no adele thread yet?

Q. Her vocal track that you recorded that day for a demo ended up on the album. Why didn’t you redo it?

A. Adele was going through something. She had had her heart broken, and she was in pieces, and you can really hear that, her anger and her sadness. Sometimes I just don’t think you can recreate that or fake it. My hunch is that we captured something in her vocal performance that was going to be very hard to recreate

The science of "Someone Like You":

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AF961A_ADELE_G_20120210234610.jpg

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213010291701378.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

spare us a tenner til Monday?

http://www.nme.com/news/adele/62071

the headline "Adele shows off her new £7 million, 10-bedroom mansion in new video" makes it sound like the Hype Williams-directed clip for the Swizz Beatz remix of her new single takes place in her mansion

ha

French paper publishing Adele sextape tomorrow. Skeezy.
http://www.jeanmarcmorandini.com/article-263995-une-sextape-de-la-chanteuse-adele-diffusee-sur-le-net-et-dans-le-magazine-public.html

does anyone really wanna see that lol

yes. yes i do.

god, the leaked pic is disturbing enough. not sure if I'm gonna be able to watch it.

that's a still from a sex tape

?

une sextape

yes, supposedly it's a still from the sextape. adele's image is ruined for me now.

Can't believe L'Académie française has not come up with a word for "sex tape."

In other news, she's been moaning about paying tax again, hasn't she?

somebody linked me this pic, but Adele really isn't the highlight:

http://i41.tinypic.com/zkijvl.jpg

lmfaooo. i wish this were real

Looking forward to the celebration-of-motherhood album then.

‏@JennyJohnsonHi5
Adele's pregnant, man her next album is gonna suuuuuuuuck

I didn't realize Adele is younger than I am!

Regarding the decline of the music industry thread elsewhere, it might be interesting to discuss "21". As in, why did this particular album actually go on to sell in numbers otherwise unheard of in the 2010s? Not being on Spotify until 2013-ish may have helped, surely? And appealing to a somewhat older audience? But, really, 30 million copies (probably even more as this is the sales by 2014). That is just so enormously much more than anything else released in the 10s. So why?

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/18/adele-new-music-25-x-factor_n_8326472.html

tristan wilds' biggest role since the wire tbh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQHsXMglC9A

new song firmly in my head :/

Because grandmas and old women like Adele and they don't stream or download.

it's pretty fucking dreary

good iD interview here

Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, Bruno Mars all on the album. supposedly it sounds like 70s soft rock!

https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/adele-exclusive-full-cover-story-i-d

obvious point but still interesting to me how much "hello" clings to yet inverts the emotional drama of "someone like you"- this is the guilty other side answer song to her previous hit- how do you manage the nostalgia you feel for a relationship that you ended? it's subtler, less self-indulgent, i guess more "mature", and it manages to loop her listeners back insofar as it's a reminder song about reminded, so the career arc and lyrical situation both click

er, about being reminded

adele is such a fucking plodding pedestrian bore

adele should probably scrap the new album and redo it with this guy from "the voice" doing all the lead vocals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCzkD-vu84g

guy pwnd that song!

music videos w long intros = duuuuud and whats up with all the dialogue and noise? also just a lot of useless belting, as if that's supposed to make her sound like a good singer... esp lol when they zoom in on her at 2:50 and belting is out of sync, who edited this vid?

yes it is all so dull and poorly executed that it's.... more popular than star wars, huh

I was def impressed by the view count

well, something's connecting with people, is my point.

to me she kinds sounds off the rails on this song. "when i call you never seems to be home" - oh he's home, adele. he's home.

does popularity magically cancel out boring art?

I don't think the song is as poor as the execution, but I think - and this may ofc just be projection - that she has a lot of goodwill and that may account for some of the popularity

i just find it amazing that you can take this massively successful pop object and slate it on technical, craftsmanship grounds, when it's like, if it were that poorly executed surely you would not get that many people liking it?

i mean, either that or "execution" is maybe not as important to most people as it is to you

lots of popular stuff is poorly executed and/or boring! technical execution doesn't really seem important to casual fans

how could something boring be more popular than star wars

I think some unfortunate aesthetic choices were made in that video - I don't like long intros, and I think the background noise is annoying (in that way it reminds me a bit of the "Hold On We're Going Home" video which is unlistenable). That's not poorly executed, it's just something I dislike. The editing around 2:50 however is simply sloppy or there's something wrong with my computer. And I think a belting chorus is a bad way to showcase a good vocalist, but I'm very open for arguments.

On pure technical terms, it sounds like she is lifting her soft palette more and pressing less when she goes full barrel, likely an adjustment she made after dealing with nodes; her voice is still recognizably her but the knife edge that floated underneath it on most of her songs (particularly "Rolling in the Deep" and "Chasing Pavement") isn't there.

Even more so than Swift, Adele seems anecdotally one of the few acts I sense kids and adults like equally. I hear little kids singing Adele songs all the time, but when this new single came out several adult friends of mine on Facebook made "ZOMG Adele is back!" posts. And am I right that she barely even toured America? She played a capacity 2500 place here back in 2011, that was it for Chicago.

I think the song is a total bore, but the execution, from the announcement to the release to the song's themes seem perfectly suited to capitalizing on the type of popstar Adele is advertised as being.

in terms of ~feel~, sonic arc etc. this song reminds me a bit of leona lewis's "run" cover. except that was great and this is rather mediocre :\

a little too on the nose too, like damn after all these years you are still singing about the same shit in a hardly-different-at-all perspective

I don't find her an exciting artist myself qua music, but the massive, massive popularity of emotional songs about resignation, regret, loss, nostalgia and guilt interests me because I work on emotion and affect and melancholy in my scholarly other life, and when you have someone completely smashing the sales figures with work that is so much about wallowing in negative emotions that is really interesting even if she's not making "interesting music" (to me)- her fame x her art as an equation is interesting even if the art isn't, because it suggests a weird groundswell of collective feeling surfing on the appoggiatura and getting pleasure out of suffering

of course if it was my job to review and write about pop music and I lived in the city where her PR team / machine was grinding her in my face relentlessly I would really have no time for her shit at all so i feel u lex :)

her PR team doesn't have to work too hard tbh

I like the idea of hello being a reply to hotline bling...