3 March 2011
Enter superstar. She’d had chart hits in the UK and Ireland before this, and her new album 21 was already receiving rapturous reviews. Still, ‘Someone Like You’ feels like the beginning of world-domination-era Adele. It would have been a hit anyway, but her live performance of it at that year’s Brit Awards ceremony in February 2011 was a sensation; on the following week’s UK singles charts the track jumped a whopping 46 places. It has become the song that defines Adele’s style and sound; her two albums since then each has a lead-off single, ‘Hello’ and ‘Easy On Me’, cut from the same cloth.
So, what lies behind the staggering success of ‘Someone Like You’? There’s that towering chorus hook, and also, similar to the heightened reality of a TV drama, a potent mix of the mundane and the tumultuous. The simple, romantic piano motif (played by the song’s co-writer and co-producer Dan Wilson, singer with naff late-’90s US MOR-pop band Semisonic) is whirling in melancholy like fallen leaves in a cold autumn wind. Similarly, Adele’s powerful yet measured performance slides from weary realisation to angry heartache to bleak resignation like beads on the same necklace, without need for fist-of-pure-emotion histrionics, climactic key changes or all-guns-blazing bombast. That she was able to reproduce the same effect live for a huge TV audience at the Brits, and with genuine emotion, was the clincher: winning singer, winning song, winning performance.
And yet something nags at me. Yes, Adele’s stunning vocal performance conveys resolve and strength – you can imagine the spirit of Dusty Springfield with her hand on Adele’s shoulder for that chorus in particular. The lyrics, though, are of a narrator without much intrinsic character or agency, face pressed up against the bay window of normcore social values: “I heard that you’re settled down / That you found a girl and you’re married now”. We get a tantalising flash of possible disruption (“I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited”) but instead it gets turned back onto the passive narrator (“I couldn’t stay away / I couldn’t fight it”). The upshot isn’t that of Gloria Gaynor’s assertive ‘I Will Survive’ or even Leona Lewis’s combative ‘Bleeding Love’ but a concessionary “never mind”, a pleading “don’t forget me, I beg” and the banal would-be insight that “sometime it lasts in love / And sometimes it hurts instead”. All the emotional strength and resolve I hear in the song comes from Adele’s performance, almost despite the actual words she sings. To borrow an expression from acoustics, are the vocals the signal and the lyrics just the noise? Perhaps – but I hear both.
Anyway, qualms noted. In the end, how do I feel about ‘Someone Like You’? Well, I still get a frisson of excitement at Adele’s performance, the context of this being a song that saw a well-known singer kick on to superstardom, the iconic minimalist video in my then-home of Paris, and, lyrics aside, the essential soundness of the songwriting. So, in a manner befitting an Adele heroine, I’ll let my head be overruled by my heart.
