One supposes that if anyone could have made their thirties look truly chic, it was not Carrie Bradshaw, but one, Adele Adkins. Better known as the mononym Adele. And, speaking of Sex and the City, there just so happens to be a line in the series’ first season during which Miranda Hobbes is bombarded by a woman at a baby shower who comes up to her to say, “My son, Andy, is a god. I tell him so every day.” Miranda then turns to Carrie and says, “Thirty years from now [appropriate because of Adele’s album title], what do you think the chances are that some woman’s gonna be able to make Andy happy? I’m gonna go with zero.” The same might be true for Adele’s son, Angelo, who is lavished with all manner of reverence on this record.
While Adele went back and forth at times on whether or not she really “needed” to put something so personal out into the world (and yes, if Adele thought it was too personal, then you know it’s really goddamn soul-baring), in the end, she decided, “Some of the songs on this album could really help people.” And, to her, that was worth more than any potential “embarrassment” she might suffer in taking such a gamble. One that has already very clearly paid off as unanimous praise surges in. Signaling to Adele that it’s time to go crawl back into her comfies and hide from fame for a while again, Greta Garbo-style. To the point of Old Hollywood stars, 30’s opener, “Strangers by Nature” is a dreamy, Judy Garland-esque number that could easily serve as the B-side to “Over the Rainbow.” Indeed, Adele was inspired by the sound of Garland after watching the Renee Zellweger-starring biopic, pondering why melodies like that were no longer au courant. Thus, she enlisted the help of composer Ludwig Göransson to help her complete such gut-wrenching lyrics as, “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart/For all of my lovers in the present and in the dark/Every anniversary, I’ll pay respects and say I’m sorry.”
The song is followed up by the single that everyone knows by now, “Easy on Me.” Another instant classic in Adele’s balladry arsenal, featuring a video that harkens back to 2015’s “Hello” (highlighted by Adele’s decision to work once again with Xavier Dolan). While some could argue it’s lyrically directed at her now ex-husband, Simon Konecki, more than anything, it seems to be in keeping with her overarching motif of apologizing to her son for upending his life. Here, too, we’re reminded of that same season one SATC episode, when the baby shower host, Laney (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), comes up to Carrie and Miranda to remark of a mother and son nearby, “We call them our old married couple. Except it’s not really that funny now that Betsy and her husband are getting…divorced.” After Laney walks away, Miranda wryly tells Carrie, “So all I have to do to meet the ideal man is…give birth to him.”
It seems that’s what Adele has ultimately done, Rich Paul or not. Notably, there’s no song on 30 about how Mommy is getting railed by a different cock now, but perhaps she’ll save that for 35. Until then, it’s the sweetness of “My Little Love” (in some sense, paralleling Madonna’s “Little Star”) that will have to suffice for a nine-year-old. Commented upon most especially by listeners for its use of recordings of herself and exchanges with her son (who knows how he’ll feel about that later?), Adele keeps channeling the mothers at the SATC baby shower when she includes Angelo asking her, “Do you like me?” and her response, “You know mummy doesn’t like anyone else like I like you, right?” Sounds a bit innuendo-laden, but maybe that’s just the perverse mind of the childless talking. And yes, in many ways, one wonders if Adele’s “relatable queen” status will hold up among those who choose never to bother with marriage or children. In fact, the entire practice of marriage is already so outmoded as it is, that one wonders how 30 will endure in a future where marriage might not exist at all (let alone humanity itself). Yet Adele’s retro fancies of having the white picket fence and the dog in the yard stemmed from the childhood lack of having her own intact nuclear family, hence the great disappointment she felt when she couldn’t make it work once she was in charge of the situation. An “inability” she stated suddenly gave her newfound empathy for her own parents. But for those “adult children” who will never spawn, parents will just have to continue to put up with “no respect.”
At the end of “My Little Love,” Adele reveals, once more, her many Taurean qualities when she narrates, “I feel like today is the first day since I left him that I feel lonely. And I never feel lonely, I love being on my own. I always preferred being on my own than being with people.” It’s a difficult and powerful admission to make. Because one can never truly know for sure if they were better off staying in the relationship that was suffocating them or enduring the harsh and total loneliness of jettisoning that person who probably knew you better than anyone.
The more “upbeat” “Cry Your Heart Out” finds Adele ironically continuing to echo an era when divorce was an absolute scandal via her 60s-era sound, rife with the doo-wop and Motown influences that make her particularly reminiscent of fellow Brit Amy Winehouse during the chorus of this song. Chirpily singing depressed lyrics like, “When I walk in a room, I’m invisible, I feel like a ghost” (something Angelo likened her to), Adele has to give herself—and anyone else who has been through her experience—the pep talk, “Cry your heart out, it’ll clean your face/When you’re in doubt, go at your own pace.”
Not to be confused with the Kaiser Chiefs/Lily Allen song, what comes next is “Oh My God.” Which, yes, also has the same lyric as the Kaiser Chiefs/Lily Allen song when Adele says, “Oh my god, I can’t believe it.” So far the most musically divergent song on the record, it has the aura of a selection that would be briefly included on Insecure. And what Adele can’t believe, clearly, is that she’s fallen for someone like Rich Paul. Is it because he’s so great, or she’s amazed that a Black person would take her so lovingly in their arms after her African tourism sketch on SNL and the cringe-worthy sporting of Bantu knots? Who can say? The point is, she “wants to have fun.” And that’s precisely what she does on this track.
