect that they put in potentially. But like, how do we get here? I, you know, I think, here's my point. When you have an instrument like that, having it blow out the compressor is kind of pointless. Like, let her drive the Ferrari

and let us hear the Ferrari engine as opposed to putting some weird-ass compression or constraints on it to break it. Yeah, the funny thing is, is they gave her a Ferrari and then didn't let her drive it because one of the things that I think does work about that song relative to some of the loungier ones

is there is a ton of strings. It's got that size to it. It feels like you can... Right. You can almost... That's a good way to describe it because you can almost go through the track list here and divide everything between...

We understand that Adele should be big and cinematic and orchestral and sort of glamorous versus the cheap Maestro's lounge singer version. Yeah. And this is very much in the former category but they're not merging the vocal, I guess, with just the, you know, this should be like her doing skyfall and it's bond and it's glamour and it's amazing.

Didn't quite get there. But I don't mind it so much just because I think it's, I don't know, it gives a little bit of texture to it. It does. But it reinforces how we feel about 19, at least how I feel about 19, which is that they grabbed her as quickly as they possibly could because they could tell that it was unpolished gold and they put her in a studio and she's playing the bass,

she's playing the guitar in some songs. She doesn't play the piano, which it doesn't make sense to me because her dad definitely is a piano as we've talked about. But she's not playing piano, but then in some, it's like they weren't all in. They didn't exactly know what to do with her.

And so they basically published an album full of mixtapes, which by the way, or demos, which by the way, you know, the Amy Winehouse album that most affected her was Frank and that kind of is the same thing. It's the album that convinced her to pick up and play guitar. That's what she's credited Amy on. I'm actually not 100% sure I totally believe that. Like, back to black was so big.

You got to wonder if she sort of said, yeah, well, I, that isn't the one that had an impact on me. It was something else. Well, it would be scary, right? If you're her, you're that young to, kind of make that the target, right? Like, inevitably, that plays as, oh, this is what Adele wants to go do. And that had just been so, so big. I think that would have been really, really scary to say it and I think if they just had taken the governor off her voice, we never would have even talked

about the comparisons. Because when she does release, like she does in chasing pavements, there's no comparison. You understand that this is a different human being with different capabilities and different skills. Right. Right. Right. Right. I also, just to shout out, I really like right as rain and then chasing pavements in hometown glory were my other considerations. I would also put

Make You Feel My Love absolutely up there if we are allowed to credit Mr. Bob Dylan. Imagine what happened at the time because again, she wasn't that big. Her U.S. tour and she canceled some

to go hang out with her boyfriend, which was the start of what seems like a somewhat cursive. touring history as we'll explore through the course of this. But the tour had very few UK dates where she was huge, but she's playing places like the Roxy and Hotel Cafe in L.A. Hotel Cafe is the size of like somebody's living room. She was playing bimboes in San Francisco, Joe's Pub in New York City. I mean, 320 people paid to see her at Martyrs in Chicago. Okay, eventually on that tour, she plays like one or two thousand people. But imagine sitting in a room full of 320 people in

she's singing, feel my love. I mean, I hear that the catalog wasn't amazing at the time, and maybe that was a little bit of, you know, a hindrance into what she could actually do with the show. But holy crap, there was a moment where she, you could have gone to see Adele sing songs that still make the set list today, even if not everything on this album does, but still make the set list today with 300 people. Yep. Anything else that's a contender for you in the best, category. Not for me, but I do think as we shift into most important collaborator, I'm actually fascinated to hear what you think here based on the way that you have thought about these songs. Well, I think, you know, it's your point about the cover making sense as part of this one,

