Adele Talks ’25,’ ‘Hello’ Origins and ‘Darkness’ in New Interviews
The same night Adele staged her grand return with 25‘s first single and video “Hello,” Apple Music and SiriusXM both released interviews with the singer to discuss her comeback track and upcoming “make-up album.” “This song was a massive breakthrough for me with my writing because it’d been pretty slow up to this point, and I felt after I worked with [“Hello” producer] Greg [Kurstin] on this, it all poured right out of me,” Adele told SiriusXM of “Hello.” “Straight away, I felt a little bit silly singing ‘Hello, it’s me,’ but straight away I loved the verse and I knew it was going to be the first thing I came back with me.”
As Adele told Apple Music, she also enjoyed the idea of reigniting her dialogue with fans with “Hello,” since “the song’s really conversational.” “I knew straight away that it’d be the first thing that everyone would hear and that it would open my album,” she said. “It took some convincing but by the time the production was done and we finished the song, everyone liked it.”
British fans first caught wind of “Hello” when a 30-second snippet for the track appeared without warning or explanation during an X Factor commercial break Sunday. “It was a great marketing idea,” Adele told Apple Music of the mysterious ad that quickly exploded virally, adding that since she doesn’t manage her own social media accounts – she fears writing something stupid – she just “humbly” watched the reaction on Twitter. “It’s been a very slow process for me. I’ve been sitting on an album for quite a while, keeping everything secret,” Adele said of her relief following the “Hello” commercial’s arrival.
Speaking to SiriusXM about 25‘s sound, Adele said there is both lightness and – like “Hello” – darkness to the record, as well as why she considered it a “make-up album” in her open letter. “There is some darkness on it just because I like to do dramatic, I’m a bit of a drama queen,” she said. “It’s not as themed as my last record. The reason I labeled it a ‘make-up record,’ it sounds super cliché, but my last record was labeled a ‘break-up record,’ and rightly so, because it was a break-up record. This record is all about how I feel as opposed to how someone else has made me feel, it’s about how I made myself feel.”
25 is Adele’s third LP, following her debut 19 and breakthrough 21. “I feel like the idea of calling the albums after my age is sort of like taking a photograph of my life,” the now-27-year-old singer told Apple Music, adding that “the magnitude of stuff that’s happened” when she was 25 – including the birth of her son – informed the record. However, this will be the last Adele album to bear a number as its title, as Adele revealed, “25 is the perfect age to end the albums named after my age.”