“When I wake up I’m afraid at the idea of facing the day,” Adele confesses. “Cry Your Heart Out” is another career highlight, with sped-up cartoon-chipmunk voices giving way to a seething reggae skank, girl-group hand claps, and Hammond B-3 organ. She goes for wild-ass humor in this song as she sings, “When I was a child every single thing could blow my mind/Soaking it all up for fun, but now I only soak up wine.” But she also asks herself tough questions with no answers: “Why am I obsessing about the things I can’t control?/Why am I seeking approval from people I don’t even know?” By the end, she’s wishing peace and happiness for her ex, but with no regrets about saying goodbye, because “sometimes the road less-traveled is a road best left behind.” What a a song - one of the most ambitious feats she’s ever attempted.
MARY J BLIGE BE WITHOUT YOU MIX FULL
She grapples with feelings so fierce, she can’t share them with anyone except the mirror, the couch, the second or third empty bottle of the night, a gospel choir, and a planet full of sentient humans wired to every tremble of her voice. On her blockbuster Sunday-night CBS concert special, she introduced the world to “I Drink Wine,” a career highlight that indeed takes inspiration from Elton John and Bernie Taupin, a piano rave where Adele has to play both Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowgirl. It’s all there in the single “Easy on Me,” where she pauses midsong to linger on the first note of “easy” so long that you feel like you might pass out, even though you can tell she isn’t breaking a sweat. Adele’s voice is a tank division that can tap dance - the more mature she gets as an artist, the more finesse and tact she brings to the microphone, without sacrificing any of the primal firepower that made her famous in the first place. You wouldn’t think it was possible, but her vocals have gotten even more expressive. The music is steeped in time-traveling R&B flourishes, going back to Old Hollywood for “Love Is a Game” and 1970s soul for “Hold On.” “All Night Parking” is a duet with the late jazz piano legend Erroll Garner, who died a decade before Adele was born.
“Strangers by Nature” begins the album with a Fender Rhodes keyboard hook and jazzy torch-ballad melodrama, like a mix of Portishead and Lauryn Hill, setting a tone for the whole set. As she confides in the album’s centerpiece, “Hold On,” “Every day feels like the road I’m on/Might just open up and swallow me whole/How do I feel so mighty small/ When I’m struggling to feel at all?” There’s a lot of that going around lately.
Let’s face it, she’s never been shy about facing her messiest feelings, but time just makes her bolder.
This is her first batch of songs since the collapse of her marriage - as she summed it up, “Divorce, baby.” But it’s also her turning-thirty album, so she’s navigating a host of turbulent emotional transitions.
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