I think is an important one because she was also, she was covering many shades of black by the raconteurs on her tour. she covered that's it I quit I'm moving on by Sam Cook so if you've got some of them got to go she definitely was pulling from other people and it does feel like there was this effort to just sort of round it out give it a little bit more shape maybe we don't have an entire set list

of game ready songs so let's let's find a couple others and I don't mind that at all I, you, you, you, you, you queued me up so nicely here to have some amazing point to make, I was just a total asshole and I said that her most important collaborator was none other than Sarah Palin, who she thanked and shouted out when she hosted SNL last year. She was like, well, thank you for, to Sarah Palin for making more people tune in. You see, I was a musical guest back in 2008 when Sarah Palin came on with Miss Tina Faye. and so obviously a few million people tuned in to watch it

and well, you know, the rest is now history. Now, I don't know anything about American politics. I mean, I'm British, you know. And I don't want to say anything too political, so I'll just say this. Sarah Palin, babes. Thanks for everything, yeah. I guess you could also say her friend

who put her demo on MySpace, but we should talk about the tour just a little bit more because the other thing that happened, so she gets the S&N. bump and then she does go back on tour in the U.S. and gets to make a little bit, you know, those shows I think were the slightly bigger venues. She was having more success.

Got to have a little bit of a redo because she had canceled the shows to go hang out with her boyfriend, which she later said that she really, really regretted doing. And she said she was drinking a lot. Yeah. And her relationship to alcohol. is actually very interesting because she's had some very noticeable times where she chose to cut it completely out of her life. And then others where it's been right on brand, baby, right? Right. Yeah. Well, and she's, she is very open about it. She said to, this was to nylon. I'm like,

I can't believe I did that. It seems so ungrateful. I was drinking far too much. And that was kind of the basis of my relationship with this boy. I couldn't bear to be without him. So I was like, well, okay, I'll just cancel my stuff then. And she has this. this very sort of flippant, funny, Adele charismatic way of talking about that stuff and explaining that. But think about that. Think about how many people must have been furious, right? Like, think about how dramatic of a situation that must actually have been. And this conversation is going to set the foundation for a lot of the themes that we're going to go on to talk about in her later albums and just in her later public life, particularly,

I think when we loop back eventually to 30, it gives you a different perspective on quotes like that, I think. Yep. Because, again, it sounds like NBD, but then you revisit it and you kind of think like, there's no way that wasn't a big deal. There's no way that her going to the label or to her mother or to anybody and saying, you know what,

I'm just not going to do it because I want to hang out with my boyfriend at the pub. There's no way. That wasn't kind of major. Yeah. Well, and so for me then, that's why I had her most important collaborator as Jonathan Dickens, who is her manager and is to this day her manager because he navigated her through a potential U.S. flop. He handled that U.S. tour cancellation with the label, kept them engaged enough in her career to keep putting their weight behind her, got her singing the Bob Dylan song, got her. on SNL. So I think he did a really great job.

The runner up in that category for me, actually not runner up, last place, but somebody who's worth talking about as a collaborator is Mark Ronson. Because Mark Ronson... I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Did the Amy Winehouse Back to Black Record. And she does a song on here with Mark Ronson called Cold Shoulder.

That, I mean, from a production standpoint, like it's got a little bit of that industrial rock beat from London clubs. It borrows from Beck's Devil's Haircut. Love machines on the sympathy crutches. Discount orders on the dropout buses. And it's got a little bit of this Sergeant Pepper's interlude.

But there's just nothing about the song for me that resonated and sticks to your bones. I don't think it's a, yeah, it's not a laster. It doesn't just hook its nails into you and. stick there. I don't think it's a bad song. Interestingly enough, it didn't have a beat at first. She brought it to the label and it was just vocal and keyboard and she was the one who was kind of like, this needs something. I think it should be faster. I want a little something extra. Hey, don't you guys know Mark Ronson? I would like to work with him. And I think that's so interesting because the idea of how ambitious is this person is going to come back a lot because you have the times, right? She

didn't put her stuff on MySpace. And there, as you said, there are so many moments when she seems almost apathetic about it. But then you have something like that where she's like, I want the it producer who does the stuff with the person who is the biggest right now. And she did it with Mark Ronson from Amy Winehouse. She did it with Max Martin when she heard the Taylor stuff on red. Right. And there is a pattern here of her, to your point, being very, very ambitious and driven to find somebody who can help her do it. I just think, you know, there was a short period of time where she was feeling like she had to outrun Amy Winehouse. It was interesting that she chose to let Mark Ronson into the conversation. Coldshoulder also was the other song, other than chasing pavements

that she did on SNL. So her two most important collaborators, Mark Ronson and Sarah Palin, coming together on that glorious night in October 2018. I am just kidding. Okay. So our next category is Easter eggs. And I think the important point to make here is actually that there's this almost total lack of them. And that's probably going to come up more than once here as we make our way through.

