The Wait is finally Over...

First Listen: Adele, '21'

by FRANNIE KELLEY

source: NPR

February 6, 2011

Adele is a 22-year-old woman from London whose voice sounds as if it's being yanked out of her chest through the throat of someone much older; someone shouldering more painful stories and a far larger chest cavity. She says that both of her albums — 2008's 19, for which she won Best New Artist at the Grammys, and this one, 21 — are about boys, two different ones. The stories she tells about them are average, familiar, normal. The voice she uses to tell them is a force of nature. It's brawny, syrupy and flashy at the same time.

What she says on record about these boys, and about what it's been like to break up with them, isn't any different from what many other singers and songwriters have said about other boys. But I believe what she's singing. In her songs, Adele says she's heartbroken, trying to convince someone to stay or at least miss her after he's left. She often sounds like she's trying to convince herself that she'll be all right. Most of the time, she sounds like a real, regular person sorting things out.

She sounds like a real person because her voice couldn't have been concocted in a studio. She's one of those singers whose voice is so intrinsic and fluorescent that you can hear the difference between her and regular people while she's making small talk between songs. Her laugh is so hefty and unsettling that you know there's something in her lungs that isn't like something in your lungs.

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