Adele Issue #39

All that jazz

By Jennifer Kelly
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 10:03am

One night in early December, just before leaving for a U.S. tour, soulful popstress Adele was watching a Leonardo DiCaprio film with her mother and casually checking her email. There was a lot of email. The 20-year-old singer had just been nominated for four Grammys.

“I kept saying, ‘I can’t believe it. This is weird,’” remembers Adele. “I wasn’t expecting to be nominated. No one talked about it. I completely forgot that [the nominations were] going to be announced.”

At 4 a.m. that morning, Adele’s manager stopped by, champagne in hand, to confirm the good news. Adele — who had already received a BRIT Awards Critic’s Choice prize and seen her debut album 19 go to number one in the UK — had just scored Grammy nominations for Best Song, Best Record, Best New Artist, and Best Female Pop Vocalist.

“It’s surreal more than anything,” says Adele. “I sing because I enjoy it and I never thought that anyone else would ever want to hear it, you know?”

In 2005, Adele decided to put a few songs on MySpace as a lark. By her 18th birthday, XL was offering a record deal, and Adele was heading to the studio. She was also breaking up with her first love. “Even though I knew I was writing a record — it had become my job — I wasn’t really thinking about that,” says Adele. “I was just trying to get this boy out of my system. Instead of falling down on my knees and becoming pathetic, I always liked to kind of be productive out of a bad situation.”

Now, only a few years later, she says she’s friends with the boy in question. She even invited him to the Mercury Prize nominations. But though the heartaches described in songs like “Chasing Pavements” may be fading, she still feels a twinge at times. “It can be difficult singing the same songs over and over again, when it’s kind of a touchy subject for me,” she says. “But everyone’s been humiliated. Everyone’s been cheated on. That’s how you relate to people.”

Adele may sing about familiar themes, but she does it in a very distinctive, unusual voice, one that blends the bubbly clarity of pop with the sophisticated phrasings of jazz and blues. That’s no accident — her favorite singer is Etta James.

“Etta James was the first artist I’d ever heard that I believed in,” she says. “I’ve always been a huge fan of music, but up until I was about 13 or 14 it was always what was on the radio and what was in the charts. Not because me and my family were closed-minded, but [because] we didn’t even know how to go about discovering new music.”

Then one day, on a whim, Adele bought an Etta James CD — and one by Ella Fitzgerald — two for five pounds. “Etta James, she made my heart ache the first time I heard her,” says Adele. “It was ‘Fool that I Am,’ which is like, the saddest song ever. She’s the only artist [that makes me] hold my breath when she’s singing a note. And when she runs out of air at the end of the big note, I kind of gasp for air, even if I’m not singing along.”

Adele’s life has been a whirlwind of shows, appearances, interviews, and photo shoots lately, but the young artist says that she is already three or four songs into the follow-up to 19. She’s thinking about a more upbeat, live sort of sound — and perhaps a new set of influences.

“I’m really into bluegrass and country at the moment,” she says. “Obviously I’m not going to come out with a bluegrass record, because my voice is not right for it,” she says. “But in terms of the melodies, I think they’re the best melodies in the world.”