But what we know about the inspiration behind this album is really very little. It's basically about one guy, Mr. 19. and I got nothing. I don't know who he is. Do you, Nathan? No. I mean, what was the best Easter egg? It was egg white is who it was.

I mean, there just isn't there. No. You didn't. There. I mean, look, he... I'm so mad I didn't think of that. I'm going to be honest. I'm furious.

I didn't think of that. Thanks. To quote Adele all over this record, thanks. Why can't she say her T. We'll come back to that. But look, the other song that she worked with him,

on was tired. Where'd you go when you stay behind? I look up and inside down and I That song is a direct replica of close to me by The Cure. It's the same key. It has some of the same exact phrasing.

I can't believe that they haven't had the blurred lines lawsuit yet to, I think it's just because it didn't do very much streaming and otherwise. Yeah, and it's not very good is the thing. But if it was good, you might see The Cure get off their butt and say, you know what, that song is actually ours. So again, the Cure catching strays here on every single album. You know it. But I'm very still like perplexed about she is not letting us in very much at all. I mean, the review of this album from Rolling Stone was,

here's hoping the girl's storytelling will one day be as interesting as her phrasing. Three stars. That's a pretty rough review, because that's the last line of the review. That's a pretty rough thing to say. But in hindsight, it was brutally honest,

but I think also accurate, as we're going to see, she's going to start to blossom from here. Well, she was such a vessel, basically, right? because most of the reviews, so that's pointing out the inspiration, the storytelling, the songwriting,

and wanting a more compelling story about who this person is, what inspires them. And I don't think it's a mistake, by the way, that, you know, we talked at the top about hometown glory, just sinking its teeth into people in certain ways,

even though it's not quite as juicy, musically, as a ballad as something like chasing pavements. And I think it is. because you have a clear compelling story in there, and you know that it's about her mom wanting her to go to university outside of London,

and she wants to stay at home. And it plants the seed of how far away from home is this girl going to go. But even musically, the people who liked this album, the reviewers who liked this album, were impressed by it because of her voice, because of what she sounded like. Yes. Yes.

people who didn't thought that, yes, she's very good. She's a very good singer. She's very talented. But she is an empty vessel. And you've got all of these ANR guys who are basically saying, well, why don't you try this? Why don't you do this person's thing? And it didn't necessarily feel like it was coming from a person, from a singular person. Yeah.

One of the key parts of Adele's stardom is that lots of people feel connected to her. They feel like she's easy to be with and like they're one of them. She's got really that every person demeanor. It doesn't really seem to come through in the music. And a few places it does. And one of them for me is in peak Adele, which is our next category. But it's interesting to see how a big part of the brand of Adele is not so much what she directly says in her music, but her personality on and off stage.

So let's go to Pek Adele because I'm based on what you just said, I'm fascinated to see if you have the same sort of thing that I do. Because my Pek Adele for a 19 was just interview Adele. Nice. Because I don't think you get it at all in the album. But then she's talking to The Guardian about people saying, you know, negative things about her online. And she says, get some balls and come say it to my face if you don't like me.

Because I'll punch you right in the mouth. That's what she does. She's a boxer. She's an athlete. She's got a left oak that can kill. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.

The athlete. That's your, how's your TH? Well, it's going to be horrible after this podcast. All right. Well, so another one. She's talking about comparisons between herself and Duffy and Amy Winehouse and Leona Lewis. And she just goes, we're a gender, not a genre.

Like, that's so funny. Yeah. She said it was called 19 because, quote, I couldn't think of anything else. We get so little of her. personality in the album, but she has so much of it. And it's impossible to think that that wasn't part of her rise and her breaking was just, this is a person who makes you want to be around her. And it's funny because she, you know, as far as major celebrities goes, she often isn't around.

