Adele’s 30: A Ravaging, Retro Rendezvous

W hen all is said and done, Adele will be welcomed into heaven (and possibly canonized) for single-handedly mending the broken hearts of millions around the world. She taught us how to be vulnerable. She articulated the inexplicable emotions of love and loss, nearly running our therapists out of business. With her volcanic vocal register, she’s scorned the one who got away, dared someone to be her one and only, made a last wish for a deteriorating relationship, and reminisced about a flame from her glory days. A knockout combination of power and poetry, her gift humbles even the most formidable titans of the music industry. With her fourth record, 30, an avant-garde yet old-fashioned adieu to a perished love, she leaves us speechless once more.

“I’m holding on, Mama’s got a lot to learn,” Adele admits as she attempts to translate her “big feelings” to her little boy on one of the album’s early songs. She’s survived divorce, but not without battle scars. In 30, Adele returns with a vengeance — but not to curse an ex-partner, as this time she’s the one who has walked away. Whereas her previous albums addressed the agony of unrequited love, on 30 Adele must cope with the anguished aftermath of her decision to leave. Just as her idol Beyoncé intended for Lemonade, Adele created 30 to make her peace, not please the world. Yes, she testifies, love is a minefield, and we’re out here fighting for our lives. Yet she has found the strength to go on.

Opening this album-as-memoir is “Strangers by Nature,” a minor-key experiment that sounds like a crossover between Judy Garland and the Tchaikovsky waltz that inspired the soundtrack to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Shifting between eerie flats and playful sharps, the song feels like a secret garden in an old movie. “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart,” Adele sings in her trademark retro timbre, as she lays to rest the most significant chapter of her life to date. The lush orchestration takes us back to an earlier musical vintage, yet it probably sounds new to those unacquainted with that era. Then a hint of vibrancy bleeds into the sepia as she welcomes in life’s beauty again: “I’ve never seen the sky this color before.”

When a marriage unravels, it’s often the children who suffer the collateral damage. In “My Little Love,” Adele copes with the guilt of failing to keep her family together. Since she can’t lean on her husband for moral support, she leans on her child, highlighting this bizarre circumstance of divorce. Riffing some R&B, combined with a pre-recorded dialogue with her young son, she asks for Angelo’s patience and forgiveness as she copes with it all. “I love your dad because he gave you to me. . . . You’re half me and you’re half Dad,” she comforts him.

Only two songs into the album and we’re ready to pour ourselves a strong one. Fortunately, Adele does it for us with “I Drink Wine,” a bouncy tune with some Elton John spice that laments the high expectations, social climbing, and rampant unhappiness of modern life. “I hope I learn to get over myself,” she croons as she laments the inopportune timing of her last love affair. Everyone, including her, is drowning in sadness, as the simple joys of innocence are gone, corrupted by the world; it’s this, she suggests, that has inhibited our ability to love. Bidding a peaceful farewell to her ex, Adele resigns herself to the fact that the past cannot be rewritten.

As notes descend on the piano like a waterfall, we already know “To Be Loved” is going to be a mic drop of a number. It’s the pièce de résistance of the album.

In it, we’re reminded that there’s always a risk calculus in love, and sometimes you lose everything. Adele is kicking herself for her naïveté, but, hey, hindsight is 20/20. “I’m as lost now as I was back then, always make a mess of everything,” she confesses. A universal truth hits like a freight train: Whatever our age, none of us knows what the hell we’re doing as we try to find a love that lasts. The styles of Amy Winehouse and Etta James, both major influences on Adele’s artistic development, sneak into the song as its raw rasp builds with soulful thunder. It’s the obituary of her marriage, which she swears she exhausted all her energies to save. “Let it be known that I tried,” she repeatedly belts in desperation until we’re just puddles on the floor

While it took me approximately two business days to recover from “To Be Loved,” I was resuscitated by “Love Is a Game,” a gospel-infused Motown revival and the record’s finale. For old-school romantics who dig the 1960s lexicon ­— the full-bodied harmonies of the Temptations in “Just My Imagination,” Nelson Riddle instrumental arrangements, Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” — it was a pleasant déjà vu. There are sweeping strings and churchy electric blues. There’s a background Greek chorus echoing Adele’s punchy words, like a scene from Hairspray, when she sings “I am fooling (fooling), what a cruel thing (cruel thing), to self-inflict that pain.” There’s a glorious key change before the whole band erupts into explosive harmony that sounds identical to the opening “ahhhs” of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love.”  All in all, it’s a great distraction from the first half of the album’s devastation.

In 30, though Adele scorns her own emotional frailty, she finally realizes that we’re all entitled to some grace in this life. She asks, “Ain’t it funny how the mighty fall?” but learns she should be delicate with herself. No doubt, love has a way of bringing us to our knees, as does this album. Adele really knows how to wreak havoc with our emotions — and we thank her for it each time.