With opening guitar notes that are vaguely reminiscent of Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” “Can I Get It” then transitions into sounding like a sonic sequel to “Rolling in the Deep.” Wielding the message behind the term “can I get it” (or, as Jay-Z might say, “Can I getta fuck you?”), Adele repurposes the meaning to infer a real relationship as opposed to a casual bang. As the only ditty on the album that incorporates Max Martin’s pop powerhouse magic, it’s among the few fast-paced standouts. The instrumentation during the chorus also mirrors a certain acoustic similarity to George Michael’s “Faith,” particularly when he sings, “Well I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body/I know not everybody has got a body like you.” And that certainly applies to Adele post-weight shedding. Adele admits as she gets more and more candid throughout the song, “I’m counting on you to put the pieces of me back together.” No pressure at all to the new bloke after her divorce.
The much-memed, much-discussed “I Drink Wine” (debuted for the first time on Adele One Night Only) brings things back to a “standard Adele pace” as she addresses her newfound revelation that alcohol, surprisingly, isn’t everything. Like her countryman, William Shakespeare, Adele uses the play on words, “‘Cause I need some substance in my life, somethin’ real, somethin’ that feels true.” And it ain’t actually wine…even though that helps (as Taylor Swift should have probably learned before re-releasing a ten-minute version of “All Too Well”).
Continuing to show how much Los Angeles has influenced her, Adele offers an interlude called “All Night Parking” that samples from Erroll Garner. Once again channeling her Amy Winehouse/R&B stylings, the laid-back groove of the song details a doomed long-distance romance (perhaps one of the rebounds before she landed, um, on Rich Paul) as Adele recounts, “Usually, I’m best alone/But every time that you text, I want to get on the next flight home.” So we’re to assume this bloke was a Brit, further corroborated by Adele saying of his charms, “Maybe it’s the way you remind me of where I come from.” And God knows Adele always likes to remind us of where she comes from.
She also reminds us of who she is (a motherfuckin’ Taurus who won’t be trifled with) on the slowed-down, musically minimalist “Woman Like Me.” With a chorus that cuts like a knife, Adele sings at her ex, “Complacency is the worst trait to have, are you crazy?/You ain’t never had, ain’t never had a woman like me.” Going against her own Taurean traits in some ways, she adds, “It is so sad a man like you could be so lazy,” but then goes back to the Bull tropes with, “Consistency is the gift to give for free and it is key/To ever keep, to ever keep a woman like me.” Obviously, he could not. Nonetheless, Adele finds the silver lining by providing yet another burn: “But lovin’ you was a breakthrough/I saw what my heart can really do/Now some other man will get the love I had for you/‘Cause you don’t care, oh.”
Just as “Woman Like Me” has an eventually empowered tone, so, too, does “Hold On.” Even if that empowerment is somewhat negated by being played in an ultra-schmaltzy Amazon commercial. And yet, although seemingly designed to help people not off themselves during the holiday season, the bittersweet song may just have the opposite effect.
The piano-drenched “To Be Loved” (now immortalized by Adele casually singing it in her living room) could very well have the same consequence as Adele ruminates on how all her best intentions for creating a “happy home” were destroyed because, like Julia Roberts as Maggie in Runaway Bride, she didn’t fully know herself yet in order to open her heart to true love. That much is evident when she talks about how she used to simply “bleed into someone else” (you know, like Maggie ordering the same kind of eggs as the guy she was with). “Let it be known that I tried,” she belts. Or, as Lana Del Rey said more casually, “God knows I tried.” Yes, Adele, it is now very known thanks to this commemorative document of the tribulations that led to the path of recovery and reconciliation (with the self).
Exuding more of that Old Hollywood musical grandeur on the intro to “Love Is a Game,” Adele’s closing track to 30 is a sweeping odyssey that is yet another clear foil to what Amy Winehouse did already on Back to Black. Namely with, what else, “Love Is a Losing Game.” Occasionally including backing singers that mimic the 60s tone of a girl group format, Adele discusses how “love is a game for fools to play.” While she’d like to believe she “ain’t foolin’” anymore, she has to surrender to what she knows will happen eventually: “I can love, I can love again/I love me now, like I loved him/I’m a fool for that/You know I, you know I’m gonna do it/Oh-oh-oh-oh/I’d do it all again like I did then.” A very Winehouse-esque sentiment indeed. And, in certain respects, 30 comes across as the record that Winehouse might have released in her own thirties had she been able to make it to that decade. Whether or not Adele is aware of the debt owed to Winehouse for her sound is immaterial, it’s palpably all over 30.
As the final notes dim out, the listener is left to acknowledge that it is undeniably her best record to date, as well as being the most listenable from start to finish. Even to the finish of the version that includes the bonus tracks “Wild Wild West,” “Can’t Be Together” and a Chris Stapleton-featuring rendition of “Easy On Me” (because Adele is not one to be outdone by Swift). Her California sensibilities are manifested most blatantly on “Wild Wild West” as she says, “From LA to San Francisco/I lost my mind in San Bernardino/Even Chula Vista and Modesto/I break my heart wherever I go.” Move over Lana, there’s a new transplant in LA mentioning more obscure California cities. As for “Can’t Be Together,” it’s another overt nod to Simon, with Adele funneling some “We both know we ain’t kids no more” vibes into it when she painfully admits, “It’s hard but we must, we’ve got to let it go/And turn off the urge to know what could have been/But I will love you forever.”
And so, 30 joins the annals of the most epic breakup records of the twenty-first century, including Back to Black, Melodrama and thank u, next. In fact, in true “Hollywood star” fashion, Adele mentioned that this is a record intended to inspire other artists (a.k.a. famous people). Assuring, “I think it’s an important record for them to hear [and maybe, just maybe, it could give Beyoncé the courage to do her own divorce album instead of what Lemonade was]. The ones that I feel are being encouraged not to value their own art, and that everything should be massive and everything should be ‘get it while you can…’ I just wanted to remind them that you don’t need to be in everyone’s faces all the time. And also, you can really write from your stomach, if you want.” Such a Taurus.