You don't see her for long periods of time. She waits years and years between albums. But when she's on, she's fantastic. She's got that. cackle. And I don't want to discount in this conversation about how, you know, how she broke, that that was a piece of it too. Well, the one place on the album, I think, where her personality does come out is in an otherwise poo-poo platter of a song called My Same, where she's like pushawing, right? But she's like making like a mouth fart noise. She's like, there's just something so endearing about that. It's a song about that. It's a song about a friend of hers, the writer Laura Dockrell.

But the song itself is like barely a song. It's like, it sounds like a Brian Setzer orchestra song. Like stray cats or something. It's just like horrible scatting. Oh. Peak lounge singer. Ironically, one of the demo songs that did well on MySpace, I don't know what people were doing on MySpace in 2006.

I was not allowed. It seems, I was too scared. So, but there is that moment where she just sort of, it's got to be the only album where somebody goes, that's a good entry. I like that. I love that. Is that not your best vocal moment then? It's not my best vocal moment.

My best vocal moment. You already mentioned it. I love the way that she sings the word say in the line, you say my name like there could be in us on Melt My Heart to Stone. There's a little sort of squeak in her voice. there that was intentional. She will sing that probably down the road differently than she does here, but it just stands out so much

because she's in control of it. She's doing it intentionally. And it's different than what you've heard before. And it's just like a, it's kind of like weird flex, girl, but it's awesome. Weird flex, but okay, we have the exact same choice

in this category. I do think, I love when we match. I love when we disagree, but I also love when we don't know that we're going to come about something from the same angle and go, oh, yeah, I thought that too. Cool. Yeah. Makes sense that we're friends. I also think that the Chasing Pavement's performance on S&L, I'm bringing up S&L a lot in this.

Saturday Life was important to me in 2008. Yeah, it's a big deal. And she sounded so good on that stage. It's a really good song. But the quality of that vocal performance, I think, is what matters there. I don't think she broke because people heard chasing pavements and went, wow, that's an incredible song. That was a vehicle for her, you know, to be seen on stage. And she's dressed so simply. She's just wearing a gray dress. And she's, you know, she's Adele up there. It was hard not to listen to that and go, I want to know more about this person and I want to hear more of them.

Yeah. And that's important. And that's important. And that's important. But we'll get to that. what we know is that it's not the song that we would cut. Absolutely not. As you do, we have to cut one.

So this is probably relatively fertile ground for a song cut because there isn't a whole lot of cohesion to this album. And they don't sort of rely on one another the way some of her albums to come will. But if you had to jettison one into the sun, what would it be? So this is not, I hate to be a hater. This was not difficult for me. I would cut a lot of songs on this album.

Yeah. To choose just one. Maybe the hardest thing is to choose one though. That's what I'm saying. I could package up five of these babies. I'm going to be honest, I would cut Daydreamer, crazy for you, first love, my same, and tired. But if I had to pick one, it's probably my same.

Oh, really? I'd keep my same because of the vocal fart noise. You love the fart noise Yeah But you can Saving grace Oh God I mean crazy for you

If you want me to stop I freeze And never you are me gonna leave Just hold me closer baby Crazy for you is the other I have a note here Where it's if I have to choose one It's crazy for you or my same

So I could go either way on that way I mean the Madonna tune Crazy for you is the shit So you can't take that song lyric, put it in a different song, and suck. I'm looking at you, Machine Gun Kelly. You get two Machine Gun Kelly references per episode. That's it. You're cut off. Okay.

Hopefully, Kyah will edit out the four more that are going to come. Okay, well, I might ask producer Kaya to edit out all of the chasing pavements references because we've got to talk about what is this British thing. And it's pavements. It's pavements. It's chasing pavements. So pavements is what they call sidewalks in the UK. That is clearly the winner in this category. The thing I think we need to talk about, and if you have something else, I'm curious to hear.

But the thing that we need to talk about is, does that even make it better? Does that make this song make sense? Does chasing sidewalks make more sense than chasing pavements? Or is it just a strange idea to begin with? I think it's a strange idea. I do have something slightly different on this. one, there's an Annie Lennox song called Sidewalk Cracks, I think. Or pavement cracks. Sorry, not sidewalk cracks for crying out loud. It's called pavement cracks.

