15 Grammy Awards, 1 Oscar, 120 million albums sold around the world… From now on, there is no need to introduce Adèle. However, if we sometimes tend to summarize the British singer with her multiple records or her complicated love situation, behind her success and her private life hides above all a talented artist, writer, composer and musician.
Various musical influences
In 1992, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was 4 years old. The little British girl, still far from suspecting her future success, timidly takes her first steps in music thanks to the artists she hears on TV or on the radio: the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys or Take That again, then at the top of the charts at the time. While growing up, her influences become more and more sophisticated (Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, Faith Hill…) the singer has never lost her love for commercial music that rocked her childhood.
Obsessed with great voices, Adele trains from an early age to build her own by imitating her favorite artists. “I was trying to sound like Beyoncé, and I sang songs from Destiny’s Child all the time. I learned to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald. But my voice asserted itself when I started to write my own songs ”, she confided in 2009 in a interview for the media Westword.
A very distinct voice
Often compared vocally to the other great British soul specialist, Amy Winehouse – who also attended the same music school as her – Adele managed, from the start of her career, to detach herself from the image. caricature that many wanted to attribute to him. With a hoarse and powerful contralto voice, recognizable from the first note, the interpreter of Hello was able to shape its own artistic identity and bring its personal touch to the musical landscape of the 2010s.
Adele’s vocal signature, halfway between jazz and soul, is illustrated in particular by the singer’s ability to adapt melancholic notes according to the emotion she wishes to convey to her listeners. But her atypical voice is certainly Adele herself who speaks best: “I will probably describe her as an old soul voice, like the voice of an elderly person singing in a folk song. It is typically the kind of music that I like ”, she declared to the journalist. Clayton perry in 2008.
Heartbroken soul
From album to album, Adele has managed to find the recipe for her success. An overwhelming voice, a simple but effective pop and lyrical melody and above all melancholy lyrics with simple themes: disappointment, rupture, betrayal in love… “Broken heart soul”, in short.
If the musical proposal made by Adele is certainly far from being innovative, its success lies more in the authenticity of its projects tinged with a deep pain in which everyone has found themselves at least once in their life. Thus, by making the choice to write and compose her pieces alone with her own sadness and her romantic setbacks as the main theme, the British singer succeeds in touching her listeners in the heart by telling them human but above all real stories.
“Usually young artists release a first album that someone else wrote for them and don’t start writing their own songs until the third or fourth album. Now, it is necessary for me to have a connection with my songs. I have no connection with other people’s songs because they don’t talk about me or my fight, ”explained the British artist in a 2008 interview.
A connection that can be found in 30, unveiled this Friday, November 19 where Adele confides in music on her torments experienced in her thirties including the birth of her son or the pain caused by her recent divorce.
Unsurprisingly, this fourth album is “the most personal to date,” according to the British singer. So, one thing is certain, given the sensational start of the first single from the album, Easy on me, Adele’s well-crafted pop-melancholy recipe has a bright future ahead of it.