Adele Shows Off Vocal Mastery, Witty Banter at St. Paul Tour Kickoff
At 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday night, an hour before Adele took the stage of the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, to kick off her 56-date North American tour, a weather alert showed up on many fans’ phones – a flash-flood warning, to go with the pounding rain and gusting winds many experienced on their way to the arena. A 7:50 p.m. crack of thunder was so noisy that it even penetrated the overstuffed arena.
But that boom was nothing compared to the sound of the crowd cheering for Adele. The audience was intergenerational but leaning toward middle-aged, very white (welcome to Minnesota), and roughly two-thirds female; in this liberal state, it read more or less as Hillary Nation. Pre-show, the merch tables were crammed; many of the younger women went to their seats wearing brand-new Adele T-shirts. They were eager to bask in the big voice, lavish arrangements and unpretentious manner of the woman they helped make a star: “This is a dream come true,” a woman behind me said before the show began. They were also up for a good time. (“I should drink wine more often,” noted the same woman. “It’s gooood.”)
Wearing a black dress with sparkling red and blue highlights, Adele opened, naturally, with “Hello,” rising onto the mid-arena stage while her 21-piece band (including three backing singers, eight string players and a four-piece horn section) worked away behind the screen on the far stage. Though the crowd was singing along a bit on the second verse, they laid out completely during the chorus – that belonged to her. Or did, until Adele was led through the crowd to the main stage, at which point she shouted, “St. Paul! It’s your turn!” Everyone went for it, lustily. The screams at the end were even louder than the screams at the beginning.
Adele sang 17 songs at Xcel, but that’s not why she was onstage for 135 minutes. The show ran past two hours because she likes to talk as much as sing. She’s extremely good at it, too. “You must be still drunk from yesterday,” she said, the day after the Fourth of July; later, introducing “Skyfall,” her James Bond movie theme, she noted that in Bond-song history, “There were some really bad ones. I’m not being judgmental; I’m just being a bitch.” Talking about “Hello,” she called herself “sick of that word. My friends call and I say, ‘Hello?,’ and they say, ‘Is this a fucking joke?'” At one point on the middle stage, she offered to “come as close as I can so [some fans] can take a selfie.” When she got there, she told them, “You know, you can get me in it if you turn around.”