And that is how I originally came to understand what chasing pavement meant. So other than that, yeah, this is a British thing. I don't totally get it. I will tell you that for me, like, what is this British thing? What is, how come she's the only singer who doesn't lose the British accent? when she sings. And by the way, it's mostly only on this album. It's like her and Maddie from the 1975.

Why does the accent go away? Are they just playing us? Are they just pissed about the revolution still? And that's it. Like, what is up with all the Fs, as in Frank,

instead of the THs? Like, on my same, she says, Fank. On Tired, she says, nothing.

When I don't get nothing back. Like, rarely do we hear the British accent translate, and I would, you know, do one for you because it's so good, but I don't want to, I don't want to stage you. Rarely do we hear that accent, like, translate into the actual vocal performance. And maybe that is what, you know, started the, oh, she's so endearing because it sort of comes through in ways that we don't normally hear with British singers. We need a North London native to give us a ring.

School us on how this should or should not be coming through in the vocal. All right, I like that one. Let's just circle back on chasing pavements. Because it doesn't make sense to you if, is your lack of clarity on pavements versus sidewalks? Or is it just, was it mean to be chasing a sidewalk? because the story behind this is at least allegedly that her boyfriend's cheated on her. She goes and punches them in the bar. She gets thrown out.

And then she's walking down the sidewalk, walking down the pavement, if you will, and thinking, you know, what are you doing? You're just chasing pavements. And so then she sings a little line into her phone, goes home, starts playing around with some chords. Those are the basics of what she's. takes in and turns into that song. Now, I suppose, if the difference between pavements and sidewalks there, at least we know she's obeying traffic laws, right? She's not walking through the middle of the street.

And she did notably, at the end of that SNL performance, the last pavements, she says sidewalks instead of pavements. Okay. Well, either way, I think the urban legend part of this was that it meant that she was in love with a gay man. And she didn't do very much to dispel that as it sort of circulated as the thing about this song.

And it sort of helped to inflate what it was. Even still, like, I don't know, chasing pavements, is that a phrase you're ever going to use in your life other than talking about this song? Well, no. And I guess I suppose chasing sidewalks isn't as well. I mean, theoretically, they should be very easy to chase. They don't go anywhere. Right. It's maybe sort of wandering, meandering aimlessly through the streets. Yeah, that I think is what it meant. I'm just curious from our UK listeners, like, does anybody else say that? Or were you all like, I don't know what she's talking about either? Let us know. Drop us a tweet. Help us understand. What is this British thing?

Well, I hope we can figure that one out. I still think it's funny that she changed the lyric on SNL. Big S&L performance. Very important. So that does bring us to our next to last category, Nathan. What song should she have covered? And as we mentioned, she covered a lot at this point in time. This was sort of peak Adele cover era. Yeah.

So what would you add to the list? I didn't have anything to. add here because she did it. She covered the Dylan song that, by the way, had been covered by Billy Joel before it was actually released by Dylan. So she picked the right

one that endures. I could hold you for a million years to make you feel my love. She's didn't, she separated herself from my standpoint from Amy Winehouse, with that song because I don't think

that's a song that Amy could have sung so I without selling out and just not giving you one this one was easy for me because she did the song

that she should have done Okay I can't even be mad at you for doing that because I agree with you there was something about looking at this category and going

I can come up with a zillion things that would be cool to hear her saying but it does feel like it feels like she got it right which is cool. I also love, if people haven't heard it, go on YouTube or wherever and find

her singing Many Shades of Black. It's really good. I really like that. I mean, if you're going to twist my arm, my internet research, fine. The script opened for her and that tune, When a Heart Breaks It Don't Break Even, is awesome. So I would love that song. Yeah. Oh, that's a good idea. Who knew the script was going to be one hit wonders, man? It's not great anatomy.

Fair enough. So I'm cheating a little bit here too because to the extent that, you know, this is a, this is a heartbreak breakup album primarily, even though we don't have a lot of the details of it. It is, it is her broken heart. She is clearly the one who has been rejected and she doesn't embody a lot of different. perspectives on a breakup in this. It's pretty static in that way. However, because she has this real knack for the smooth richness of her vocal being able to make phrasing that's actually a little bit sort of should be a little bit choppy or staccato,

sound very velvety and rich and nice, she occasionally reminds me a little bit of Justin Timberlake. Ooh. Boy, I made fun of the script. People are going to be mad at us for talking about Timberlake. This is good. If she would be willing

to embody a different perspective on a breakup, I would like to hear her sing Prime the River. Oh, wow. Do we know that she hasn't? I certainly... I've certainly sung it in the shower. She grabbed Bonnie Raid.

I can't make you love me and did it. You can't make your heart feel something that it was. I think it's actually probably the only song that she couldn't do better than any living artist. There's no way to do the Bonnie song better. But yeah, I love it. Why not? And listen, there's a lot of controversy about it. that song too.

How sort of... Yeah. It's in some ways a hard song to sing because it's sort of jumpy, but you have to make it smooth. And I think she can really pull that off. And I would like to hear her do it. Well, the Britney Truthers really do not like that song

because they feel that she was shamed in the video and elsewhere as a result of that. I think there's validity to that, but I do think, look, you know, we're not going to have us separate the art from the art. here, but I do think that it's a great song. Yeah, that's a way for Adele to maybe take it back. Well, Nora, I told you what Rolling Stone thought of this album.

And almost universally, the reviews were, this is an amazing voice in an unpolished songwriting and production environment. So I say to you, as we always do on every single album, we have to give this one a grade. It is her oldest album. It was the youngest work that she had. What is your grade for Adele's 19? I'm going to give it a B minus.

How does that feel? Initial reaction. Harsh? You know, it feels like grade inflation to me. I think it might be a little bit because I felt very reluctant to apply a C to an album

where there is clearly, right, an Adele album. It has, that has great songs on it. Right. Yeah.

I do have to go back to the fact that when we got to songs we'd cut, I gave you five. Yeah. That's a lot of songs. That's a lot of songs. Yes.

I, look, no offense to Egg White and no offense to 19-year-old Adel. but this one, I agree with Adele herself and her assessment of this. I think there are some enduring songs that will last forever,

but as an album for me, I had written B-minus, and it just felt like great inflation. It felt like that kid who didn't do the damn work, only finished half the test, and still the teacher somehow, because they didn't want to have to answer

to the angry parents, gave them, you know, a B-minus when what they actually deserved was a C-plus. I'm going to give it like a, I'm going to give it like a 74. Is a 74 a C? Do you go to restaurants and order something medium-plus or like medium-rare minus? Are you that person? No, absolutely not.

No, absolutely not. No, I'm going to invent new slices. Okay, okay, okay, okay. A 74 is a C. So I think you're right. I'm giving it a C. Okay, so I just talked you down. You talked me down. I was succumbing to grade inflation, but...

You just jumped below me. Wow. All right. I think you're right. I think this is a C. Why does a 74 sound so much less harsh than a C to me? Well, I don't know. I imagine your grades were a lot better than that. So this is probably all new territory for you. But I can tell you definitively. I was graded on a zero to six scale in high school. So I just don't know. I'm completely out of my depth. Well, what we know for sure is that there are albums that far exceed the overall front-to-back quality of this one. Yet it is not something that we discard and throw away because all of the glimmers of what's to come are here. And her voice on a few of these songs and a few of these songs are the magic that are going to make the albums still to come. Absolutely.

Well, this was great, Nathan. This was a great, I think, primer for where we're going to go next. And we will be back in about a week, moving on to an album that is very different from this one, right? Because when we move on to 21, we're going to be talking about an album that is a lot less raw, is a lot less lacking in some of the elements of just sort of identity and purpose and what is this about and who is this singer, who is this celebrity? What is the deal here? When we get to 21, I think is when we sort of find out who Adele Supernova is and is to us. So I'm very excited to do that with you, Nathan. Can't wait. Thank you as always to Kaya McMullen for production on this episode. This has been every single album, Adele. I'm Nora Pinciotti. He's Nathan Hubbard. We will be back next Monday,

breaking down 21.